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The Feyerabend lectures on natural right is Kant’s first clear statement of a view on punishment that balances retributivist and deterrence concerns. Kant’s earlier views, shown by other course lectures on ethics, were largely focused on deterrence. As Kant developed his view of human autonomy, he shifted his reasoning about punishment to include concern for the honor and dignity of the victim as well as the criminal, including right of criminals to be treated no worse than they treated others.
Workplace exclusion – often subtle and difficult to detect – significantly contributes to employee disengagement and turnover, costing US organizations over $1 trillion annually. This study examines how exclusionary behaviors (EBs) influence turnover intentions (TOIs) through disruption of psychological needs, using Rock’s SCARF model (Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, Fairness) and self-determination theory. A two-wave survey of full-time US employees (N = 277) assessed EB, SCARF-based need satisfaction, and TOI. Partial least squares structural equation modeling revealed that EB significantly undermines all five SCARF domains, but only fairness and status mediated the EB–TOI link. Certainty, autonomy, and relatedness did not have significant effects. These findings suggest turnover risk intensifies when employees feel unfairly treated or socially devalued, rather than merely disempowered or disconnected. The study advances theoretical integration between SCARF and SDT and offers practical guidance for managers seeking to reduce attrition by fostering inclusive, respectful, and psychologically safe workplace environments.
State consent is the primary mechanism by which international legal rules are generated and amended and by which states undertake legal obligations. The focus on state consent is celebrated for its strong protection of state sovereignty and for expressing the will of states. The main purpose of this article is to raise some doubts about this understanding of the value of state consent. I argue that far from protecting state sovereignty, unrestricted state consent can undermine it. I show that it is false to think that the virtually unlimited freedom to act protected by state consent safeguards state sovereignty in an environment in which every other state possesses the same unlimited freedom to act. I suggest one possible way of reconceiving state consent in line with existing trends in international law to increase the scope of nonconsensual mechanisms for making international legal rules.
The emerging awareness of self and other, especially with regard to compatible and conflicting aims, opens up dramatic new meanings for the toddler. Being able to be deliberately contrary gives the child experience with disruption and repair of the relationship and lets them explore the boundaries of appropriate behavior. The toddler also has a beginning capacity to control impulses and manage behavior, but doing this adequately requires continued scaffolding and guidance from parents. Meanings surrounding parental reliability brought forward from infancy impact how readily children now accept parental guidance. At the same time, clear, firm, and warm guidance can increase the child’s confidence regarding parents. This is how the transactional model works.
The issue of whether technology is inherently motivating for learners and teachers has often been discussed in the literature around computers and language learning. Yet, there is more to this relationship than initially meets the eye. This chapter outlines the ways in which symbolic power plays a part in both personal and institutional motivations for the adoption of technology. The chapter also looks at the way motivation is often credited as a key to success, though rarely with much empirical evidence. Finally, the article takes on a practitioner’s viewpoint to share several motivational techniques that can assist with practice and research.
Literacy is the ability to make use of visible language, and it is fundamental to language education. This chapter focuses on what teachers should know about digital technologies but begins with broad background and context related to multiliteracies, metaphors, and cultural dimensions of technology use. It then focuses on four key areas where teachers play an important role in the development of their students’ language and literacy abilities via technology: autonomy, mobility, creativity, and communities. It then discusses two controversial areas of current pedagogical research and practice: artificial intelligence and machine translation. It concludes with a call for greater attention to two additional areas highly relevant to language development: literacies related to film and digital communication in the context of study abroad.
To investigate levels of knowledge and attitudes towards advance healthcare directives among inpatient psychiatry service users in Ireland.
Methods:
A survey was completed among adult inpatient psychiatry service users (n = 47) in Tallaght University Hospital, Dublin.
Results:
Just over one in ten (11%) inpatient psychiatry service users had heard of advance healthcare directives. None had created an advance healthcare directive, but over a quarter (25.5%) had written down or verbally told someone what they would like to happen when they became unwell. When asked ‘if you were supported by your healthcare provider to make an advance healthcare directive, would you like to make one?’, over two thirds responded either ‘definitely yes’ (34%) or ‘probably yes’ (34%). On multi-variable testing, future willingness to make an advance healthcare directive was significantly associated with younger age but not with ethnicity, gender, education, employment status, or prior knowledge of advance healthcare directives. All respondents would involve someone else in making an advance healthcare directive. There was high confidence that healthcare practitioners would respect an advance healthcare directive (87%).
