Background: Ethics support services are growing in Europe to help doctors in dealing with ethical difficulties. Currently, insufficient attention has been focused on the experiences of doctors who have faced ethical difficulties in these countries to provide an evidence base for the development of these services.Methods: A survey instrument was adapted to explore the types of ethical dilemma faced by European doctors, how they ranked the difficulty of these dilemmas, their satisfaction with the resolution of a recent ethically difficult case (...) and the types of help they would consider useful. The questionnaire was translated and given to general internists in Norway, Switzerland, Italy and the UK.Results: Survey respondents ranged in age from 28 to 82 years, and averaged 25 years in practice. Only a minority reported having access to ethics consultation in individual cases. The ethical difficulties most often reported as being encountered were uncertain or impaired decision-making capacity , disagreement among caregivers and limitation of treatment at the end of life . The frequency of most ethical difficulties varied among countries, as did the type of issue considered most difficult. The types of help most often identified as potentially useful were professional reassurance about the decision being correct , someone capable of providing specific advice , help in weighing outcomes and clarification of the issues . Few of the types of help expected to be useful varied among countries.Conclusion: Cultural differences may indeed influence how doctors perceive ethical difficulties. The type of help needed, however, did not vary markedly. The general structure of ethics support services would not have to be radically altered to suit cultural variations among the surveyed countries. (shrink)

In an international survey of rationing we have found that European physicians encounter scarcity-related ethical difficulties, and are dissatified with the resolution of many of these cases. Here we further examine survey results to explore whether ethics support services would be potentially useful in addressing scarcity related ethical dilemmas. Results indicate that while the type of help offered by ethics support services was considered helpful by physicians, they rarely referred difficulties regarding scarcity to ethics consultation. We propose that ethics consultants (...) could assist physicians by making the process less difficult, and by contributing to decisions being more ethically justifiable. Expertise in bringing considerations of justice to bear on real cases could also be useful in recognising an unjust limit, as opposed to a merely frustrating limit. Though these situations are unlikely to be among the most frequently referred to ethics support services, ethics consultants should be prepared to address them. (shrink)

The increasing complexity of human subjects research and its oversight has prompted researchers, as well as institutional review boards, to have a forum in which to discuss challenging or novel ethical issues not fully addressed by regulations. Research ethics consultation services provide such a forum. In this article, we rely on the experiences of a national Research Ethics Consultation Collaborative that collected more than 350 research ethics consultations in a repository and published 18 challenging cases with accompanying ethical commentaries to (...) highlight four contexts in which REC can be a valuable resource. REC assists: 1) investigators before and after the regulatory review; 2) investigators, IRBs, and other research administrators facing challenging and novel ethical issues; 3) IRBs and investigators with the increasing challenges of informed consent and risk/benefit analysis; and 4) in providing flexible and collaborative assistance to overcome study hurdles, mediate conflicts within a team, or directly engage with research participants. Institutions that have established, or plan to establish, REC services should work to raise the visibility of their service and engage in open communication with existing clinical ethics consult services as well as the IRB. While the IRB system remains the foundation for the ethical review of research, REC can be a valuable service for investigators, regulators, and research participants aligned with the goal of supporting ethical research. (shrink)

Purpose/methods: This study investigated the relationship between ethics education and training, and the use and usefulness of ethics resources, confidence in moral decisions, and moral action/activism through a survey of practicing nurses and social workers from four United States (US) census regions. Findings: The sample (n = 1215) was primarily Caucasian (83%), female (85%), well educated (57% with a master's degree). no ethics education at all was reported by 14% of study participants (8% of social workers had no ethics education, (...) versus 23% of nurses), and only 57% of participants had ethics education in their professional educational program. Those with both professional ethics education and in-service or continuing education were more confident in their moral judgments and more likely to use ethics resources and to take moral action. Social workers had more overall education, more ethics education, and higher confidence and moral action scores, and were more likely to use ethics resources than nurses. Conclusion: Ethics education has a significant positive influence on moral confidence, moral action, and use of ethics resources by nurses and social workers. (shrink)

Is the societal-level of analysis sufficient today to understand the values of those in the global workforce? Or are individual-level analyses more appropriate for assessing the influence of values on ethical behaviors across country workforces? Using multi-level analyses for a 48-society sample, we test the utility of both the societal-level and individual-level dimensions of collectivism and individualism values for predicting ethical behaviors of business professionals. Our values-based behavioral analysis indicates that values at the individual-level make a more significant contribution to (...) explaining variance in ethical behaviors than do values at the societal-level. Implicitly, our findings question the soundness of using societal-level values measures. Implications for international business research are discussed. (shrink)

