The earlier volume in this series dealt with two religions of Indian origin, namely, Buddhism and Jainism. The Indian religious scene, however, is characterized by not only religions which originated in India but also by religions which entered India from outside India and made their home here. Thus religious life in India has been enlivened throughout its history by the presence of religions of foreign origin on its soil almost from the very time they came into existence. This volume covers (...) three such religions—Zoraoastrianism, Judaism, and Islam. In the case of Zoraostianism, even its very beginnings are intertwined with India, as Zoroastrianism reformed a preexisting religion which had strong links to the Vedic heritage of India. This relationship took on a new dimension when a Zoroastrian community, fearing persecution in Persia after its Arab conquest, sought shelter in western India and ultimately went on to produce India’s pioneering nationalist in the figure of Dadabhai Naoroji ( 1825-1917), also known as the Grand Old Man of India. Jews found refuge in south India after the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in 70 C.E. and have remained a part of the Indian religious scene since then, some even returning to Israel after it was founded in 1948. Islam arrived in Kerala as soon as it was founded and one of the earliest mosques in the history of Islam is found in India. Islam differs from the previously mentioned religions inasmuch as it went on to gain political hegemony over parts of the country for considerable periods of time, which meant that its impact on the religious life of the subcontinent has been greater compared to the other religions. It has also meant that Islam has existed in a religiously plural environment in India for a longer period than elsewhere in the world so that not only has Islam left a mark on India, India has also left its mark on it. Indeed all the three religions covered in this volume share this dual feature, that they have profoundly influenced Indian religious life and have also in turn been profoundly influenced by their presence in India. (shrink)

The earlier volume in this series dealt with two religions of Indian origin, namely, Buddhism and Jainism. The Indian religious scene, however, is characterized by not only religions which originated in India but also by religions which entered India from outside India and made their home here. Thus religious life in India has been enlivened throughout its history by the presence of religions of foreign origin on its soil almost from the very time they came into existence. This volume covers (...) three such religions—Zoraoastrianism, Judaism, and Islam. In the case of Zoraostianism, even its very beginnings are intertwined with India, as Zoroastrianism reformed a preexisting religion which had strong links to the Vedic heritage of India. This relationship took on a new dimension when a Zoroastrian community, fearing persecution in Persia after its Arab conquest, sought shelter in western India and ultimately went on to produce India’s pioneering nationalist in the figure of Dadabhai Naoroji ( 1825-1917), also known as the Grand Old Man of India. Jews found refuge in south India after the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in 70 C.E. and have remained a part of the Indian religious scene since then, some even returning to Israel after it was founded in 1948. Islam arrived in Kerala as soon as it was founded and one of the earliest mosques in the history of Islam is found in India. Islam differs from the previously mentioned religions inasmuch as it went on to gain political hegemony over parts of the country for considerable periods of time, which meant that its impact on the religious life of the subcontinent has been greater compared to the other religions. It has also meant that Islam has existed in a religiously plural environment in India for a longer period than elsewhere in the world so that not only has Islam left a mark on India, India has also left its mark on it. Indeed all the three religions covered in this volume share this dual feature, that they have profoundly influenced Indian religious life and have also in turn been profoundly influenced by their presence in India. (shrink)

The fourth edition of this bestselling title is designed to help you think critically and thoughtfully about ethical decisions you'll face in practice-in any health care discipline. Utilizing a unique 6-step decision making process designed by the author, this multi-disciplinary text provides an expert framework for making effective choices that lead to a professional and caring response to patients and clients.

If it can be agreed that health care resources are finite, it follows that choices between competing needs must be made. Cost utility analysis is an application of decision theory which has been proposed as a strategy for making difficult social decisions about health resource allocations. This method is heavily dependent upon the measurement of social utilities for various health outcomes. Recent work in cognitive psychology suggests that there are important sources of distortion in such measurement. Ethical implications of application (...) of cost utility analysis to health resource allocations are discussed. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to encourage reflection about the harm that could result if the positive aspects of team-organized health care are compromised during the health care reform process. While other models of health care delivery could replace teamwork and serve patients as well or better, the interdisciplinary health care team probably will not be abandoned. However, one or more disciplines whose members play important roles on various teams may be sacrificed in the hasty effort to define essential (...) health care. Moreover, a significant proportion of the types of IHCTs in existence could be rashly eliminated from health plans. These changes should not take place randomly or by default. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to encourage reflection about the harm that could result if the positive aspects of team-organized health care are compromised during the health care reform process. While other models of health care delivery could replace teamwork and serve patients as well or better, the interdisciplinary health care team probably will not be abandoned. However, one or more disciplines whose members play important roles on various teams may be sacrificed in the hasty effort to define essential (...) health care. Moreover, a significant proportion of the types of IHCTs in existence could be rashly eliminated from health plans. These changes should not take place randomly or by default. (shrink)

