The use of ethics in everyday nursing practice will become increasingly important to the individual nurse, and nursing as a profession, as technology has a greater impact on health status and the provision of health care. Resource allocation is only one example of an ethical issue in which nursing must have input. Nursing can expand its contribution to society by ensuring that it plays a major role in shaping public policy and legislation. If nursing is to continue to serve the (...) public, the involvement of nurses within the political process must be accepted as an ethical necessity. (shrink)

Prepare for practice with the essential text dedicated to Canadian legal and ethical issues! Focused solely on the ever-changing, and often complex health care landscape in Canada, Ethical & Legal Issues in Canadian Nursing 4th, Edition expertly covers the often intertwined ethical and legal issues that health care professionals face today. This fourth edition includes discussion points at the end of every chapter along with tables and illustrations to help you fully comprehend the material. Plus, the clear and straightforward writing (...) style presents information just as you will encounter it in your day-to-day practice, ensuring you're even more prepared to make an impact from the start! -- From the publisher. (shrink)

Margaret Whitford's study provides the ideal introduction to Irigaray's thought, offering a sustained interpretation of her whole corpus, including previously untranslated French texts. Whitford suggests that Irigaray's work should be seen as "philosophy in the feminine," actively opposing the complicity of philosophy with other social practices which exclude or marginalize women.

Through the use of particular pedagogies and the adoption of new modes of thinking, physical literacy promises more realistic models of physical competence and ...

For those open to the possibility that philosophical thought can improve life, David Hume's Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary have something to say. In the first comprehensive study of the Essays, Margaret Watkins engages closely with these neglected texts and shows how they provide important insights into Hume's perspective on the breadth and depth of human life, arguing that the Essays reveal his continued commitment to philosophy as a discipline that can promote both social and individual progress. Addressing topics (...) such as politics, war, slavery, the priesthood, the development of industry, aesthetics, emotional disorders, egoism, friendship, sexuality, gender relations, and the nature of philosophy itself, the volume examines Hume's purposes and aims against the backdrop of the eighteenth century society in which he lived. It will be of interest to scholars of modern thought in philosophy, politics, history, and economics. (shrink)