Ce livre prend position sur les enjeux et les visées des oeuvres d'art en matière de vérité et de morale : il répond, par un retour sur l'époque des Lumières, aux questions contemporaines sur l'idée d'un perfectionnement moral de l'individu (S. Cavell, M. Nussbaum, S. Laugier). Car les Lumières ont remis au coeur de la création artistique les émotions, les affects et les sentiments, mues par la conviction de l'efficacité d'une éducation esthétique de l'homme, d'une éducation sensible par le sensible, (...) en l'occurrence par les oeuvres. La vérité a-t-elle un sens en matière artistique? Notre besoin d'art est-il lié à notre conviction qu'elles nous rendent meilleurs et nous font mieux connaître le monde? L'autonomie de l'oeuvre, la liberté du créateur, la dévaluation de tout canon au nom d'un global turn qui contraint au relativisme rendent aujourd'hui difficile l'affirmation d'une vérité. (shrink)

The human immune system can directly lyse invading micro‐organisms and aberrant host cells by generating pores in the cell envelope, called membrane attack complexes (MACs). Recent studies using single‐particle cryoelectron microscopy have revealed that the MAC is an asymmetric, flexible pore and have provided a structural basis on how the MAC ruptures single lipid membranes. Despite these insights, it remains unclear how the MAC ruptures the composite cell envelope of Gram‐negative bacteria. Recent functional studies on Gram‐negative bacteria elucidate that local (...) assembly of MAC pores by surface‐bound C5 convertase enzymes is essential to stably insert these pores into the bacterial outer membrane (OM). These convertase‐generated MAC pores can subsequently efficiently damage the bacterial inner membrane (IM), which is essential for bacterial killing. This review summarizes these recent insights of MAC assembly and discusses how MAC pores kill Gram‐negative bacteria. Furthermore, this review elaborates on how MAC‐dependent OM damage could lead to IM destabilization, which is currently not well understood. A better understanding on how MAC pores kill bacteria could facilitate the future development of novel strategies to treat infections with Gram‐negative bacteria. (shrink)

This review essay of Economics Rules situates Dani Rodrik’s contribution with respect to the 2007–2008 global economic crisis. This financial meltdown, which the eurozone did not fully recover from before the Covid-19 pandemic, led to soul- searching among economists as well as a call for heterodox economic approaches. Yet, over the past decade, instead the economics profession has maintained its orthodoxy. Rodrik’s Economics Rules offers a critique of the economics profession that is castigating but mild. It calls for economists to (...) use more and diverse models without becoming wedded to any single model or an overarching vision. Yet Rodrik ratifies many of the benchmark models standard to orthodox economics and provides little ground for a fundamental rethinking of the discipline. This essay analyses the conservatism underlying Rodrik’s approach, which upholds general equilibrium theory and rational expectations underlying the efficient market hypothesis. It argues that the economics discipline’s scope-creep to maintain its applicability to all human decision-making, and its acceptance of all-inclusive utility functions, crowds out moral sentiments and civic virtue. Thus. it argues that rather than urging economists simply to be more cautious in their application of models to address particular social concerns, instead economists must recognise their discipline’s inherent limitations. (shrink)

The present study aimed to verify the quarantine’s effects during a serious viral outbreak on the cardiovascular and performance associated with the Yo-Yo test in a sample of professional soccer players. 20 high-level soccer players participated in this study. The intermittent Yo-Yo test was performed pre- and post- COVID-19 quarantine in a random order. During each test, the soccer players’ running performance outcomes were monitored using a portable 5-Hz GPS with a 100 Hz accelerometer and a paired t-test was conducted (...) at a p-value of ≤ 0.05. The main results demonstrated significant differences between pre- versus post-COVID-19 quarantine in the following variables: relative distance, maximal speed, acceleration, deceleration, sprints > 19 km/h [0.8 % >0.5 %], and in high intensity running distance [16.48 m > 0.827 m]. We concluded that COVID-19-related restrictions and quarantine COVID-19 demonstrated adverse effects on professional soccer players’ Yo-Yo tests performance. (shrink)

