Risk and Trust in Public Health: A Cautionary Tale

The leading ethical position on placebo-controlled clinical trials is that whenever proven effective treatment exists for a given condition, it is unethical to test a new treatment for that condition against placebo. Invoking the principle of clinical equipoise, opponents of placebo-controlled trials in the face of proven effective treatment argue that they (1) violate the therapeutic obligation of physicians to offer optimal medical care and (2) lack both scientific and clinical merit. We contend that both of these arguments are mistaken. Clinical equipoise provides erroneous ethical guidance in the case of placebo-controlled trials, because it ignores the ethically relevant distinction between clinical trials and treatment in the context of clinical medicine and the methodological limitations of active-controlled trials. Placebo controls are ethically justifiable when they are supported by sound methodological considerations and their use does not expose research participants to excessive risks of harm.     

道德哲学建基在错误之上吗？

责任或义务是伦理学中最基本的概念。它是客观的、绝对自明的,因而是不可定义的、无需推理的。人们既不能从别的非伦理的事实或非伦理的属性中推出义务,也不能把它归约为任何其它伦理属性。以往的各种伦理理论的错误在于用一些其它伦理属性来规定责任,从而使其丧失了绝对客观的和自明的意义,其结果是使伦理学长期陷入困境之中。     

Logical dynamics of some speech acts that affect obligations and preferences

In this paper, illocutionary acts of commanding will be differentiated from perlocutionary acts that affect preferences of addressees in a new dynamic logic which combines the preference upgrade introduced in DEUL (dynamic epistemic upgrade logic) by van Benthem and Liu with the deontic update introduced in ECL II (eliminative command logic II) by Yamada. The resulting logic will incorporate J. L. Austin’s distinction between illocutionary acts as acts having mere conventional effects and perlocutionary acts as acts having real effects upon attitudes and actions of agents, and help us understand why saying so can make it so in explicit performative utterances. We will also discuss how acts of commanding give rise to so-called “deontic dilemmas” and how we can accommodate most deontic dilemmas without triggering so-called “deontic explosion”.     

Intuition, Inference, and Rational Disagreement in Ethics

This paper defends a moderate intuitionism by extending a version of that view previously put forward and responding to some significant objections to it that have been posed in recent years. The notion of intuition is clarified, and various kinds of intuition are distinguished and interconnected. These include doxastic intuitions and intuitive seemings. The concept of inference is also clarified. In that light, the possibility of non-inferential intuitive justification is explained in relation to both singular moral judgments, which intuitionists do not take to be self-evident, and basic moral principles, which they typically do take to be self-evident in a sense explicated in the paper. This explanation is accomplished in part by drawing some analogies between moral and perceptual judgments in the light of a developmental conception of knowledge. The final section of the paper presents a partial account of rational disagreement and indicates how the kind of intuitionist view defended can allow for rational disagreement between apparent epistemic peers.

Transnational families,remittances, cieng and obligation for Dinka women in Australia

This paper explores the narratives of a group of Dinka women living in Australia with a focus on the emotional underpinnings of remittance sending to family in Africa. The sending of remittances is shaped by the Dinka relational ontology of cieng which obliges those who have migrated to Australia to financially support relatives left behind in Africa. Through exploring the ‘emotional content of obligation’ (Clark, 1990) this paper considers how cieng and remittance sending can result in feelings including shame and helplessness but also in reinforcing a sense belonging. In addition, this paper argues that while there is continuity in cieng despite the global dispersal of Dinka people, there has been a change in the degree and type of obligation placed on people through cieng.     

Obligation, contracts, and negotiation: Outlining an approach

In this paper I outline an ambitious project to incorporate into a normative language the tools necessary for an account of hierarchical organizations and the changing roles and obligations of agents within them, and an analogous account of contracts and the changing roles and obligations of agents who are parties to contracts. While such an enriched language is likely to be considerably more complex than those most often considered for deontic logic, it promises for that very reason to enlarge considerably the range of normative problems that can be accurately expressed and effectively addressed.     

Moral phenomenology and moral intentionality

This paper distinguishes between two senses of the term “phenomenology”: a narrow sense (drawn from Nagel) and a broader sense (drawn from Husserl). It claims, with particular reference to the moral sphere, that the narrow meaning of moral phenomenology cannot stand alone, that is, that moral phenomenology in the narrow sense entails moral intentionality. The paper proceeds by examining different examples of the axiological and volitional experiences of both virtuous and dutiful agents, and it notes the correlation between the phenomenal and intentional differences belonging to these experiences. The paper concludes with some reflections on how the focus on the broader sense of “phenomenology” serves to provide a more precise sense of what we might mean by “moral phenomenology.”

Love,duty and burden: Mothers' and daughters' engagements with familial obligations

The proliferation of transnational migration has attracted scholars from diverse disciplines to investigate the experiences of migrants from different cultures. While cultural anthropologists are trained to understand the subjects' emic perspectives, other social scientists who grapple with cultural diversity tend towards applying an etic analytical lens, without deeper engagement with given cultural logics. In order to fully overcome the conceptual marginalisation of cultures in our discussion of family relationships and intimacy, cultural specificities need to be more thoroughly taken into account. This article adds to the discussion of diverse forms of culturally specific intimacy by exploring familial obligations undertaken by Tongan female migrants and their second-generation daughters in Australia. Ethnographic case studies examine their emotions in relation to love and the feelings of burden and duty in practices of the creation and maintenance of intimate relationships both in proximity and at a distance. Deep engagements with Tongan cultural concepts and their emic viewpoints enable this article to challenge the simplistic view that envisages first generation migrants as ‘traditional’ and their daughters as more ‘Westernised’ or ‘individualised’ along the scale of individualisation.