BackgroundIn this study, medical errors are defined as unintentional patient harm caused by a doctor’s mistake. This topic, due to limited research, is poorly understood in Malaysia. The objective of this study was to determine the proportion of doctors intending to disclose medical errors, and their attitudes/perception pertaining to medical errors.MethodsThis cross-sectional study was conducted at a tertiary public hospital from July- December 2015 among 276 randomly selected doctors. Data was collected using a standardized and validated self-administered questionnaire intending to (...) measure disclosure and attitudes/perceptions. The scale had four vignettes in total two medical and two surgical. Each vignette consisted of five questions and each question measured the disclosure. Disclosure was categorised as “No Disclosure”, “Partial Disclosure” or “Full Disclosure”. Data was keyed in and analysed using STATA v 13.0.ResultsOnly 10.1% intended to disclose medical errors. Most respondents felt that they possessed an attitude/perception of adequately disclosing errors to patients. There was a statistically significant difference when comparing the intention of disclosure with perceived disclosures. Most respondents were in common agreement that disclosing an error would make them less likely to get sued, that minor errors should be reported and that they experienced relief from disclosing errors.ConclusionMost doctors in this study would not disclose medical errors although they perceived that the errors were serious and felt responsible for it. Poor disclosure could be due the fear of litigations and improper mechanisms/procedures available for disclosure. (shrink)

Examining the costs and motivations of warfare is key to conundrums concerning the relevance of this troubling phenomenon to the evolution of social attachment and cooperation, particularly during adolescence and young adulthood—the developmental time period during which many participants are first recruited for warfare. The study focuses on Samburu, a pastoralist society of approximately 200,000 people occupying northern Kenya’s semi-arid and arid lands, asking what role the emotionally sensitized, peer-driven adolescent life stage may have played in the cultural and genetic (...) coevolution of coalitional lethal aggression. Research in small-scale societies provides unparalleled opportunities for sharply defined variables, particularly in age generation societies in which all young men are initiated into “warriorhood.” Proposing an epigenetic and component behavior approach, we examine whether raiding activities such as number of raids, killing, and sparing enemy lives associate with DNA methylation in two candidate genes: MAOA, linked to mood and arousal, and NR3C1, linked to stress and immune response. We report statistically significant associations between the epigenetic variables and the combat variables of overall raiding activity and reportedly showing mercy to enemies. In contrast, epigenetic variables did not associate with post-traumatic stress disorder symptom scores, and the only combat variable associated with PTSD was losing one’s own livestock in a raid. These findings raise important questions concerning the mechanisms driving warfare’s paradoxical mix of violent and altruistic behaviors. (shrink)

The Second Amendment is accepted as protecting a right, but it is commonly accepted that the right is not unrestricted. I will explore the most commonly suggested restrictions proposed by gun control advocates and show why these restrictions to the Second Amendment are unjustifiably high, especially when compared with restrictions we accept for other Constitutional rights. I argue that these restrictions violate a central function of the Second Amendment—to enable the people to protect themselves against a tyrannical government. The three (...) restrictions I will be discussing are: licensing requirements for gun ownership, gun tracing with a national database of gun owners, and concealed carry restrictions. (shrink)

The conventional wisdom that influences university policy on what is considered valid sexual consent has undergone radical change over the past twenty years. Valid consent being the criteria that makes subsequent sexual behavior morally justified because the consent is morally transformative in the way that matters. Affirmative consent policies are now being used increasingly at universities across the country, as well as forming the basis for legislation in some U.S. states. University policies that define affirmative consent are varied, but policies (...) generally require the consent to be voluntary, conscious, unambiguous, and ongoing. The consent can be communicated verbally or behaviorally as long as it is clear and continues throughout the sexual encounter. I will argue against both the unambiguous and ongoing requirements of sexual consent. I contend that we should reject the affirmative model of sexual consent because of the problems with these requirements and I then offer some reasons in favor of returning to a lack of dissent model of sexual consent. (shrink)

