安乐死立法为什么这样难

关于安乐死的争论由来已久,虽然目前全世界仅有荷兰等极少数国家通过了有关安乐死的法案,但安乐死实际已经在许多国家悄悄实施,越来越多的人对安乐死持肯定态度已成为不争的事实.贵州省贵阳市一个体行医者赵某还声称自己实施过几例"安乐死".我们实在不知道这种"违规"操作在现实中究竟有多少?这些事实提醒我们不应再就安乐死问题采取回避和视而不见的态度,而应正视它,并尽快制定出明确的法规,在认可安乐死的同时,规范安乐死的实施,作出符合人类理性的选择和符合人类法的精神决断.     

知情同意为什么难以实现

实施知情同意旨在有效地保护患者的合法权利不受侵犯 ,同时也是缓解医患关系 ,减少医疗纠纷的有效手段。但在实际临床实践中往往由于多种原因的制约和影响使其陷入困境 ,达不到预期的效果。从根本上讲 ,是由于医患双方在沟通理解上还存在问题 ,造成了医患之间的互不信任。     

Kantian Marriage and Beyond: Why It Is Worth Thinking about Kant on Marriage

Kant has famously argued that monogamous marriage is the only relationship where sexual use can take place “without degrading humanity and breaking the moral laws.” Kantian marriage, however, has been the target of fierce criticisms by contemporary thinkers: it has been regarded as flawed and paradoxical, as being deeply at odds with feminism, and, at best, as plainly uninteresting. In this paper, I argue that Kantian marriage can indeed survive these criticisms. Finally, the paper advances the discussion beyond marriage. Drawing on Kant's conception of friendship, I suggest that he might have overlooked the possibility of sex being morally permissible in yet another context.     

Critical Psychology: What It Is and What It Is Not

Critical psychology alerts us to the limitations of mainstream research in the discipline, and it promises to put 'social' issues on the agenda in the whole of psychology. A starting point of the stance of critical psychological research is that the claims that psychologists make about human beings often seem to vanish almost as quickly as they are discovered. People, a group or culture do not behave or think like the model would predict, and, more importantly, we find that our awareness, our reflection on a process described by a psychologist changes that process. It is in the nature of human nature to change, to change as different linguistic resources, social practices, and representations of the self become available, and for human nature to change itself as people reflect on who they are and who they may become. That means that any attempt to fix us in place must fail. But it will only fail in such a way that something productive emerges from it if we do something different, and one place to do something different is in psychology. We need to step back and look at the images of the self, mind and behaviour that psychologists have produced, the types of practices they engage in, and the power those practices, those 'technologies of the self' have to set limits on change. When we appreciate this, we can start to look at what psychologists might do instead as part of a genuinely critical approach.     

Animal Morality: What It Means and Why It Matters

It has been argued that some animals are moral subjects, that is, beings who are capable of behaving on the basis of moral motivations (Rowlands 2011, 2012, 2017). In this paper, we do not challenge this claim. Instead, we presuppose its plausibility in order to explore what ethical consequences follow from it. Using the capabilities approach (Nussbaum 2004, 2007), we argue that beings who are moral subjects are entitled to enjoy positive opportunities for the flourishing of their moral capabilities, and that the thwarting of these capabilities entails a harm that cannot be fully explained in terms of hedonistic welfare. We explore the implications of this idea for the assessment of current practices involving animals.     