The economics profession has become a favourite punching bag in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. Economists are widely reviled and their influence derided by the general public. Yet their services have never been in greater demand. To unravel the paradox, we need to understand both the strengths and weaknesses of economics. This book offers both a defence and critique of economics. Economists' way of thinking about social phenomena has great advantages. But the flexible, contextual nature of economics is (...) also its Achilles' heel in the hands of clumsy practitioners. (shrink)

A number of epistemologists have defended a necessary condition for knowledge that has come to be labeled as the “safety” condition. Timothy Williamson, Duncan Pritchard, and Ernest Sosa are the foremost defenders of safety. According to these authors an agent S knows a true proposition P only if S could not easily have falsely believed P. Disagreement arises, however, with respect to how they capture the notion of a safe belief. This article is a treatment of the different presentations and (...) defenses of the safety condition for knowledge. Special attention is first paid to an elucidation of the various aspects or features of the safety condition. Following a short demonstration of the manner in which the safety condition handles some rather tough Gettier-like cases in the literature, some problems facing safety conclude this article. (shrink)

The present article focuses on the case of the 2012 hunger-strike of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. We analyze the ethical dilemma involved in the way the Israeli medical community reacted to these hunger-strikes and the question of force feeding within the context of the fundamental dual-loyalty structure inherent in the Israeli Prison Services—system. We argue that the liberal perspective that focuses the discussion on the dilemma between the principle of individual autonomy and the sanctity of life tends to be (...) oblivious to the asymmetrical relation of power that characterizes the prison system and to the socio-political context in which hunger-strikes take place. Emphasizing hunger-strikes as political acts implies that health practitioners’ conducts cannot be analyzed only through the prism of clinical medical ethics. It requires a public health ethics’ approach, an approach that understands health in the context of the complex relationship between society, state, organizations, communities and individuals. The authors are both academics and volunteers in Physicians for Human Rights—Israel thus our analysis is based both on sociological and public health ethics principles and on the continuous work and advocacy for the right to health of prisoners. (shrink)

In this paper evidence will be provided that Wittgenstein’s intuition about the logic of colour relations is to be taken near-literally. Starting from the Aristotelian oppositions between propositions as represented in the logical square of oppositions on the one hand and oppositions between primary and secondary colors as represented in an octahedron on the other, it will be shown algebraically how definitions for the former carry over to the realm of colour categories and describe very precisely the relations obtaining between (...) the known primary and secondary colours. Linguistic evidence for the reality of the resulting isomorphism will be provided. For example, the vertices that resist natural single-item lexicalization in logic (such as the O-corner, for which there is no natural lexicalization *nall (=not all)) are not naturally lexicalized in the realm of colour terms either. From the perspective of the architecture of cognition, the isomorphism suggests that the foundations of logical oppositions and negation may well be much more deeply rooted in the physiological structure of human cognition than is standardly assumed. (shrink)

It is common to appeal to governing laws of nature in order to explain the existence of natural regularities. Classical theism, however, maintains the sovereignty thesis: everything distinct from God is created by him and is under his guidance and control. It follows from this that God must somehow be responsible for natural laws and regularities. Therefore, theists need an account of the relation between regularities, laws, and God. I examine competing accounts of laws of nature and conclude that dispositional (...) essentialism provides the most satisfactory explanation of the relation between, and. (shrink)

Dans tous les pays et particulierement en Europe, les citoyens, les magistrats et les juristes en general deplorent la complexite normative. Comment traiter la complexite des normes a prendre en compte dans toutes les decisions fondees sur la regle de droit? Depuis une quinzaine d'annees, l'etude des systemes complexes a fait de grands progres tant du point de vue des methodes que de la modelisation. L'approche politique et l'approche scientifique semblent a priori eloignees, mais elles convergent sur l'interet de prendre (...) en compte un objet nouveau: la complexite des systemes. Ces systemes font emerger de nouvelles proprietes, non observables au niveau des elements constitutifs, par une dynamique difficilement previsible, et rendent vaine toute analyse en sous-systemes plus simples. Pour la premiere fois, des specialistes des systemes complexes, des juristes, des philosophes, des experts de l'action publique et de l'evaluation des lois conjuguent leurs reflexions pour depasser les problematiques de la simplification et proposent des concepts et des outils totalement nouveaux pour comprendre et traiter de facon simple l'inevitable complexite du droit. (shrink)

