Tarasoff and the Duty to Protect

Summary

The Tarasoff I and Tarasoff II cases were decided by the California Supreme Court in 1974 and 1976, respectively. These cases involved the murder of a young woman by her ex-boyfriend, who had been a patient at a University counseling center. The parents of the young woman sued, alleging negligence. Tarasoff I set forth a “duty to warn” on the part of psychotherapists. Upon rehearing in Tarasoff II, the decision was upheld but modified. The court ruled that when a therapist determines, or should have determined, that a patient presents a serious danger of violence to another, the therapist has a “duty to protect” that other person. In this article, we address subsequent cases that have arisen under the “duty to protect” doctrine, and analyze some of the legal issues that these cases have raised.     

Challenges in Implementing the Responsibility to Protect: The Security Council Veto and the Need for a Common Ethical Approach

The Journal of Ethics - In 2005 the member states of the United Nations recognized a “responsibility to protect” (“R2P”) victims of mass atrocities such as genocide, war...     

The Tarasoff Warning and the Duty to Protect

Summary

Since the case of Tarasoff v. Regents of the University of California, mental health professionals have had an explicit legal duty to warn potential adult victims of violence. Subsequent case law expanded this standard to a broader duty-to-protect. Primary health care providers are increasingly treating psychiatric patients for whom the duty to protect is applicable. However, these providers are often unaware of the legal, ethical, and clinical issues involved. Assessment of violence risk should include demographic, psychiatric, and social dimensions. Interventions include notifying law enforcement authorities, potential victims, and possible use of psychiatric hospitalization to prevent aggressive behavior. The duty-to-protect as a standard-of-care has been applied to several other clinical situations, including impaired driving capacity, high-risk HIV behavior, and child sexual abuse. The article includes a step-by-step clinical protocol for evaluation and intervention in dangerous situations.     

Collective and Individual Duties to Protect the Environment

ABSTRACT Many environmental harms are produced by the consequences of too many people doing acts which taken together have collective bad consequences, e.g. overuse of an underground aquifer or acid rain ‘killing’ a lake. If such acts are wrong, what should a conscientious moral agent do in such circumstances? Examples of such harms have the general feature that they are produced by individual acts, which taken by themselves may be innocent and morally permissible, but which have disastrous consequences when too many people perform them. Philosophers once thought that the generalisation argument (GA), “If the consequences of everyone's doing acts of kind a are undesirable, then no one ought to do a,” was the appropriate principle to guide a conscientious moral agent in such circumstances. However, there has been considerable literature discussing the shortcomings of this principle. Nevertheless, a proper understanding of the GA suggests that whole groups of people have collective duties to prevent such harms, which duties then provide clues to individual duties to protect the environment. In this paper I consider some major deficiencies of the generalisation argument, the collective duty which follows from the salvageable part of the argument, and the distribution of individual duties a conscientious moral agent has with regard to such environmental harms as a consequence. These duties turn out to be peculiarly political in nature with the result that conscientious moral agents may have a number of political duties to protect the environment heretofore unrealised.     

The Duty to Protect: Privacy and the Public University

This article addresses the tensions between the sense of responsibility that university administrators feel to protect student privacy with the requirement to be accountable and transparent to the public. This discussion is placed in the context of the history and purpose of post-secondary education.     

Reforming England's Blasphemy Law to Protect the Individual

Using a framework of legal analysis proposed by Robert Post, this article examines the novel possibility of a reform in England's current criminal law of blasphemy. As previous attempts to include faiths other than Christianity faltered politically and theoretically, the article proposes a reform of the law to protect individual citizens and not religious groups. Different from incitement to racial or religious hatred legislation, this new offense would rest on what Joel Feinberg calls 'vicarious harm', the harm done directly to a person by deliberately wounding her sense of the sacred. The essay takes as given the propositions that equality before the law is desirable, a clear and ordered criminal offense is better than a vague criminal offense, and, as given specifically by the circumstances in England, a reverence for the transcendent sacred is privileged above other forms of reverence.     

Just War Theory and the IRA

ABSTRACT The Irish Republican Army (IRA) sometimes claim that their violent actions are sanctioned by traditional just war doctrine. To what extent is this true? To answer this question it is necessary to have a clear grasp of the principles of just war and of the situation in Northern Ireland to which they are to be applied. This is done in the first sections, and it is then argued that just war sanctions some kinds of violence in Northern Ireland but only those of direct self-defence. Violence outside the borders of Northern Ireland or for the sake of Irish Unity is not justifiable. Consequently the IRA must be viewed, in terms of just war theory at any rate, as in principle illegitimate, even though some of their actions are defensible. Finally it is suggested that non-violence, after the pattern of Gandhi, while not required by justice might nevertheless be preferable.     

Just Savings and the Difference Principle

The issue of just savings between generations presents an important,and for the most part unappreciated, problem for Rawls's theory ofdistributive justice. This paper argues that the just savingsprinciple, as Rawls formulates it in his recent work, standsin tension with the difference principle. When thought through,the just savings principle – and more precisely the foundationon which it rests – give us reason to reject the differenceprinciple in favor of a less egalitarian principle ofdistributive justice.     

职业压力对护患互动行为的影响

自编护士职业压力调查问卷及自编护患互动行为观察表,发放护士职业压力问卷159份,将被试着分为高,中,低三个压力组,对不同压力组护士护患互动行为进行观察,76.7％的护士认为护理工作是一种“较大”压力的职业,64.5％的护士认为自己承受“较大”或“极大”的职业压力.中等压力护士的护患互动行为最多,且为正性五动行为,因此证实了压力水平与工作绩效的倒U型关系,护士工作压力已影响到了其护患互动行为.由此可见,护理管理者要有针对性地缓解护士压力,才能提高优质护理服务质量.     

Introduction: symposium on Brooke Ackerly’s Just Responsibility: A Human Rights Theory of Global Justice

ABSTRACT

This symposium brings together normative and empirical scholars in dialogue on Brooke Ackerly’s innovative and compelling recent monograph, Just Responsibility. Contributors discuss the book’s distinctive grounded normative theory methodology, its arguments for how individuals can take appropriate responsibility for global structural injustices, and its potential for practical impact.     

Beliefs in a Just World and Reactions to Personal Deprivation

ABSTRACT We hypothesized that strong believers in a just world would be motivated to perceive personal deprivation as fair and to report little resentment, compared to weak believers in a just world In two experiments, subjects performed a computer task to earn points toward a goal that had desirable consequences In the first study, some subjects chose their computer task, whereas other subjects were randomly assigned to a task In the second study, some subjects decided not to practice the task before the test trial, whereas other subjects learned after the test trial that the experimenter had forgotten to give them the opportunity to practice All subjects received bogus feedback indicating that they did not earn any points The predicted relation between beliefs in a just world and perceived fairness was obtained in both experiments, especially within the choice condition of Experiments and the experimenter error condition of Experiments The results show that beliefs in a just world have implications not only for perceptions of others, but also for self-perception