Conclusions:
There are high levels of interest in advance healthcare directives, but low levels of knowledge and use among inpatient psychiatry service users in Ireland. Our findings indicate a need for educational initiatives and resources to increase awareness. Such efforts could usefully focus especially on appropriate use of advance healthcare directives in psychiatric care and seek to bridge the gaps between evidence of benefit, legislative reform, and their use in mental healthcare.
What is persuasion and how does it differ from coercion, indoctrination, and manipulation? Which persuasive strategies are effective, and which contexts are they effective in? The aim of persuasion is attitude change, but when does a persuasive strategy yield a rational change of attitude? When is it permissible to engage in rational persuasion? In this paper, I address these questions, both in general and with reference to particular examples. The overall aims are (i) to sketch an integrated picture of the psychology, epistemology, and ethics of persuasion and (ii) to argue that there is often a tension between the aim we typically have as would-be persuaders, which is bringing about a rational change of mind, and the ethical constraints which partly distinguish persuasion from coercion, indoctrination, and manipulation.
In this chapter of Complex Ethics Consultations: Cases that Haunt Us, the author encounters a 50-year-old woman who is requesting her arm be amputated to alleviate her complex regional pain syndrome. This is not a usual indication for an amputation, but a surgeon is willing to offer the procedure. The author attempts to bring about clarity even in the face of uncertainty. Moral distress played a substantial role in the consultation.
In this chapter of Complex Ethics Consultations: Cases that Haunt Us, the author addresses the unassailable, sometimes unmentionable, common thread of deep-seated values and cultural or religious beliefs that serve as a core set of values that can define and certainly do surround us. In bioethics consultations, the process often serves as a deep dive into what is deeply embedded at the center of our behaviors, uncovering cultural, religious, or even family-held norms that underlie our individual sense of place and identity in the world around us. As ill health and disease destroy patients’ sense of autonomy and self-reliance, our core values become more apparent, and we cling more to them in efforts to exercise our will. This fact alone makes the reflection of these core values essential within ethics consultation process because they are defining for many of us. The commentary takes a deep dive into the chapter’s four haunting ethics cases centered around culture and religion and the ethical challenges that they reflect.
In this chapter of Complex Ethics Consultations: Cases that Haunt Us, the authors describe a 70-year-old man who is refusing all options available to him and expresses faith that his suffering must have some meaning since it was "God’s will." The team struggled with apparently inconsistent patient expressions of turning down surgery but insisting on attempted resuscitation. The case additionally highlights the uncertainty involved in medical decision making.
This chapter argues that the resurgence of strong religion has forced liberal states to find new answers to its effects on women’s rights. It discusses two examples. The first is recognition of the jurisdiction of private Muslim Sharia Tribunals to decide Muslim divorces and family disputes, and the second is intervention in Jewish divorce cases in which Jewish religious women find themselves anchored to their marriages due to their husbands’ refusal to grant them a religious divorce. The chapter offers a novel classification of religion–state relations, which sheds new light on the different solutions offered to such dilemmas and their compatibility with women’s rights and with religious freedom. It employs a comparative perspective on religion–state relations to distinguish between three approaches toward religion – nationalization, authorization, and privatization. It assesses the advantages and disadvantages of these approaches and claims that, contrary to liberal inclinations, measured state intervention that enables the liberal state to acknowledge the importance of religious belief in people’s lives, while at the same time protecting the rights of all its citizens, is required.
Social entrepreneurs face a dilemma. When making decisions about corporate giving, should they prioritize groups with whom they share some historical, national, or emotional tie or should they maximize the overall effectiveness of their contributions? According to a thesis I call “associationist priority,” the moral reasons to favor stakeholders with whom the entrepreneur shares an associative relationship trump the reasons to promote the impartial good. An important component of the argument for associationist priority is the premise that some nonvoluntary associations, including those between corporations and members of their communities, create special moral obligations. This essay argues against associationist priority by way of denying nonvoluntary associative obligations generally. This expands the moral discretion corporate social entrepreneurs enjoy both in how they give and to whom they give.
This paper focuses on the discursive connection between the notion of autonomy and the ageing-in-place policy approach, in a context of population aging and budgetary restraint. We argue that these central elements of the policy discourse on ageing represent a governance strategy that defines ageing in place as the prevailing standard for ageing well. Through an analysis of ageing policy documents released by the Québécois government between 2012 and 2023, this paper shows a disconnect between national policy frameworks and the reality of ageing in place. The issue of ageing in place is strongly bound up with the idea of autonomy, which is mainly expressed in terms of responsibility and freedom of choice, while its implementation overlooks the social structural determinants of individual autonomy and their impact on older people’s opportunities and processes of ageing in place.