The language of rights is increasingly used to regulate access to health care and allocation of resources in the health care field. The right to health has been grounded on different theories of justice. Scholars within the liberal tradition have grounded the right to health care on Rawls's two principles of justice. Thus, the right to health care has been justified as being one of the basic liberties, as enabling equality of opportunity, or as being justified by the maximin principle. (...) In this article, Filc analyzes—from a radical egalitarian standpoint—the limitations of the different attempts to ground an equal right to health on Rawls's theory of justice and offers a first approximation to a radical egalitarian formulation of the right to health. (shrink)

In this research, a sliding mode regulator with sine mapping is suggested for the stabilization of electricity generators being affected by magnet interaction nonlinearities and generator nonlinearities. To reach this goal, our suggested regulator has the following contributions: it starts from the sliding mode regulator with the modifications that the saturation mapping is used to reach a smoother performance instead of the signum mapping, and the sine mapping is applied to reach an upper bound in the proportional gain error, it (...) is used to reach some chosen constant behaviors for the angle position, angle speed, and current in the electricity generators, and its stabilization is ensured based on the Lyapunov approach. We show the simulation of the suggested regulator in two electricity generators. (shrink)

Studie over het verschijnsel helderziendheid waarbij de verschillende in de loop der tijden ontwikkelde theorieën en verklaringen in een logisch verband behandeld worden.

The problems of racism and racially motivated violence in predominantly African American communities in the United States are complex, multifactorial, and historically rooted. While these problems are also deeply morally troubling, bioethicists have not contributed substantially to addressing them. Concern for justice has been one of the core commitments of bioethics. For this and other reasons, bioethicists should contribute to addressing these problems. We consider how bioethicists can offer meaningful contributions to the public discourse, research, teaching, training, policy development, and (...) academic scholarship in response to the alarming and persistent patterns of racism and implicit biases associated with it. To make any useful contribution, bioethicists will require preparation and should expect to play a significant role through collaborative action with others. (shrink)

Con Spinoza, la filosofía moderna alcanza una nueva comprensión de la subjetividad. Sobre la base de la crítica del racionalismo, Spinoza descubre, por primera vez, la afectividad para la filosofía. El filósofo reflexiona sobre la repercusión de los afectos en la formación del sujeto ético y piensa que el mayor conocimiento posible sobre los propios afectos redunda en la utilidad colectiva de la humanidad toda. Sostengo que, en la teoría general de los afectos que explica la naturaleza, principios y fundamentos (...) de los fenómenos afectivos, Spinoza anida una oportuna teoría del autoconocimiento. (shrink)

Статтю присвячено аналізу розуміння ієрархії у православній філософській та богословській думці, та визначенню того, як це розуміння впливає на православний світогляд. Мета статті досягається за допомогою застосування авторами методології, розробленої представниками філософської школи інтегрального традиціоналізму, оскільки остання являє собою продукт глибокого вивчення та зіставлення досвіду різних релігійних традицій, а також виявляє критерії традиціоналістського світогляду як такого, спільні для різних традицій. Зокрема, автори використовують висновки французького філософа-традиціоналіста Рене Генона про сакральну та ініціатичну природу ієрархії у традиційних суспільствах для пошуку відповідників у (...) православній релігійній традиції. Такі відповідники автори знаходять у працях отців церкви, які вважаються канонічними для православної релігійної традиції та являють собою «становий хребет» її філософського світогляду. За підсумками проведеного дослідження, автори даної публікації виявили, що православний релігійний світогляд є ієрархічним за своєю суттю. (shrink)

"A demain le bon sexe"... disait, non sans une pointe d'ironie, Michel Foucault, au plus fort de la "révolution sexuelle", et l'on sentait que ce n'était pas gagné. Qu'est-ce que le bon sexe? J'ai écrit ce livre en neuf mois... et toute une vie... Sans doute, pour moi, une manière de réaliser une certaine façon qui fut mienne d'être femme je me revois, dans ma petite chambre mansardée, étudiante, tentant en vain de lire en son entier l'Histoire de la sexualité (...) de Michel Foucault... Que savais-je de la sexualité, que pouvais-je recevoir de cet essai, que je trouvais grandiose, lumineux et obscur? Foucault, le seul des philosophes à parler de "ces choses-là", était bien isolé. Il faudrait du temps pour que ses écrits fassent leur route et du temps pour changer les mentalités. Du temps aussi pour moi, pour pouvoir les entendre, qu'ils fassent écho en moi. "Le sexe, disait Foucault, ça s'administre, la sexualité, ça se subit ; quant à la sensualité, elle est chaque jour à inventer." J'ai voulu rouvrir le dossier, emprunter les chemins qu'il a tracés en 1976 en écrivant son Histoire de la sexualité, qui est l'histoire des discours sur la sexualité, eux-mêmes histoire des corps investis par le pouvoir. Danièle Sastre. (shrink)

