Variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease is a fatal, transmissible, neurodegenerative disorder for which there is currently no effective treatment. vCJD arose from the zoonotic spread of bovine spongiform encephalopathy. There is now compelling evidence for human to human transmission through blood transfusions from presymptomatic carriers and experts are warning that the real epidemic may be yet to come. Imperatives exist for the development of reliable, non-invasive presymptomatic diagnostic tests. Research into such tests is well advanced. In this article the ethical implications of (...) the availability of these tests are elaborated and comparisons drawn with predictive genetic testing for Huntington’s disease and screening for HIV. Paramount to considerations is the issue of whom to test, weighing up respect for personal autonomy against obligations to benefit and protect society. A paradigm is proposed similar to that used for HIV screening but with unique features: compulsory testing of all blood/organ donors and individuals undergoing surgery or invasive procedures who have a significant risk of disease transmission. (shrink)

Research and clinical trial development for rare diseases pose unique bioethical challenges. Much of the literature on rare diseases focuses on patient advocacy and drug development to manage or cu...

This chapter considers ethical issues involved in genetic testing and screening for susceptibility to various forms of cancer.

Huntington ; argues that recent commentators err in attributing to Nāgārjuna and Candrakīrti a commitment to rationality and to the use of argument, and that these commentators do violence to the Madhyamaka project by using rational reconstruction in their interpretation of Nāgārjuna’s and Candrakīrti’s texts. Huntington argues instead that mādhyamikas reject reasoning, distrust logic and do not offer arguments. He also argues that interpreters ought to recuse themselves from argument in order to be faithful to these texts. I (...) demonstrate that he is wrong in all respects: Nāgārjuna and Candrakīrti deploy arguments, take themselves to do so, and even if they did not, we would be wise to do so in commenting on their texts. (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)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Religion, the Globalization of War, and Restorative JusticeNathan TierneyAs the pace of globalization increases, the world's religions find themselves in a perilous dilemma that they have yet to resolve in either practical or conceptual terms. On the one hand, the globalization of markets exerts a powerful pressure toward consumerist and materialist values, which undermine and undercut religious perspectives and sensibilities. On the other hand, the globalization of war heightens (...) the intensity of these religious perspectives and sensibilities, and distorts them in the direction of violence and religious extremism. This dilemma plays itself out in different ways in the developed and developing world, but, as the term "globalization" indicates, it is a problem for all of us. Governments, in developing countries especially, often find themselves forced to choose between one horn of the dilemma or the other, with often disastrous results as they take one or the other side in a "West versus the rest" scenario. In the long run, the only viable solution is one that addresses both horns of the dilemma at the same time, and this is possible only if, in turn, religions themselves become truly global. This will require a large-scale and focused cooperative effort in which the religions of the world actively and jointly engage with both problems, working with governments, NGOs, religious communities, and interfaith groups to harmonize religious life with economics and to promote a culture of peace and justice.Because "globalization" is a familiar term in relation to markets, I'll begin by clarifying what I mean by the globalization of war. There are two main aspects to this phenomenon. First, the term refers to a specific transformation in the nature, purposes, and conditions of warfare brought about by the forces of globalization. By globalization I mean the growing trend of the world's cultural, economic, and political forces to bypass national borders and operate on a world scale. This process creates new possibilities for both integration and conflict. When that conflict passes beyond the possibility of diplomatic negotiation, we have the conditions for globalized war. Globalized war is not necessarily world war. It can be relatively local in its sphere of combat; for example, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was a collective response to a worldwide threat of terrorism. What makes it a globalized war, as distinct from international war, is the global nature of the forces that produced it and [End Page 79] are affected by it. Globalized war in this sense has come only lately onto the scene, but its scale and impact is likely to grow in the coming century.The second aspect of the globalization of war is the tendency of conflict to mutate beyond the interests and concerns of nation-states and be taken up by broader civilizational units, even if they were not originally a response to global pressures. The most likely trajectory for this mutation has been well described by Samuel P. Huntington in his influential article "The Clash of Civilizations" (1993) and his book-length treatment of the same subject (1997). Huntington argues that the fault lines of conflict will not be primarily ideological or economic but cultural, where "cultural" is to be understood at its broadest level—the level of civilizations. He divides the world into seven or eight competing civilizations: Western, Sinic, Japanese, Hindu, Islamic, Orthodox, Latin American, and possibly African. Societies sharing cultural affinities will cooperate with one another, and the attempt by the West to universalize its dominant version of consumer capitalism and liberal democracy will be resisted in an increasingly determined way—eventually to the point of outright war: "the next world war, if there is one, will be a war between civilizations."1In Huntington's analysis, then, the globalization of war refers to a coming clash of civilizations. He believes that religion will play a central role in this clash as the focal point of civilizations: "Civilizations are differentiated from each other by history, language, culture tradition and, most important, religion."2 While Western civilization has experienced several decades of decline and decay, in both its cultural unity and its sense of identity, other civilizations have grown both in economic terms and... (shrink)

A major difficulty for currently existing theories of inductive inference involves the question of what to do when novel, unknown, or previously unsuspected phenomena occur. In this paper one particular instance of this difficulty is considered, the so-called sampling of species problem.The classical probabilistic theories of inductive inference due to Laplace, Johnson, de Finetti, and Carnap adopt a model of simple enumerative induction in which there are a prespecified number of types or species which may be observed. But, realistically, this (...) is often not the case. In 1838 the English mathematician Augustus De Morgan proposed a modification of the Laplacian model to accommodate situations where the possible types or species to be observed are not assumed to be known in advance; but he did not advance a justification for his solution. (shrink)

The Unknowable, arguably the greatest Russian philosophical work of the 20th century, was the culmination of S. L. Frank's intellectual and spiritual development, the boldest and most imaginative of all his writings, containing a synthesis of epistemology, ontology, social philosophy, religious philosophy, and personal spiritual experience.