This article argues that Hume's brief essay, "Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion," offers resources for three claims: (1) Delicate taste correlates with self-sufficiency and thus with a particularly Humean form of Magnanimity -- greatness of mind; (2) Delicate taste improves the capacity for profound friendships, characterized by mutual admiration and true compassion; and (3) magnanimity and compassion are thus not necessarily in tension with one another and may even proceed from and support harmony of character. These claims, in (...) turn, provide reasons to take seriously Hume's view that moral character depends, in part, on aesthetic character. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Testimony of Sense: Empiricism and the Essay from Hume to Hazlitt by Tim MilnesMargaret WatkinsTim Milnes. The Testimony of Sense: Empiricism and the Essay from Hume to Hazlitt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. viii + 278. Hardback. ISBN: 9780198812739. $91.00.In his brief autobiography, “My Own Life,” Hume reports that “almost all [his] life has been spent in literary pursuits and occupations” (E-MOL: xxxi). This is one (...) of at least ten places in this brief work in which he associates himself with “letters” or “literature”—as compared to at most four associations with philosophy. The moral to be inferred is not that Hume considered himself not to be a philosopher. Rather, he conceived of philosophy as a kind of literature. The Treatise was itself a “literary attempt.” Indeed, opposition between the “literary” and “philosophical” aspects of a text would have been foreign to Hume and his contemporaries—a notion for a later age, despite his occasional loose distinction between the relevant genres, as in his list of writings “historical, philosophical, or literary” in “My Own Life” (E-MOL: xxxvi).Yet despite Hume’s own understanding of the continuity between philosophy and literature, broadly conceived, it is still common for contemporary philosophers to ignore literary questions in their examination of Hume’s work, or to presume that one can easily distinguish the “philosophical” parts from the “literary” ones. Tim Milnes’s The Testimony of Sense is therefore a welcome addition to the Hume literature (pun intended). With a particular focus on the essay—a genre of great importance to Hume—Milnes contributes to the small set of engagements with Hume from the disciplinary perspective of English literature. With training in both philosophy and literature, as well as established expertise on Romanticism and its own essays, Milnes is well-qualified for the task. The Testimony of Sense includes sustained engagement with Hume’s contemporaries and successors, but for the purposes of this review, I engage the book primarily as a Hume scholar for Hume scholars.Milnes’s story plays out in three acts. The first establishes the need for public trust created by a skeptical crisis, itself a product of Hume’s criticism of the epistemic program of thinkers in the Cartesian and Lockean traditions. The second explains how the essays of the long eighteenth century constitute a response to that need in various ways. The third reveals in detail how the Romantic essayists, particularly William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb, both respond to and deviate from the “neoclassical” essayists, typified by Hume and Samuel Johnson.The first chapter, “Self and Intersubjectivity,” lays the groundwork by articulating how Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Reid, and Dugald Stewart identify the need for what we now call intersubjectivity. Milnes describes the common thread as a kind of “natural transcendentalism.” In what sense are these thinkers properly understood as [End Page 175] transcendentalists? The central idea seems to be that all posit things other than reason as “conditions of meaningful thought” (72). For Hume, it is the social, linguistic experience of a community of virtuous judges. The intricate relations between self and other essential to such a community get “internalized within the specular drama of the impartial spectator” (72) in Smith’s writing, which itself takes part in the drama through his “halting, qualified syntax” that mimics “everyday speech” (44). Reid posits a “prescience” of trust, which grounds our reliance on both human testimony and the uniformity of nature, itself undergirded by the design of a benevolent God. Stewart, who posits axiomatic truths that help constitute the “stamina of intellect,” goes furthest, actually calling these truths transcendental (55). This chapter also puts these eighteenth-century thinkers in conversation with twentieth-century theorists, including Habermas, Davidson, and Rorty.Chapter 2, “The Subject of Trust,” deepens the analysis by situating these “natural transcendentalisms” in the broader enlightenment context. In contrast to Descartes, Bacon, and Locke, who were suspicious of our reliance on the opinions of others, the eighteenth-century thinkers understand trust as prior to reason in various ways—though not prior to solidarity. The particulars in each case depend on their responses to skepticism and their accounts of the relation between... (shrink)

Work on representing women's voices in ethics has produced a vision of moral understanding profoundly subversive of the traditional philosophical conception of moral knowledge. 1 explicate this alternative moral “epistemology,” identify how it challenges the prevailing view, and indicate some of its resources for a liberatory feminist critique of philosophical ethics.

This paper undertakes textual exegesis and rational reconstruction of Mukula Bhaṭṭa’s Abhidhā-vṛttta-mātṛkā, or “The Fundamentals of the Communicative Function.” The treatise was written to refute Ānandavardhana’s claim, made in the Dhvanyāloka, that there is a third “power” of words, vyañjanā (suggestion), beyond the two already accepted by traditional Indian philosophy: abhidhā (denotation) and lakṣaṇā(indication).1 I argue that the explanation of lakṣaṇā as presented in his text contains internal tensions, although it may still be a compelling response to Ānandavardhana.

This article first briefly examines the textual structure of the Vangisathera Samyutta of the Pali Samyutta-nikaya in conjunction with two other versions preserved in Chinese translation in Taisho vol. 2, nos. 99 and 100. Then it compares the main teachings contained in the three versions. These three versions of this collection on the subject of the venerable Vangisa represent three different early Buddhist schools within the Sthavira branch. This comparative study of these three different versions focuses on three major topics: (...) Arhants at the pravarana ceremony; sensual desire and the way to extinguish it; and the Buddha’s teachings to Vangisa. It reveals similarities and significant differences in structure and doctrinal content, thus advancing the historical/critical study of early Buddhist doctrine in this area. (shrink)

Drawing on the work of a wide range of thinkers, the authors offer a program for organizing and leading human activity in all types of organizations, based a ...