Pain management has no meaning without the stories of men and women, and boys and girls whose lives are dramatically altered by the presence of pain in their own and their loved ones lives. In this narrative section, four people present their perspectives on the enigma and challenge of pain, its power, and our on-going efforts to limit its hold on our lives.In the first story, Dr. Robert McQuillan, an anesthesiologist with Creighton University School of Medicine, conveys the fear some (...) patients suffering chronic pain face when seeking pain medication over the long term. Dr. Christine Cassel, chair of the Department of Geriatrics and Adult Development at Mount Sinai Medical Center and immediate past president of the American College of Physicians, recounts the plight of a fellow physician whose pain treatment of a patient led to suspension of his professional license and to personal bitterness after many years of exemplary medical practice. (shrink)

Pain management has no meaning without the stories of men and women, and boys and girls whose lives are dramatically altered by the presence of pain in their own and their loved ones lives. In this narrative section, four people present their perspectives on the enigma and challenge of pain, its power, and our on-going efforts to limit its hold on our lives.In the first story, Dr. Robert McQuillan, an anesthesiologist with Creighton University School of Medicine, conveys the fear some (...) patients suffering chronic pain face when seeking pain medication over the long term. Dr. Christine Cassel, chair of the Department of Geriatrics and Adult Development at Mount Sinai Medical Center and immediate past president of the American College of Physicians, recounts the plight of a fellow physician whose pain treatment of a patient led to suspension of his professional license and to personal bitterness after many years of exemplary medical practice. (shrink)

Cesario claims that all bias research tells us is that people “end up using the information they have come to learn as being probabilistically accurate in their daily lives”. We expose Cesario's flawed assumptions about the relationship between accuracy and bias. Through statistical simulations and empirical work, we show that even probabilistically accurate responses are regularly accompanied by bias.

Management plays an important role in reinforcing ethics in organizations. To support this aim, managers must use incentive and goal programs in ethical ways. This study examines experimentally the potential ethical costs associated with incentive-driven and goal-induced employee behavior from a managerial perspective. In a quasi-experimental setting, 243 MBA students with significant professional work experience evaluated a hypothetical employee’s ethical behavior under incentive pay systems modeled on a business case. In the role of the employee’s manager, participants evaluated the ethicality (...) of the employee’s incentive-driven and goal-induced ethical/unethical behavior and the outcomes of behavior, with consequences that were either favorable or unfavorable to the organization. The results indicated that participants discounted the ethical considerations of incentive-driven and goal-induced behavior when consequences were favorable to the organization. Participants’ morals and outcome orientations were also significantly related to their ethical judgments and intentions to intervene. The implications of these findings for research and practice are discussed. (shrink)

BackgroundHuntington’s disease has a poor prognosis. For HD patients in the Netherlands, one way of dealing with their poor prognosis is by drawing up an advance euthanasia directive. Little is known about the perspectives of HD patients on their AED.AimTo gain insight into patients’ views on and attitudes towards their AED, and changes over time.MethodsA longitudinal qualitative interview study using 1 to 6 semi-structured interviews over a period of maximum three years. Nine HD patients who either had an AED or (...) were thinking about drawing it up participated in this study.ResultsWe identified two themes that characterize patients’ perspectives on their AEDs: general character of the AED; uncertainty around their AED. Ad The conditions that the participants described in their AED were generally not very specific for the person. Mostly they were general notions of unbearable suffering. Familiarity with HD in the family could play a role in drawing up an AED. Ad Participants generally were aware of the tentative character of their AED and could have doubts concerning their own willingness or the willingness of others in the future. Sometimes these doubts were so great, that it prevented them from drawing up an AED. However, patients did not alter their AED during the follow-up period or changed in their view or attitude on their AED.ConclusionHD patients that draw up an AED usually describe general conditions for euthanasia and recognize that these conditions may change as the disease progresses. An AED or the wish to draw one up may be a good conversation starter for conversations about goals and preferences for future care. (shrink)

