HOW SCIENCE CAN HELP RELIGION BENEFIT SOCIETY

Abstract. Modern science has given us a revolutionary new understanding of the close interrelationship and interdependence of humans not only with all other humans but with all other living species and with the nonliving elements of the geosphere and the rest of the universe. This new understanding can provide a basis for new understandings of (1) the basic nature of religion, (2) the basic principles of major world religious traditions, and (3) the basic principles of religious ethics. The new understanding of religious ethics will involve a better understanding of our rights and responsibilities, as individuals and groups, with respect to other individuals and groups of humans, other living species, and the nonliving universe. This improved understanding will benefit not only human individuals and human societies, local and global, but also local and global ecosystems.     

经济平等的三重维度

我们可从权利平等、机会平等、结果平等三个维度来具体分析经济关系中的平等问题。经济关系中的平等问题需要在发挥市场的基础作用和国家的积极干预之间才可能找到解决问题的最佳途径。     

The Difference Between Lonely Old Ladies and CCTV Cameras: A Response to Ryberg

This article considers the question of whether it is meaningful to speak of privacy rights in public spaces, and the possibility of such rights framing the basis for regulating or restricting the use of surveillance technologies such as closed circuit television (CCTV). In particular, it responds to a recent article by Jesper Ryberg that suggests that there is little difference between being watched by private individuals and CCTV cameras, and instead argues that state surveillance is qualitatively different from (and more problematic than) surveillance by ‘lonely old ladies’.

论医务人员在医疗事故技术鉴定过程中的法律地位

目前,医疗事故技术鉴定过程中忽视了医务人员应有的地位。从法律规定和程序正义、当事人理论等方面明确了医务人员在鉴定中的法律地位。论述了医务人员应当是医疗事故技术鉴定的当事人,其在鉴定中享有当事人的权利和义务,这对保护医务人员的合法权益有着重要意义。     

Understanding of the current police caution (England and Wales)

The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 (England and Wales) modified suspects' right to silence during police questioning and required a new police caution. The current 37-word caution was introduced after it was found that a proposed 60-word draft version was too complex. The results of the present study show that, although more succinct, the current caution is no easier to explain. Even under optimal conditions, when the participants could focus on each sentence in turn, only 1 in 10 of the general population (n=15), 6 in 10 of A-level students preparing for university (n=72) and 9 in 10 police officers (n=21) demonstrated their understanding by explaining all three sentences correctly. For all groups, the difficulties were more marked when the caution was presented in its entirety, as would happen in real life. The complexity of the caution has serious implications for suspects in police detention. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Rethinking Accountability in the Context of Human Rights

Within liberal democratic theory, ‘democratic accountability’ denotes an aggregative method for linking political decisions to citizens’ preferences through representative institutions. Could such a notion be transferred to the global context of human rights? Various obstacles seem to block such a transfer: there are no ‘world citizens’ as such; many people in need of human rights are not citizens of constitutional democratic states; and the aggregative methods that are supposed to sustain the link are often used in favour of nation-state strategic action rather than human rights. So what could accountability mean in relation to human rights? This article argues that discourse theory offers resources for approaching these problems and for rethinking a normative notion of accountability in relation to human rights. It is suggested that accountability should link political decisions to universal agreements through global rights institutions and that the link should be sustained by deliberative rather than aggregative procedures.     

The protection of patients’ rights in clinical trials

The Helsinki Declaration is a very important document regarding the protection of patients’ rights in clinical trials and one of the fundamental sources of operational principles for every ethics committee. Although they have been updated, the international guidelines for ethics committees continually fail to address certain issues pertaining to the protection of patients’ rights in clinical trials. These issues include, most significantly, the method of electing ethics committees (a free, secret ballot should be preferred to direct appointment), the avoidance of conflict of interest during the election of ethics committee members, and the necessary insurance coverage for the participants of clinical trials. Polish law should, on the other hand, be developed in such way as to not limit the effectiveness of ethics committees in protecting patients’ rights in clinical trials. The ideal solution would be to draft a uniform law concerning not only clinical trials, but all medical experiments. The opinions of experts who have been reviewing medical research projects for several years may prove to be especially valuable in this setting. This paper was presented at the 6th International Bioethics Conference on the subject of ‘The Responsible Conduct of Basic and Clinical Research’, held in Warsaw, Poland, 3–4 June 2005. The author is Chairman, Bioethics Committee of the Warsaw Regional Chamber of Physicians and Dentists.     

罗尔斯“分配的正义观”与诺齐克“持有的正义观”对照研究

分配正当性的根据是什么 ?人的基本权利与平等的要件如何分配才是符合正义的 ?罗尔斯和诺齐克从两个向度上对此作了深入研究。罗尔斯从平等的权利出发 ,主张用“公平正义的两个原则”来取代功利主义 ,认为除非有充足理由证明应当不平等 ,否则就应当平等。并要求依据“公平的正义原则”分配公共资源和自由体系 ;诺齐克从人的不可剥夺的权利出发 ,认为除非有充足理由证明应当平等 ,否则就应当不平等 ,通过“资格”理论确立“持有”的正当性。在功利主义、财产权、国家的作用、自由平等、分配模式和社会稳定的意义等方面 ,罗尔斯与诺齐克的观点也各有契合与对立。     

Policing,profiling and discrimination law: US and European approaches compared

Counter-terrorism officials in the USA and the UK responded to the events of 11 September 2001 and 7 July 2005 with an increasing resort to the use of ‘intelligence-led policing’ methods such as racial and religious profiling. Reliance on intelligence, to the effect that most people who commit a certain crime have a certain ethnicity, can lead to less favourable treatment of an individual with that ethnicity because of his membership in that group, not because of any act he is suspected or known to have committed. This paper explains the context in which intelligence-led policing flourishes, and how this discussion contributes to the profiling debate in both the USA and the UK, and then sets out two key contentions. First, we argue that Article 14 ECHR as applied under the UK Human Rights Act has a more protective, and less ‘prosecutorial’, conception of discrimination than has the US Equal Protection Clause, meaning that judges need not find a discriminatory motive to find that discrimination has occurred. Second, we contend that Article 14 provides the judiciary with the key tool of proportionality, which, when properly applied, makes it harder for discrimination to stand up to scrutiny.     

Generation Units and the Student Protest Movement in the United States: An Intra- and Intergenerational Analysis

The American student protest movement provides exceptional opportunities to observe how formative political experiences can affect intragenerational cleavages over the adult life span and how they may reflect on intergenerational continuities. Long-term national panel data from the high school class of 1965 and data from their parents and offspring are used here to exploit these opportunities. The results show that a sharp rift in political participation and attitudes emerged between protesters and non-protesters during the protest era, a rift that persists into mid-life and one that testifies to the conceptual utility of generation units. Continuities across the three lineage generations are demonstrated by the moderate similarities in the ideological and participative orientations that are associated with the protest status of the student generation.