Animal Pain: What It is and Why It Matters

The basis of having a direct moral obligation to an entity is that what we do to that entity matters to it. The ability to experience pain is a sufficient condition for a being to be morally considerable. But the ability to feel pain is not a necessary condition for moral considerability. Organisms could have possibly evolved so as to be motivated to flee danger or injury or to eat or drink not by pain, but by “pangs of pleasure” that increase as one fills the relevant need or escapes the harm. In such a world, “mattering” would be positive, not negative, but would still be based in sentience and awareness. In our world, however, the “mattering” necessary to survival is negative—injuries and unfulfilled needs ramify in pain. But physical pain is by no means the only morally relevant mattering—fear, anxiety, loneliness, grief, certainly do not equate to varieties of physical pain, but are surely forms of “mattering.” An adequate morality towards animals would include a full range of possible matterings unique to each kind of animal, what I, following Aristotle, call “telos”. Sometimes not meeting other aspects of animal nature matter more to the animal than does physical pain. “Negative mattering” means all actions or events that harm animals—from frightening an animal to removing its young unnaturally early, to keeping it so it is unable to move or socialize. Physical pain is perhaps the paradigmatic case of “negative mattering”, but only constitutes a small part of what the concept covers. “Positive mattering” would of course encompass all states that are positive for the animal. An adequate ethic for animals takes cognizance of both kinds. The question arises as to how animals value death as compared with pain. Human cognition is such that it can value long-term future goals and endure short-run negative experiences for the sake of achieving them. In the case of animals, however, there is no evidence, either empirical or conceptual, that they have the capability to weigh future benefits or possibilities against current misery. We have no reason to believe that an animal can grasp the notion of extended life, let alone choose to trade current suffering for it. Pain may well be worse for animals than for humans, as they cannot rationalize its acceptance by appeal to future life without pain. How can we know that animals experience all or any of the negative or positive states we have enumerated above? The notion that we needed to be agnostic or downright atheistic about animal mentation, including pain, because we could not verify it through experience, became a mainstay of what I have called “scientific ideology”, the uncriticized dogma taught to young scientists through most of the 20th century despite its patent ignoring of Darwinian phylogenetic continuity. Together with the equally pernicious notion that science is “value-free”, and thus has no truck with ethics, this provided the complete justification for hurting animals in science without providing any pain control. This ideology could only be overthrown by federal law. Ordinary common sense throughout history, in contradistinction to scientific ideology, never denied that animals felt pain. Where, then, does the denial of pain and other forms of mattering come from if it is inimical to common sense? It came from the creation of philosophical systems hostile to common sense and salubrious to a scientific, non-commonsensical world view. Reasons for rejecting this philosophical position are detailed. In the end, then, there are no sound reasons for rejecting knowledge of animal pain and other forms of both negative and positive mattering in animals. Once that hurdle is cleared, science must work assiduously to classify, understand, and mitigate all instances of negative mattering occasioned in animals by human use, as well as to understand and maximize all modes of positive mattering.     

Faculty Development in the 1990s: What It Is and Why We Can't Wait

Faculty development efforts are vitally needed in higher education today. Changes in expectations about the quality and assessment of undergraduate education, societal needs, technology, the student populations, and paradigms about teaching and learning argue for viable, credible, and creative programs. The author explores the nature and need for faculty development, discusses some faculty development options, and provides a selected number of resources.     

Racism: What It Is and What It Isn't

The words `racist' and `racism' have become so overused that they nowconstitute obstacles to understanding and interracial dialogue aboutracial matters. Instead of the current practice of referring tovirtually anything that goes wrong or amiss with respect to race as`racism,' we should recognize a much broader moral vocabulary forcharacterizing racial ills – racial insensitivity, racial ignorance,racial injustice, racial discomfort, racial exclusion. At the sametime, we should fix on a definition of `racism' that is continuouswith its historical usage, and avoids conceptual inflation. Isuggest two basic, and distinct, forms of racism that meet thiscondition – antipathy racism and inferiorizing racism. We should alsorecognize that not all racially objectionable actions are done froma racist motive, and that not all racial stereotypes are racist.     

Permission to Believe: Why Permissivism Is True and What It Tells Us About Irrelevant Influences on Belief

In this paper, I begin by defending permissivism: the claim that, sometimes, there is more than one way to rationally respond to a given body of evidence. Then I argue that, if we accept permissivism, certain worries that arise as a result of learning that our beliefs were caused by the communities we grew up in, the schools we went to, or other irrelevant influences dissipate. The basic strategy is as follows: First, I try to pinpoint what makes irrelevant influences worrying and I come up with two candidate principles. I then argue that one principle should be rejected because it is inconsistent with permissivism. The principle we should accept implies that it is sometimes rational to maintain our beliefs, even upon learning that they were caused by irrelevant influences.     