My dissertation develops a defense of a right to self-defense against the state. I set aside anarchist theories and grant for the sake of argument that the state has legitimate political authority. My goal is to convince non-anarchists that the right to self-defense extends to individuals against the state and the state’s agents. I argue that the right to self-defense is a fundamental, negative, claim right. The right to self-defense has these characteristics: (1) it is fundamental, meaning that it is (...) not derivative of any other right—it doesn’t appeal to any other right for its justification (2) it is negative, meaning that it simply requires others to refrain from certain action, and (3) it is a claim right, rather than a permission right, which means that it logically entails correlative duties on others. I also challenge some basic tenets of the orthodox account of justified defensive force, including the imminence, necessity, and proportionality conditions. My argument is a controversial one; many will resist the idea that an individual could be justified in self-defense against the state for a variety of reasons, ranging from thinking the idea is absurd or dangerous, to thinking that even if it is morally permissible, it is impractical. I aim to rebut these objections and to provide strong moral reasons to show why individuals do in fact have this right. -/- This research explores the relationship between one of our most basic rights—the right to self-defense—with our most basic political relationship—the relationship between the individual and the state. Part of my aim is to convince non-anarchist readers of philosophical claims that are usually only supported by anarchists. The reason this is important, beyond being academically interesting, is that if I am successful, it could allow a great majority of individuals to rethink their relationship with the state; not just at a basic level, but also in other applied areas such as gun rights, drug laws, and issues surrounding punishment and imprisonment. (shrink)

Linguists have habitually phrased their accounts of language knowledge as sound/meaning correspondences about which no mention need be made of differences that might exist between knowledge of how to analyze input versus knowledge of how to construct output . However, evidence from many sources increasingly indicates that the dissimilarities between language as comprehension versus language as production are so profound that they nullify attempts to describe language in a 'non-directional' manner, 'neutral' with respect to interpretive versus expressive functions. A two-component (...) model of idealized linguistic performance can be devised on the basis of much past and present linguistic scholarship. Elements needed for the comprehension component are derivable from 'taxonomic' distributional analyses of phonotactics, morphosyntax, and lexical semantics, as well as from recent cognitive psychological work on 'perceptual strategies', while the production component can be formulated in terms of 'generative-semantic' and 'generative-phonological' rules recast as meaning-to-sound transformational processes. Interaction between these two components may well be the crucial determinant of the 'creative aspect of language use'. (shrink)

BackgroundIn this study, medical errors are defined as unintentional patient harm caused by a doctor’s mistake. This topic, due to limited research, is poorly understood in Malaysia. The objective of this study was to determine the proportion of doctors intending to disclose medical errors, and their attitudes/perception pertaining to medical errors.MethodsThis cross-sectional study was conducted at a tertiary public hospital from July- December 2015 among 276 randomly selected doctors. Data was collected using a standardized and validated self-administered questionnaire intending to (...) measure disclosure and attitudes/perceptions. The scale had four vignettes in total two medical and two surgical. Each vignette consisted of five questions and each question measured the disclosure. Disclosure was categorised as “No Disclosure”, “Partial Disclosure” or “Full Disclosure”. Data was keyed in and analysed using STATA v 13.0.ResultsOnly 10.1% intended to disclose medical errors. Most respondents felt that they possessed an attitude/perception of adequately disclosing errors to patients. There was a statistically significant difference when comparing the intention of disclosure with perceived disclosures. Most respondents were in common agreement that disclosing an error would make them less likely to get sued, that minor errors should be reported and that they experienced relief from disclosing errors.ConclusionMost doctors in this study would not disclose medical errors although they perceived that the errors were serious and felt responsible for it. Poor disclosure could be due the fear of litigations and improper mechanisms/procedures available for disclosure. (shrink)

Social service professionals use a unique set of principles to guide their decisions within a broad and complex array of situations. Straight Talk about Professional Ethics provides readers with the guidelines that will help them make decisions in a manner that is clinically and ethically effective. This book explains the seven core concepts that guide ethical practice in the helping professions: self-determination, informed consent, competence, confidentiality and privacy, attention to conflicts of interest, maintenance of professional boundaries, and professionalism and (...) integrity. Developing a commitment to the ethics of a profession and an understanding of how those ethics apply to commonly occurring workplace situations is a major element of professional preparation. (shrink)

This article argues that one of our only pieces of evidence for Roman marriage between cinaedi, Juvenal's second satire, has been consistently misread and in fact describes a marriage between a cinaedus and a sex worker. It begins by providing the context for the passage in question and its traditional reading, and then demonstrates that the critical phrase siue hic recto cantauerat aere refers to financial, not erotic, exchanges. The article finally discusses the implications of this correction, which are far (...) more substantial than one might expect for a contentious ablative. (shrink)

While most business ethics texts focus exclusively on individual decision making--what should an individual do--this resource presents the whole business ethics story. Highly realistic, readable, and down-to-earth, it moves from the individual to the managerial to the organizational level, focusing on business ethics in an organizational context to promote an understanding of complex influences on behavior. The new Fifth Edition is the perfect text for students entering the workplace, those seeking to become professionals in training, communications, compliance, in addition to (...) chief ethics officers, corporate counsel, heads of human resources, and senior executives. (shrink)