Moral epistemology investigates sources and patterns of moral understanding. Its questions include: To what extent does morality consist in or depend on knowledge, and of what kind(s)? What makes possible moral knowledge, and how is such knowledge grounded or justified? What is the relation between philosophical claims about morality and the moral understanding any of us has, that is, what has ethics – the philosophical representation of morality – to do with morality itself? Feminist moral epistemology asks how social divisions (...) of labor, opportunity, power, and recognition which reproduce gender and other hierarchies affect both the ways these questions have in fact been answered, and the ways they might be. (shrink)

The claim that Spinoza has a conception of animal mentality and consciousness that is superior to Descartes's is criticized. It is also argued that Spinoza fails to provide a coherent way of establishing what he considers to be our morally unconstrained “rights” with regard to brutes. Despite Spinoza's claim that brutes “feel,” i.e., are capable of sentience, his view that we are nonetheless entitled to treat animals in any way convenient to us is criticized. Questions are also raised as to (...) whether Spinoza is entitled to distinguish human from bestial nature on the basis of the possession of reason. (shrink)

The book examines issues related to the way modeling and simulation enable us to reconstruct aspects of the world we are investigating. It also investigates the processes by which we extract concrete knowledge from those reconstructions and how that knowledge is legitimated.

This new essay collection by distinguished philosopher Margaret Gilbert provides a richly textured argument for the importance of joint commitment in our personal and public lives. Topics covered by this diverse range of essays range from marital love to patriotism, from promissory obligation to the unity of the European Union.

Moral Repair examines the ethics and moral psychology of responses to wrongdoing. Explaining the emotional bonds and normative expectations that keep human beings responsive to moral standards and responsible to each other, Margaret Urban Walker uses realistic examples of both personal betrayal and political violence to analyze how moral bonds are damaged by serious wrongs and what must be done to repair the damage. Focusing on victims of wrong, their right to validation, and their sense of justice, Walker presents (...) a unified and detailed philosophical account of hope, trust, resentment, forgiveness, and making amends - the emotions and practices that sustain moral relations. Moral Repair joins a multidisciplinary literature concerned with transitional and restorative justice, reparations, and restoring individual dignity and mutual trust in the wake of serious wrongs. (shrink)

Businesses that produce bioscience products—gene tests and therapies, pharmaceuticals, vaccines, and medical devices—are regularly confronted with ethical issues concerning these technologies. Conflicts exist between those who support advancements in bioscience and those who fear the consequences of unfettered scientific license. As the debate surrounding bioscience grows, it will be increasingly important for business managers to consider the larger consequences of their work. This groundbreaking book follows industry research, development, and marketing of medical and bioscience products across a variety of fields, (...) including biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, and bio-agriculture. Compelling and current case studies highlight the ethical decisions business managers frequently face. With the increasing visibility and public expectation placed on businesses in this sector, managers need to understand the ethical and social issues. This book addresses that need and provides a framework for incorporating ethical analysis in business decision making. (shrink)

This is a revised edition of Walker's well-known book in feminist ethics first published in 1997. Walker's book proposes a view of morality and an approach to ethical theory which uses the critical insights of feminism and race theory to rethink the epistemological and moral position of the ethical theorist, and how moral theory is inescapably shaped by culture and history. The main gist of her book is that morality is embodied in "practices of responsibility" that express our identities, values, (...) and connections to others in socially patterned ways. Thus ethical theory needs to be empirically informed and politically critical to avoid reiterating forms of socially entrenched bias. Responsible ethical theory should reveal and question the moral significance of social differences. The book engages with, and challenges, the work of contemporary analytic philosophers in ethics. Moral Understandings has been influential in reaching a global audience in ethics and feminist philosophy, as well as in tangential fields like nursing ethics; research ethics; disability ethics; environmental ethics, and social and political theory. This revised edition contains a new preface, a substantive postscript to Chapter 1 about "the subject of moral philosophy"; the addition of a new chapter on the importance of emotion in practices of responsibility; and the addition of an afterword, which responds to critics of the book. (shrink)