Demystifying Intuition: What It Is,What It Does,and How It Does It

Definitions of intuition are discussed and two working definitions are proposed. This is followed by a list of eight unresolved problems concerning intuition. It is suggested that all of these problems can be resolved by cognitive-experiential self-theory (CEST), a dual-process theory of personality according to which people process information with two systems, an experiential/intuitive system that is an associative learning system that humans share with other animals and a uniquely human verbal reasoning system. Intuition is considered to be a subsystem of the experiential/ intuitive system that operates by exactly the same principles and attributes but has narrower boundary conditions. The next section includes a presentation of the most relevant aspects of CEST with an emphasis on the operating rules and attributes of the experiential/intuitive system. This is followed by demonstrating how the operation of the experiential/intuitive system can resolve each of the unresolved problems concerning intuition. The article closes with a comparison of the advantages and disadvantages of the experiential/intuitive and rational/analytic systems. It is concluded that neither system is generally superior to the other, as each has important advantages and disadvantages.     

The World According to Men: It Is Hierarchical and Stereotypical

The present research was designed to test whether people who expect social relationships to be structured like pecking orders (interpersonal hierarchy expectation, IHE) are also prone to stereotyping and whether this relation is moderated by gender. In two studies, a total of 203 participants completed a self-report questionnaire on IHE (Interpersonal Hierarchy Expectation Scale, IHES) and either a questionnaire that measures a general tendency to stereotype (Acceptance of Stereotyping Questionnaire, ASQ, Study 1) or a projective measure that assesses the specific gender stereotype that low dominance positions are occupied by women and high dominance positions by men (Study 2). Results showed that both stereotyping measures were related to IHE, but only for men. Moreover, trait dominance did not mediate the relation between IHE and stereotyping.     

行善与作恶是自愿的吗——柏拉图、西塞罗、奥古斯丁的解答

行善与作恶是自愿的还是非自愿的?这个问题,无论是在伦理学家的理论探究中,还是在人们对现实生活的道德思考中,可以说是古已有之,迄今仍存.柏拉图(Plato,公元前427-347年)、西塞罗(Cicero,公元前106-43年)和奥古斯丁(Augustine,公元354-430年)对此问题的解答揭示了他们思想上的传承演进关系,并且具有重要的理论意义.     

Why a Big Mac Is a Good Mac: Associations between Affect and Size

Evaluation is a core topic of interest in both social psychology and linguistic theory, but there are relatively few social-cognitive studies examining the “online” consequences of affective metaphor. The experiments presented here sought to investigate such online consequences in relation to an understudied class of metaphors linking evaluation to size (i.e., “bigger is better”). Consistent with such metaphors, we found that positive (vs. negative) words were evaluated more quickly (Experiment 1) and accurately (Experiment 2) when presented in a larger (vs. smaller) font size. Parallel and opposite effects were found for negative words. A third experiment demonstrated that words presented in a larger font size were evaluated more favorably, thus extending size effects to evaluative judgments. Together, the studies converge on the importance of size metaphors for understanding evaluation from a social-cognitive perspective.     

What Invariance Is and How to Test for It

Causal assessment is the problem of establishing whether a relation between (variable) X and (variable) Y is causal. This problem, to be sure, is widespread across the sciences. According to accredited positions in the philosophy of causality and in social science methodology, invariance under intervention provides the most reliable test to decide whether X causes Y. This account of invariance (under intervention) has been criticised, among other reasons, because it makes manipulations on the putative causal factor fundamental for the causal methodology; consequently, the argument goes, the account is ill-suited to those contexts where manipulations are not performed, for instance, the social sciences. The article aims to extend the account of invariance (under intervention), in a way that manipulations on the putative causal factors are not methodologically fundamental, and yet invariance remains key for causal assessment both in experimental and non-experimental contexts.