It has been pointed out that Gettier case scenarios have deviant realizations and that deviant realizations raise a difficulty for the logical analysis of thought experiments. Grundmann and Horvath have shown that it is possible to rule out deviant realizations by suitably modifying the scenario of a Gettier-style thought experiment. They hypothesize further that the enriched scenario corresponds to the way expert epistemologists implicitly interpret the original one. However, no precise account of this implicit enrichment is offered, which makes the (...) proposal somewhat ad hoc. Drawing on pragmatic theory, I argue that the content of Grundmann and Horvath’s modified scenario corresponds to the default interpretation of the original scenario and that epistemological expertise is not required to access the deviance-proof interpretation. This Default Interpretation proposal offers thus a more general and independently motivated solution to the Problem of Deviant Realizations. (shrink)

The paper analyzes the two types of self-deception, usually labeled straight and twisted self-deception. In straight cases the self-deceptive belief coincides with the subject’s desire. In twisted cases, by contrast, the self-deceptive belief opposes the subject’s desire as in the example of Othello’s conviction of Desdemona’s infidelity. Are both these contrasting types of deceptive beliefs cases of SD? The argument of this paper shall answer this question in the positive, yet in different way from the unitary explanation of (...) straight and twisted SD proposed by Alfred Mele. The causal account of SD claims to provide a unitary and simple explanation for both straight and twisted SD, and considers such a unitary explanation as a specific virtue of the causal view. Within the same causal model, the difference between straight and twisted self-deception is explained by a difference in the motivational state that in twisted cases is dominated by emotions. The paper will critically examine this claim, and advance an alternative explanation based on a different view of self-deception where emotions play a role alongside wishes both in straight and in twisted case. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: New Frontiers for College Sex “I'm no queer!” The Paradox within Identity and Practice “You just might like it”: The Straight Sex Experiment Challenges to College Sex Experimentation Toward Alternative Notions of Sexual Experimentation.

Drawing upon feminist, queer, and crip phenomenology, this essay argues that the distinct temporality of the lived, stuttering body disturbs the normalized “choreography” of communication and thereby threatens the disabled speaker's recognition as a speaking subject. Examined through the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Alfred Schutz, the disabled speaking body is temporally “out of step” with the normalized bodily rhythms and pace of communicative practices in relation to both lived and objective time. Disciplined for his incalculable and therefore irrational bodily (...) choreography, the disabled speaker is foregrounded against an objective, instrumentally ordered world constituted by a disembodied and hegemonic “straight-masculine” time. Although dominant communicative choreographies may often be unlivable for disabled speakers, cripping communicative time rejects the cardinal value of futurity and invites interlocutors to gather in a noninstrumentalized and nonproductive present. This reshaping of communicative space enacts new modes of relationality and opens up an array of communicative futures suppressed or cut off by straight-masculine time. (shrink)

What is it for a speech act to be sincere? The most common answer amongst philosophers is that a speech act is sincere if and only if the speaker is in the state of mind that the speech act functions to express. However, a number of philosophers have advanced counterexamples purporting to demonstrate that having the expressed state of mind is neither necessary nor sufficient for speaking sincerely. One may nevertheless doubt whether these considerations refute the orthodox conception. Instead, it (...) may be argued, they expose other ways of elucidating sincerity in speech. “Sincerity in speech” is ambivalent between a number of different conceptions. Against this background this paper presents two alternative conceptions, viz., Sincerity as Spontaneity and Sincerity as Presenting Oneself as one takes Oneself to be and develops a third conception which we may call Sincerity as a Communicative Virtue. This conception emphasizes the speaker’s intention in communicating her attitudes and the need to be properly justified in saying what one does. (shrink)

David Gauthier stages a competition between two arguments, each of which purports to decide once for all transparent agents which is best, being a straight or being a constrained maximizer. The first argument, which he criticizes and rejects, is for the greater utility, on a certain weak assumption, of straight maximization for all transparent agents. The second, which he endorses, is for the greater utility on the same weak assumption of constrained maximization for all transparent agents.In Section I, (...) Gauthier’s account of constrained maximization is presented, and his use in the two arguments of the idea of choosing a disposition to choose actions is noted. Section II is about the unfortunate argument that Gauthier criticizes. This argument is flawed in ways additional to those he notices, but a less ambitious form of reasoning can, for individuals whose probabilities and values are right, be good for the greater expected utility of straight maximization. Section III takes up the argument that Gauthier endorses and maintains that it is wrong in a way specific to it as well as in ways closely related to all of the first argument’s noted flaws. An Appendix features a three-person prisoners’ dilemma and includes demonstrations of principal conclusions reached in the body of this paper. (shrink)