Humanity and the very notion of the human subject are under threat from postmodernist thinking which has declared not only the 'Death of God' but also the 'Death of Man'. This book is a revindication of the concept of humanity, rejecting contemporary social theory that seeks to diminish human properties and powers. Archer argues that being human depends on an interaction with the real world in which practice takes primacy over language in the emergence of human self-consciousness, thought, emotionality and (...) personal identity - all of which are prior to, and more basic than, our acquisition of a social identity. This original and provocative new book from leading social theorist Margaret S. Archer builds on the themes explored in her previous books Culture and Agency (CUP 1988) and Realist Social Theory (CUP 1995). It will be required reading for academics and students of social theory, cultural theory, political theory, philosophy and theology. (shrink)

How is it possible to think new thoughts? What is creativity and can science explain it? And just how did Coleridge dream up the creatures of The Ancient Mariner? When The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms was first published, Margaret A. Boden's bold and provocative exploration of creativity broke new ground. Boden uses examples such as jazz improvisation, chess, story writing, physics, and the music of Mozart, together with computing models from the field of artificial intelligence to uncover the (...) nature of human creativity in the arts. The second edition of The Creative Mind has been updated to include recent developments in artificial intelligence, with a new preface, introduction and conclusion by the author. It is an essential work for anyone interested in the creativity of the human mind. (shrink)

In recent years, the free market position has been gaining strength. In this book, Radin provides a nuanced response to its sweeping generalization.

One of the most distinguished living social philosophers, Margaret Gilbert develops and extends her application of plural subject theory of human sociality, first introduced in her earlier works On Social Facts and Living Together. Sociality and Responsibility presents an extended discussion of her proposal that joint commitments inherently involve obligations and rights, proposing, in effect, a new theory of obligations and rights. In addition, it demonstrates the extensive range and fruitfulness of plural subject theory by presenting accounts of social (...) rules, scientific change, political obligation, collective remorse, collective guilt, shared intention and an important class of rights and obligations. (shrink)

Margaret Moore offers a comprehensive normative theory of territory.

Margaret Canovan argues in this book that much of the published work on Arendt has been flawed by serious misunderstandings, arising from a failure to see her work in its proper context. The author shows how such misunderstanding was possible, and offers a fundamental reinterpretation, drawing on Arendt's unpublished as well as her published work, which sheds new light on most areas of her thought.

Does one have special obligations to support the political institutions of one’s own country precisely because it is one’s own? In short, does one have political obligations? This book argues for an affirmative answer, construing one’s country as a political society of which one is a member, and a political society as a special type of social group. The obligations in question are not moral requirements derived from general moral principles. They come, rather, from one’s participation in a special kind (...) of commitment: a joint commitment. This theory is referred to as the plural subject theory of political obligation since, by the author’s definition, those who are party to any joint commitment constitute a plural subject of some action in a broad sense of the term. Several alternative theories are compared and contrasted with plural subject theory, with a particular focus on the most famous — actual contract theory — according to which membership in a political society is a matter of participation in an agreement. The book offers plural subject accounts of both social rules and everyday agreements, and includes discussion of political authority and punishment. (shrink)

This book is about the methods used for unifying different scientific theories under one all-embracing theory. The process has characterized much of the history of science and is prominent in contemporary physics; the search for a 'theory of everything' involves the same attempt at unification. Margaret Morrison argues that, contrary to popular philosophical views, unification and explanation often have little to do with each other. The mechanisms that facilitate unification are not those that enable us to explain how or (...) why phenomena behave as they do. A feature of this book is an account of many case studies of theory unification in nineteenth- and twentieth-century physics and of how evolution by natural selection and Mendelian genetics were unified into what we now term evolutionary genetics. (shrink)

Margaret Gilbert presents the first full-length treatment of a central class of rights: demand-rights. To have such a right is to have the standing or authority to demand a particular action of another person. Gilbert argues that joint commitment is a ground of demand-rights, and gives joint commitment accounts of both agreements and promises.

This paper argues for a methodological point that bears on a relatively long-standing debate concerning collective beliefs in the sense elaborated by Margaret Gilbert: are they cases of belief or rather of acceptance? It is argued that epistemological accounts and distinctions developed in individual epistemology on the basis of considering the individual case are not necessarily applicable to the collective case or, more generally, uncritically to be adopted in collective epistemology.

