Bioethics has focused on the areas of individual ethical choices -- patient care -- or public policy and law. There are however, important arenas for ethical choices that have been overlooked. Health care is populated with intermediate arenas such as hospitals, nursing homes, hospices, and health care systems. This essay argues that bioethics needs to develop a language and concepts for institutional ethics. A first step in this direction is to think about institutional conscience.
Religious discussion of human organs and tissues has concentrated largely on donation for therapeutic purposes. The retrieval and use of human tissue samples in diagnostic, research, and education contexts have, by contrast, received very little direct theological attention. Initially undertaken at the behest of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission, this essay seeks to explore the theological and religious questions embedded in nontherapeutic use of human tissue.
Disagreement over the legitimacy of direct sterilization continues within Catholic moral debate, with painful and at times confusing ramifications for Catholic healthcare systems. This paper argues that the medical profession should be construed as a key moral authority in this debate, on two grounds. First, the recent revival of neo-Aristotelianism in moral philosophy as applied to medical ethics has brought out the inherently moral dimensions of the history and current practice of medicine.
Canadian Journal of Psychiatry. Revue Canadienne De Psychiatrie
Epistemology and ethics are fundamental disciplines to understanding the nature of the medical enterprise. Values of truth, goodness, faith and love dominate the knowledge and practise of medicine. Each epistemological model of truth (truth as useful, truth as correspondence to fact, and truth as coherence) has strengths and weaknesses in guiding us in the scientific method in medicine. Dialectic skills are also important epistemological tools in exploring truth in relationship to diagnosis and treatment.
After some exploration of caring as a socio-historical construct, the author examines the changing conception of caring in nursing between Florence Nightingale's day and our own. The place of the older and emergent meanings in the work of some of the recognized nursing theorists is critically examined. A distinction is drawn between a science for caring and a science of caring and some of the problems of conceptualizing and developing a science of caring are explored.
The present research examined the impact of everyday romantic goal strivings on women's attitudes toward science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). It was hypothesized that women may distance themselves from STEM when the goal to be romantically desirable is activated because pursuing intelligence goals in masculine domains (i.e., STEM) conflicts with pursuing romantic goals associated with traditional romantic scripts and gender norms.
Psychodynamic psychotherapy has evolved in the 30 years since John Nemiah was the author's mentor in the endeavor. It has always occupied an epistemologic position somewhere between the scientific standard of physics and the postmodern or poststructuralist view that the search for truth using language is totally futile.
A nonbusiness discipline can provide a useful framework for thinking about old problems in new ways. People who study management, for instance, freely borrow from many fields of science to theorize about organizational behavior and business strategy. Evolutionary psychology and biology are especially popular sources of inspiration. But should they be? Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has spent much of his career explaining science to the public.
Human societies have formalized instincts for compliance with reciprocal altruism in laws that sanction some aggression and not other aggression. Neuroscience makes steady advances toward measurements of various aspects of brain function pertinent to the aggressive behaviors that laws are designed to regulate. Consciousness, free will, rationality, intent, reality testing, empathy, moral reasoning, and capacity for self-control are somewhat subject to empirical assessment.