Inducing the rubber hand illusion (RHI) requires that participants look at an imitation hand while it is stroked in synchrony with their occluded biological hand. Previous explanations of the RHI have emphasized multisensory integration, and excluded higher cognitive functions. We investigated the relationship between the RHI and higher cognitive functions by experimentally testing task switch (as measured by switch cost) and mind wandering (as measured by SART score); we also included a questionnaire for attentional control that comprises two subscales, attention-shift (...) and attention-focus. To assess experience of RHI, the Botvinick and Cohen (1998) questionnaire was used and illusion onset time was recorded. Our results indicate that rapidity of onset reliably indicates illusion strength. Regression analysis revealed that participants evincing less switch cost and higher attention-shift scores had faster RHI onset times, and that those with higher attention-shift scores experienced the RHI more vividly. These results suggest that the multi-sensory hypothesis is not sufficient to explain the illusion: higher cognitive functions should be taken into account when explaining variation in the experience of ownership for the rubber hand. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to make a simple observation regarding the Johnson -Carnap continuum of inductive methods. From the outset, a common criticism of this continuum was its failure to permit the confirmation of universal generalizations: that is, if an event has unfailingly occurred in the past, the failure of the continuum to give some weight to the possibility that the event will continue to occur without fail in the future. The Johnson -Carnap continuum is the mathematical consequence (...) of an axiom termed Johnson 's sufficientness postulate, the thesis of this paper is that, properly viewed, the failure of the Johnson -Carnap continuum to confirm universal generalizations is not a deep fact, but rather an immediate consequence of the sufficientness postulate; and that if this postulate is modified in the minimal manner necessary to eliminate such an entailment, then the result is a new continuum that differs from the old one in precisely one respect: it enjoys the desideratum of confirming universal generalizations. (shrink)

Joachim Schulte’s introduction provides a distinctive and masterful account of the full range of Wittgenstein’s thought. It is concise but not compressed, substantive but not overloaded with developmental or technical detail, informed by the latest scholarship but not pedantic. Beginners will find it accessible and seasoned students of Wittgenstein will appreciate it for the illuminating overview it provides.

Among various cases that equally admit of evidentialist reasoning, the supposedly evidentialist solution has varying degrees of intuitive attractiveness. I suggest that cooperative reasoning may account for the appeal of apparently evidentialist behavior in the cases in which it is intuitively attractive, while the inapplicability of cooperative reasoning may account for the unattractiveness of evidentialist behaviour in other cases. A collective causal power with respect to agreed outcomes, not evidentialist reasoning, makes cooperation attractive in the Prisoners' Dilemma. And a natural (...) though unwarranted assumption of such a power may account for the intuitive appeal of the one-box response in Newcomb's Problem. (shrink)

Business ethics scholars have proposed strategies for mitigating the ill effects brought on by a wealth maximization business strategy by urging managers to either embrace corporate social responsibility (CSR) or to manage according to stakeholder theory. In this article I argue that these strategies are often ineffective in bringing about the behavior they promote because it is antithetical to the nature and logic of capitalism. I examine the organizing principles of capitalism and the role it assigns to capitalists, and juxtapose (...) these with the behavior prescribed by three normative frameworks: strategic management theory (SMT), the CSR initiative, and stakeholder theory. Unlike the behaviors prescribed by the CSR initiative and stakeholder management theory, the behavior prescribed by SMT is consistent with the role of capitalists as defined by the organizing principles of capitalism, and SMT's “rules” have instilled habits that have, in turn, been able to mold managers’ aspirations and purposes. CSR and stakeholder theory must not only combat the habits instilled by the entrenched SMT, they must also find some way of instilling habits that run contrary to those defined by the nature and logic of capitalism itself. (shrink)

Part 1 reviews the general question of when elimination of an entity orproperty is warranted, as opposed to revision of our view of it. Theconnections of this issue with the distinction between context-drivenand theory-driven accounts of reference and essence are probed.Context-driven accounts tend to be less hospitable to eliminativism thantheory-driven accounts, but this tendency should not be overstated.However, since both types of account give essences explanatory depth,eliminativist claims associated with supposed impossible essences areproblematic on both types of account.Part 2 applies (...) these considerations to responsibility in particular. Theimpossibility of regressive choice or control is explained. It is arguedthat this impossibility does not support the claim that no one is everresponsible on either context-driven or theory-driven accounts of`responsibility'. (shrink)

S. L. Hurley; VIII*—Kant on Spontaneity and the Myth of the Giving, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 94, Issue 1, 1 June 1994, Pages 137–164, htt.

Tape-recorded semi-structured interviews were conducted with 21 nursing aides and enrolled nurses in the geriatric clinic in Umeå, Sweden. The interviews focused on the difference between the care of demented and non-demented patients and ethical conflicts in dementia care. The results indicate that caregivers have problems in providing the demented patients with opportunities to act autonomously in everyday matters on the ward, mainly due to the difficulty of understanding what the patients wish and the fact that their wishes, when understood, (...) often seem irrational. Measures to provide the demented patients with more opportunities to act autonomously in everyday matters are suggested. (shrink)