What is a crip politics of bodymind? Drawing upon Rosemarie Garland-Thomson's theory of the misfit, I explain my understanding of crip and bodymind within a feminist materialist framework, and argue that careful investigation of a crip politics of bodymind must involve accounting for two key, but under-explored, disability studies concepts: desire and pain. I trace the turn toward desire that has characterized DS theory for the last decade, and argue that while acknowledging disability desire, we must also attend to the (...) aspects of disability, including pain, that are sometimes bad. Although I don't argue that pain is always and only bad, I call for recognition of the ways pain complicates disability desire, as well as the possibilities it opens for specifically located, collective forms of care. (shrink)

'The Patient as Victim and Vector' is jointly written by four authors at the University of Utah with expertise in bioethics health law, and both clinical practice and public health policy concerning infectious disease.

Brain–computer interfaces are a form of technology that read a user’s neural signals to perform a task, often with the aim of inferring user intention. They demonstrate potential in a wide range of clinical, commercial, and personal applications. But BCIs are not always simple to operate, and even with training some BCI users do not operate their systems as intended. Many researchers have described this phenomenon as “BCI illiteracy,” and a body of research has emerged aiming to characterize, predict, and (...) solve this perceived problem. However, BCI illiteracy is an inadequate concept for explaining difficulty that users face in operating BCI systems. BCI illiteracy is a methodologically weak concept; furthermore, it relies on the flawed assumption that BCI users possess physiological or functional traits that prevent proficient performance during BCI use. Alternative concepts to BCI illiteracy may offer better outcomes for prospective users and may avoid the conceptual pitfalls that BCI illiteracy brings to the BCI research process. (shrink)

This article explores the question: what is it for two or more people to intend to do something in the future? In a technical phrase, what is it for people to share an intention ? Extending and refining earlier work of the author’s, it argues for three criteria of adequacy for an account of shared intention (the disjunction, concurrence, and obligation criteria) and offers an account that satisfies them. According to this account, in technical terms explained in the paper, people (...) share an intention when and only when they are jointly committed to intend as a body to do such-and-such in the future. This account is compared and contrasted with the common approach that treats shared intention as a matter of personal intentions, with particular reference to the work of Michael Bratman. (shrink)

This paper raises two problems for plan-expressivism concerning normative judgments about non-corealizable actions: actions which cannot both be performed. First, plan-expressivists associate normative judgment with an attitude which satisfies a corealizability constraint, but this constraint is (in the interpersonal case) unwarranted, and (in the intrapersonal case) warranted only at the price of a contentious normative premise. Ayars (2022) holds that the pair of judgments ‘A should φ’ and ‘B should ψ’ is coherent only if one believes that A can φ (...) while B ψ’s. But this is false. Both Gibbard (2003) and Ayars hold that the pair of judgments ‘A should φ’ and ‘A should ψ’ is coherent only if one believes that A can φ and ψ. But this assumes possibilism. Second, the paper demonstrates, cases involving interpersonal non-corealizability prompt judgments about what multiple agents should do which – contra Gibbard – are not plausibly associated with any planning subject. (shrink)

The paper examines philosophical issues that arise in contexts where one has many different models for treating the same system. I show why in some cases this appears relatively unproblematic (models of turbulence) while others represent genuine difficulties when attempting to interpret the information that models provide (nuclear models). What the examples show is that while complementary models needn’t be a hindrance to knowledge acquisition, the kind of inconsistency present in nuclear cases is, since it is indicative of a lack (...) of genuine theoretical understanding. It is important to note that the differences in modeling do not result directly from the status of our knowledge of turbulent flows as opposed to nuclear dynamics—both face fundamental theoretical problems in the construction and application of models. However, as we shall, the ‘problem context(s)’ in which the modeling takes plays a decisive role in evaluating the epistemic merit of the models themselves. Moreover, the theoretical difficulties that give rise to inconsistent as opposed to complementary models (in the cases I discuss) impose epistemic and methodological burdens that cannot be overcome by invoking philosophical strategies like perspectivism, paraconsistency or partial structures. (shrink)

In this wide-ranging interview Professor Margaret Archer discusses a variety of aspects of her work, academic career and influences, beginning with the role the study of education systems played in...