When clinical ethicists are called upon to give a recommendation regarding patient care, they may be faced with a dilemma of their own. If their own personal opinion is not widely shared, the ethicist will have three options. These include: (1) giving their own opinion; (2) giving the widely shared opinion; and (3) giving both opinions, leaving the physician to select which opinion to accept. The intentions of this article are to evaluate strengths and weaknesses of these three alternatives and (...) to suggest that ethics consultants recognize and deal with this issue. Two cases are presented to explore the limitations of each option. The author suggests that when the views of ethics consultants differ from the consensus view, the consultant should give the consensus view, their own dissenting view and the arguments in support of each position. (shrink)

Over the past 15 years, ethics committees have become common within the acute care hospital setting. Their development within long-term care settings has evolved more slowly and has been confined primarily to nursing homes. In this paper, I describe the development of an ethics committee in a residential center for the mentally retarded and developmentally disabled. I describe how the committee has progressed and some of the ethical issues in this setting.

The present trend toward routine inquiry appears to be based on the false premise that the individual's wishes cannot be known and that, therefore, the family is the only alternative for making donation decisions. The UAGA states that the family should be turned to only when the wishes of the individual are not known.To protect the right of individuals to make their own decision, an effective and efficient process for making the wishes of individuals known should be devised and the (...) UAGA amended accordingly. I have presented the policy of strong required request as the best way to effectively protect the rights that the UAGA ostensibly gives to the individual. This policy ensures that the individual's wishes, both for and against donation, are known. It also alleviates some of the problems in the original approach that hindered the procurement of organs from willing donors. Strong required request saves families from making critical decisions, which may be painful and conflicted for some, at a time of emotional shock and grief. (shrink)

John Searle and Walter Freeman compared notes at a Wonderfest panel at the University of California, Berkeley, 16 August, 1998.

A festschrift for Dorothy Edgington, containing contributions from Cleo Condoravdi, Dorothy Edgington, Kit Fine, Alan Hájek, John Hawthorne, Sabine Iatridou, Nick Jones, Rosanna Keefe, Angelika Kratzer, David Over, Daniel Rothschild, Robert Stalnaker, Scott Sturgeon, and Timothy Williamson.

Extensive social choice theory is used to study the problem of measuring group fitness in a two-level biological hierarchy. Both fixed and variable group size are considered. Axioms are identified that imply that the group measure satisfies a form of consequentialism in which group fitness only depends on the viabilities and fecundities of the individuals at the lower level in the hierarchy. This kind of consequentialism can take account of the group fitness advantages of germ-soma specialization, which is not possible (...) with an alternative social choice framework proposed by Okasha, but which is an essential feature of the index of group fitness for a multicellular organism introduced by Michod, Viossat, Solari, Hurand, and Nedelcu to analyze the unicellular-multicellular evolutionary transition. The new framework is also used to analyze the fitness decoupling between levels that takes place during an evolutionary transition. (shrink)

A phenomenological hermeneutic study of the lifeworld of critical care nursing was undertaken, from which emerged the concept of ‘focusing’. Focusing is defined as empathizing concern for the critically ill person and his/her family amid the high technology of the intensive care unit. When nurses focus on the patient and the patient's family they are able to empathize with die personal dimensions of caring. The study used a phenomenological hermeneutic approach to describe die nature of the lived experience of clinical (...) nursing practice in a high technology environment. (shrink)

After an eloquent and moving analysis of what he sees as the disillusion of themodern age, Lippmann posits as the central dilemma of liberalism its inability to find an appropriate substitute for the older forms of authority - church, state, class, family, law, custom - that it has denied. Lippmann attempts to find a way out of this chaos through the acceptance of a higher humanism and a way of life inspired by the ideal of "disinterestedness" in all things.In his (...) new introduction to the Transaction edition, John Patrick Diggins marks A Preface to Morals, originally published in 1929, as a critical turning point in Lippmann's intellectual career. He also provides an excellent discussion of the enduring value of this major twentieth-century work by situating it within the context of other intellectual movements. (shrink)

The 2014 Tanner Symposium features a panel of speakers discussing current research in the areas of volition and self-control and the effects of that research for issues of public policy.

Nuclear power has never been free from the stifling involvement of government. Heavy regulation has reduced the ability of entrepreneurs to develop and provide new means for the generation of energy using nuclear fuel. The strict parameters dictated by government officials are based upon outdated technology, an improper regulatory philosophy, and preclude innovation in nuclear power generation. Anti-market environmentalists misunderstand the implications of a free market in nuclear power and argue against it based on problems that are actually caused by (...) government involvement. Our position is neither for nor against nuclear power. We advocate a hands-off policy where the nuclear industry is left to its own devices, free from governmental regulations and subsidies: free to succeed or fail on its own. Thus, our position is neither right-wing conservative (removing regulations), nor left-wing liberal (removing subsidies). Very much to the contrary of both positions, we propose a free-market in nuclear power. (shrink)

Nurses involved in research are concerned with methodological issues. This paper explores the Cartesian debate that has polarized the discourse on nursing research methodology. It is argued that methodologies exclusively based on objectivism, one pole of the Cartesian debate, or subjectivism, the other, do not provide nurses with adequate research foundations to understand the complexity of the lifeworld of nursing practice. This paper provides nurse researchers with an alternative methodological perspective, Gadamerian hermeneutics, which is in harmony with the clinical world (...) of nursing practice. (shrink)

This article illustrates how axiomatic social choice theory can be used in the evaluation of measures of group fitness for a biological hierarchy, thereby contributing to the dialogue between the philosophy of biology and social choice theory. It provides an axiomatic characterization of the ordering underlying the MichodSolariNedelcu index of group fitness for a multicellular organism. The MVSHN index has been used to analyse the germ-soma specialization and the fitness decoupling between the cell and organism levels that takes place during (...) the evolutionary transition to multicellularity. It is argued that some of the axioms satisfied by the MVSHN group fitness ordering are not appropriate for all stages in this transition. (shrink)

Academic freedom and tenure, both cherished institutions of higher education, are currently under attack by many both outside and within the academy. Richard DeGeorge argues that they can be defended on ethical grounds only if they are joined with appropriate accountability, publicly articulated and defended standards, and conscientious enforcement of these standards by academic institutions and the members of the academic community.

Scientists often respond to failures to replicate by citing differences between the experimental components of an original study and those of its attempted replication. In this paper, we investigate these purported mismatch explanations. We assess a body of failures to replicate in neuroscience studies on spinal cord injury. We argue that a defensible mismatch explanation is one where a mismatch of components is a difference maker for a mismatch of outcomes, and the components are relevantly different in the follow-up study, (...) given the scope of the original study. With this account, we argue that not all differences between studies are meaningful, even if they are difference makers. As our examples show, focusing only on these differences results in disregarding the representativeness of the original experiment’s components and the scope of its outcomes, undercutting other epistemic aims, such as translation, in the process. (shrink)