Good states want to increase the well-being of their citizens, and act to do this. Insofar as state efforts constrain action for the sake of well-being, however, there is a danger that these constraints will limit liberty in a way that actually undercuts the individual achievement of well-being. If we limit liberty in order to bring us to one desirable state (say, good health) that doesn’t necessarily increase well-being if the loss of liberty in itself diminishes well-being. However, when we consider the three major theories of well-being, hedonism, desire-satisfaction, and objective list theories, we see that there is nothing in the loss of liberty that necessarily diminishes well-being at all. It depends on what that loss brings about. Sometimes liberties make us better off, but it depends on the specific liberty and what it contributes. There is nothing about loss of liberty per se that does us any harm.
In law and scholarship, natural rights are associated more often with libertarian theories than theories of natural law. This chapter contrasts the two models of natural rights. Natural law-based natural rights rely on the interest theory of rights, not will theories. In natural law theories, autonomy is subordinate to rational flourishing and not a good on its own. Natural law theories make relevant the consequences on people of structuring rights in different ways. And in natural law theories political communities may accord broader rights to their members than to outsiders. The chapter illustrates the jus abutendi or right to destroy, the trespass case State v. Shack, doctrines about the acquisition of captured wild animals and whales, and the Native American property case Johnson v. M’Intosh.
The commonest view on the essential moral nature of manipulation is that manipulation is pro tanto wrong: it is wrong as such but, given countervailing considerations, can be all-things-considered morally justified. The argument in this chapter, in contrast, is that manipulation is not intrinsically morally bad. This claim has never been argued for systematically. Reviewing the most probable bad-making features associated with manipulation shows that none of them is necessarily exhibited by it. The chapter then lays out a broad phenomenological description of the many positive contributions manipulation makes to human life. This reveals manipulation as an indispensable “social lubricant” and an element of the good life for people. The main moral conclusions of this review are (a) that manipulation is (not only not necessarily bad, but) not even typically bad. And (b) that rational choosers “behind a veil of ignorance” would choose a society where certain kinds of (mutually enjoyable or prosocial) manipulation are part of the ordinary repertoire. This suggests, in turn, that manipulation does not necessarily disrespect the autonomy of persons – since they choose to be subjected to it. This constitutes a new argument against the charge that manipulation disrespects autonomy.
Karen Bauer offers a comprehensive review of the Islamic moral framework as outlined in the Qur’an, situating Islamic gender norms within this context. The chapter demonstrates how these norms support a hierarchical structure that also emphasizes fairness.
This article examines whether artificial intelligence (AI)-driven harm can be classified as moral or natural evil, or whether a new category – artificial evil – is needed. Should AI’s harm be seen as a product of human design, thus maintaining moral responsibility for its creators, or whether AI’s autonomous actions resemble natural evil, where harm arises unintentionally? The concept of artificial evil, combining elements of both moral and natural evil, is presented to better address this dilemma. Just as AI is still a form of intelligence (albeit non-biological), artificial evil would still be evil in the sense that it results in real harm or suffering – it is just that this harm is produced by AI systems rather than by nature or human moral agents directly. The discussion further extends into the realm of defence or theodicy, drawing parallels with the Free Will Defence, questioning if AI autonomy may be justified even if it results in harm, much like human free will. Ultimately, the article calls for a re-evaluation of our ethical frameworks and glossary of terms to address the emerging challenges of AI autonomy and its moral implications.
The Cambridge Companion to Women and Islam provides a comprehensive overview of a timely topic that encompasses the fields of Islamic feminist scholarship, anthropology, history, and sociology. Divided into three parts, it makes several key contributions. The volume offers a detailed analysis of textual debates on gender and Islam, highlighting the logic of classical reasoning and its enduring appeal, while emphasizing alternative readings proposed by Islamic feminists. It considers the agency that Muslim women exhibit in relation to their faith as reflected in women's piety movements. Moreover, the volume documents how Muslim women shape socio-political life, presenting real-world examples from across the Muslim world and diaspora communities. Written by an international team of scholars, the Companion also explores theoretical and methodological advances in the field, providing guidance for future research. Surveying Muslim women's experiences across time and place, it also presents debates on gender norms across various genres of Islamic scholarship.