同性恋的社会伦理评价

按照WHO的健康定义与Engel疾病模式,同性恋仍然是一种疾病;也仍然是一种性偏离或性变异。同性恋如同其他性行为或性变异一样,必须受到社会控制和道德控制。而男同性恋对艾滋病传播的负面影响绝不能忽视。     

手术同意书的相关法律问题

医患双方都非常重视手术同意书,从法理角度分析,手术同意书是患者知情同意权利和医方告知义务的体现;符合民事法律要件的合法有效的手术同意书,证明了医患之间告知与知情同意权的实现.对手术同意书的法律性质及法律效力进行探究,有助于维护医患双方的合法权利.     

完善我国基本医疗保障制度的法律思考

由于公民社会保障制度在具体立法、司法存在立法不健全、层次低、法律实施机制不健全等问题,特别是基本医疗保障法律体系需进一步完善.制定和健全基本医疗保险制度基本法是医疗体制改革、社会主义市场经济体制必然要求.     

语言理解中主体职业特征与动作表征的激活

运用句-配范式以及句子理解与身体反应相互作用的实验范式,探讨 “做某事的是某人”与“某人做某事”两类句式理解过程中主体职业特征与动作表征的激活。结果发现,在“做某事的是某人”句子理解过程中,主体的职业特征和动作表征得到了激活,但在“某人做某事”句子理解过程中,主体职业特征表征和动作表征只有其中一种表征处于匹配状态时,另一种表征才能得到明显的激活。这表明,句子理解过程中,主体职业特征表征得到了激活,而主体职业特征表征与动作执行器表征的同时激活则受到对方匹配情况的影响,知觉符号理论得到了进一步的证明。     

伦理与法律对冲下的代孕思考

人类辅助生殖技术的进步使代孕成为可能,因女性子宫机能障碍而丧失生育能力的夫妇可以借别人的子宫获得与自己有遗传关系的子女,因而代孕有其社会必然性,合理的非商业化的代孕渐被多数国家接受并立法。我国禁止任何形式的代孕,但是近年来国内不少地区代孕现象屡见报端。通过对代孕现象的探讨分析,建议应从对社会和个人有利的原则出发,制定相应的伦理规范和严格的法律政策,允许代孕技术的合理应用。     

A behavioral account of compensation awarding decisions

Suppose an individual loses an irreplaceable object and someone else is at fault. How much should he be compensated? Normatively, compensation should equal the value (utility) to the victim. Our experiments demonstrate that compensation decisions often ignore value and are instead based on cost (how much the victim originally paid for the item) except when cost is zero. For example, we found that people awarded $200 for a destroyed item worth $500 to the victim if the cost was $200; however, they awarded $500 if the original cost was zero. We explain these phenomena in terms of lay scientism (the tendency to base decisions on objective factors) and discuss how the prevalent cost‐based compensation rule hurts consumer welfare. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Decisions about a crime: downward and upward counterfactuals

Deciding about people’s responsibility, intentions and need for punishment is particularly hard and it may be often associated with counterfactual thinking, which refers to the creation of mental alternatives to actual events. Ninety-three participants were asked to generate downward or upward counterfactuals regarding a given criminal event and, then, to give judgments about defendant’s predictability, responsibility, intentionality and punishment. Results showed that downward counterfactuals had led people to judge the event less intentional, the defendant less responsible and, therefore, to give him a less severe punishment (vice versa for upward). The relationship between counterfactuals and intentionality judgments was partially mediated by the perceived defendant’s predictability of the negative outcomes. Finally, downward counterfactuals were linked to a greater focus on the context (external factors), whereas upward counterfactuals on the defendant/victim’s behaviours (internal factors). Findings were discussed considering both theoretical decision-making models and applications on the judicial field.     

Placebo in the investigation of psychotropic drugs,especially antidepressants

The paper presents major ethical, legal and methodological problems related to the use of placebo in mental disorders, especially in depression. It is pointed out that although authoritative groups of experts and numerous publications in the field of psychopharmacology indicate advisability of the double blind design with placebo in clinical trials of antidepressants, in recent years there have been more and more voices questioning legitimacy of this method. Objections of an ethical nature are raised, and reliability of this approach is put into doubt from the methodological viewpoint. These issues are discussed in more detail in the paper. Available alternative solutions should be implemented in psychotropic drug studies. The author shares these objections and doubts of an ethical nature, and believes that the placebo procedure is not a necessity in clinical trials of antidepressants. An earlier version of this paper was presented at an international conference, “Placebo: Its Action and Place in Health Research Today,” held in Warsaw, Poland on 12–13 April, 2003.     

Possibilities and Limits of Self-reflection in the Teaching Profession

Reflection seems today to be highest fashion ineducation, especially in discussions aboutteacher education and the teaching profession.This has created the paradoxical situation that reflection is often used in an unreflectedmanner. Furthermore, this discovery ofreflection is not supported by earlierresearch. In philosophy, however, reflectionhas always played a central role.The purpose of this study is to investigate thepossibilities and limits of self-reflection forthe teaching profession by relating the problemto three masters of philosophy of reflection,i.e., René Descartes, Immanuel Kant andEdmund Husserl. In this way it is hoped that itwill be possible to learn from specialists onreflection for the teaching profession. Thelessons do not, however, need to be exclusivelypositive. Also from deficiencies and mistakesit is possible to learn.     

What can we learn by looking for the first code of professional ethics?

The first code of professional ethics must: (1)be a code of ethics; (2) apply to members of a profession; (3) apply to allmembers of that profession; and (4) apply only to members of that profession. The value of these criteria depends on how we define “code”, “ethics”, and “profession”, terms the literature on professions has defined in many ways. This paper applies one set of definitions of “code”, “ethics”, and “profession” to a part of what we now know of the history of professions, there by illustrating how the choice of definition can alter substantially both our answer to the question of which came first and (more importantly) our understanding of professional codes (and the professions that adopt them). Because most who write on codes of professional ethics seem to take for granted that physicians produced the first professional code, whether the Hippocratic Oath, Percival’s Medical Ethics, the 1847 Code of Ethicsof the American Medical Association (AMA), or some other document, I focus my discussion on these codes. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.