The Virtuous Tortoise

The epistemically virtuous clinician.

Today, modern Western medicine is facing a quality-of-care crisis that is undermining the patient-physician relationship. In this paper, a notion of the epistemically virtuous clinician is proposed in terms of both the reliabilist and responsibilist versions of virtue epistemology, in order to help address this crisis. To that end, a clinical case study from the literature is first reconstructe...

Independence and the Virtuous Community

The last tortoise

The UN used World Environment Day earlier this month to launch a report highlighting the problems facing the conservation and management of biodiversity in the face of the many assaults humans are making on the natural environment. The report — Dead Planet, Living Planet; Biodiversity and Ecosystem Restoration for Sustainable Development — highlights not only the preservation of natural ecosyst...

Sustainability: Virtuous or Vulgar?

Progress in understanding and achieving sustainability requires addressing it as both a scientific and an ethical issue. If sustainability is defined as “meeting human needs in a socially just manner without depriving ecosystems of their health,” most of the words in its definition are normative or value laden. Depending on how critical normative terms such as “human needs” and “ecosystem healt...

The Tortoise and the Hut

he men of old were born like the wild beasts. In woods, caves, and groves, they lived on food gathered in the fi elds, " wrote Marcus Vitruvius Pollio more than 2,000 years ago in his well-known account of classical traditions in architecture. One day, a dense group of trees, agitated by winds and storms, caught fi re. Humans nearby ran from the fl ames but then, attracted to the warmth, began ...