Our objective is to test an optimality model of human fertility that specifies the behavioral requirements for fitness maximization in order (a) to determine whether current behavior does maximize fitness and, if not, (b) to use the specific nature of the behavioral deviations from fitness maximization towards the development of models of evolved proximate mechanisms that may have maximized fitness in the past but lead to deviations under present conditions. To test the model we use data from a representative sample (...) of 7,107 men living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, between 1990 and 1993. The model we test proposes that low fertility in modern settings maximizes number of grandchildren as a result of a trade-off between parental fertility and next generation fertility. Results do not show the optimization, although the data do reveal a trade-off between parental fertility and offspring education and income.We propose that two characteristics of modern economies have led to a period of sustained fertility reduction and to a corresponding lack of association between income and fertility. The first is the direct link between costs of investment and wage rates due to the forces of supply and demand for labor in competitive economies. The second is the increasing emphasis on cumulative knowledge, skills, and technologies in the production of resources. Together they produce historically novel conditions. These two features of modern economies may interact with evolved psychological and physiological mechanisms governing fertility and parental investment to produce behavior that maximizes the economic productivity of lineages at the expense of fitness. If cognitive processes evolved to track diminishing returns to parental investment and if physiological processes evolved to regulate fertility in response to nutritional state and patterns of breast feeding, we might expect non-adaptive responses when returns from parental investment do not diminish until extremely high levels are reached. With high economic payoffs from parental investment, people have begun to exercise cognitive regulation of fertility through contraception and family planning practices. Those cognitive processes maynot have evolved to handle fitness trade-offs between fertility and parental investment. (shrink)

In this study on deduction, the authors argue that people reason by imagining the relevant state of affairs, ie building an internal model of it, formulating a tentative conclusion based on this model and then searching for alternative models.

Two experiments investigated inferences based on suppositions. In Experiment 1, the subjects decided whether suppositions about individuals' veracity were consistent with their assertions—for example, whether the supposition “Ann is telling the truth and Beth is telling a lie”, is consistent with the premises: “Ann asserts: I am telling the truth and Beth is telling the truth. Beth asserts: Ann is telling the truth”. It showed that these inferences are more difficult than ones based on factual premises: “Ann asserts: I live (...) in Dublin and Beth lives in Dublin”. There was no difference between problems about truthtellers and liars, who always told the truth or always lied, and normals, who sometimes told the truth and sometimes lied. In Experiment 2, the subjects made inferences about factual matters set in three contexts: a truth-inducing context in which friends confided their personality characteristics, a lie-inducing context in which business rivals advertised their products, and a neutral context in which computers printed their program characteristics. Given the supposition that the individuals were lying, it was more difficult to make inferences in a truth-inducing context than in the other two contexts. We discuss the implications of our results for everyday reasoning from suppositions, and for theories of reasoning based on models or inference rules. (shrink)

The authors outline a theory of conditionals of the form If A then C and If A then possibly C. The 2 sorts of conditional have separate core meanings that refer to sets of possibilities. Knowledge, pragmatics, and semantics can modulate these meanings. Modulation can add information about temporal and other relations between antecedent and consequent. It can also prevent the construction of possibilities to yield 10 distinct sets of possibilities to which conditionals can refer. The mental representation of a (...) conditional normally makes explicit only the possibilities in which its antecedent is true, yielding other possibilities implicitly. Reasoners tend to focus on the explicit possibilities. The theory predicts the major phenomena of understanding and reasoning with conditionals. (shrink)

Many claim that belief in God is like belief in Santa Claus have it out belief in God, or belief in Santa – is rational, and a direct parallel between the reasoning of the two sides is demonstrated. Many important arguments regarding theistic belief are discussed in some form. The article is intended for use in an introduction to philosophy, or an introductory philosophy of religion course, as a humorous way to foster discussion and expose students to criticisms of theistic (...) arguments, and to consider the possibility that theistic belief is no better than belief in the existence of Santa Claus. Act One. (shrink)