Depuis quelques années, un mouvement d'idées venu des Etats-Unis, qualifié de "Révolution transhumaniste", a pris un essor considérable. Demain, on vivra 200 ou 300 ans... et bien sûr en parfaite santé : l'immortalité n'est pas loin! Ces prophéties s'appuient sur les avancées réelles de l'intelligence artificielle et de la recherche en biologie, en particulier dans le domaine du vieillissement, passant ainsi allègrement de l'homme préservé et/ou augmenté à un véritable homme dieu. Mais dès que l'on s'intéresse au cerveau, les données, (...) particulièrement complexes, ne vont pas dans leur sens. Il existe une contradiction criante entre la jeunesse éternelle promise et la réalité actuelle, marquée en particulier par les échecs thérapeutiques répétés dans les maladies neurodégénératives. Forts de leur expérience et de leur autorité dans le domaine des neurosciences et du vieillissement, Danièle Tritsch et Jean Mariani dénoncent l'imposture du transhumanisme et ses excès ou délires, données scientifiques à l'appui. De façon accessible et vivante, avec de nombreux exemples de la vie quotidienne, ils démontrent que les efforts lents et soutenus de la recherche biologique et médicale - auxquels contribuera l'intelligence artificielle - restent la seule voie pour comprendre le fonctionnement du cerveau, le maintenir en bonne santé (cerveau préservé), le doter de capacités nouvelles (cerveau augmenté) et, dans un délai non prévisible, guérir ou stabiliser les maladies neurodégénératives (cerveau réparé). L'homme dieu, quant à lui, ne s'appuie sur rien de tangible. (shrink)

This radical reading of Wittgenstein's third and last masterpiece, On Certainty, has major implications for philosophy. It elucidates Wittgenstein's ultimate thoughts on the nature of our basic beliefs and his demystification of scepticism. Our basic certainties are shown to be nonepistemic, nonpropositional attitudes that, as such, have no verbal occurrence but manifest themselves exclusively in our actions. This fundamental certainty is a belief-in, a primitive confidence or ur-trust whose practical nature bridges the hitherto unresolved categorial gap between belief and action.

This collection addresses a post-WWII shift in the hierarchy of scientific explanations, where the highest goal moves from reductionism towards some ...

C’est un vieux court-métrage en noir et blanc qui ne cesse de tressauter dans ma tête depuis mon adolescence. Cela débute généralement à l’aube, entre deux sommeils. Le film se termine par une scène en apparence banale : quelques secondes où l’on voit deux hommes se serrer la main. L’image est un peu floue du fait que la scène est filmée par une mémoire émue. * Quelques rapides traits pour situer l’événement. Les deux hommes vivent sur des continents séparés. L’un (...) est en Europe ; l’autre, en .. (shrink)

The article aims to, from the study of several writings of Pascal,return to what the seventeenth century thinker would have consideredabout time and eternity: what they would be, if and how they wouldrelate. For this, it will be firstly outlined a course that will go through thestudy of the human condition, describing its situation of disproportion and misery, and the condition of the things of worldly life, in addition to man, until the understanding of the existence of another order is (...) reached. This will then mark a course from time to eternity, or, as it will be seen, from flow to presence. (shrink)

O percurso argumentativo do Discurso de Metafísica encontra um momento de tensão quando se atinge o artigo 13, pois, após abordar Deus e a substância individual com caracterizações que induzem ao fatalismo, Leibniz procura afirmar a contingência e a liberdade tanto divina quanto humana. O exame que se segue tem como objetivo a descrição dessa dificuldade, bem como a apresentação de tentativas de solucioná-la – articulando as noções e respostas dadas no Discurso de Metafísica e outros textos de Leibniz, e (...) buscando sempre manter uma coerência em relação à sua filosofia. (shrink)

We intend to present a reading of Franklin Leopoldo e Silva’s Bergson: intuição e discurso filosófico from the perspective of the problem of expression, emphasizing how the methodological and discursive issue in philosophy is resolved by overcoming traditional problems related to the subject-object distinction, privileging now interiority, a genetic method, suggestion, and philosophical attitude, which we will finally try to qualify as generous. Thus, we aim not only to reveal Franklin Leopoldo e Silva’s Bergson, but also the Bergsonism present in (...) the Brazilian philosopher. (shrink)