The new South African constitution commits the government to guarantee "basic health services" for every child under 18. Primary health care for pregnant women and children under six and elements of essential primary health care have received priority. At present, there is little analysis of the moral considerations involved in making choices about more advanced or costly health care which may,...

A widely accepted component of any answer to the question 'What is it to do good medical ethics?' is the commitment to benefit people's health, in principlist terminology, 'beneficence'. This paper addresses deliberate maleficence and the cultural otherness with which it is associated, focusing on the activities of the serial killer Dr Harold Shipman. It finds an uncanny 'fit' between the norma...

In a 1996 American Educational Research Journal (AERJ) article, Deborah Ball and Suzanne Wilson (Ball & Wilson, 1996) made an argument for “integrity in teaching,” in which they framed integrity as the commitment to “fusing” the moral aspects of teaching with the intellectual. The central question they explored was how to deal with conflicts between the intellectual work of teaching content con...

Consider a committee that in the past has made a promise not to confiscate the profits from a foreign investor. After the investment has taken place, there is a material benefit if the committee decides to default on the earlier promise. But there are also some small moral costs for those who vote in favor of default. We show that in such situations small committees are more likely to default t...

Survey results show that the American public comes to the health care reform debate with ambivalent feelings and a relatively low base of specific knowledge. But Americans also hold a set of core values that will shape their response to various proposals for national change. These include (1) a moral commitment to the uninsured; (2) a desire to achieve personal peace of mind; (3) a lack of self...

At its most basic, the title of a medical doctor represents a commitment to engage with patients, helping and advising them to the best of one’s ability. When the physician also takes on the role of researcher, which responsibilities have the greater claim on his or her time? While the question of allocating time between the clinic and the laboratory can be personally stressful even in the best...

Time, the irrevocability of choice and commitment as well as the finality of death are central premises in modern moral and political thinking. This irreversibility is understood to reflect something about the organism, and something about the world. As culture comes to be mediated more and more by digital architectures in which time can be skipped, reversed, and begun again, it becomes importa...

In times of contagion, the key role of nurses brings fears, dangers, and unique demands. The ethics of such challenges need to be explored and understood. Using Callahan's framework for thinking ethically and Taylor's "worries" of modern life, the author elucidates some of the challenges and then argues that the current approach to pandemic ethics, with its reliance on moral reasoning, is insuf...

This paper provides a framework to analyse emergency liquidity assistance of central banks on financial markets in response to aggregate and idiosyncratic liquidity shocks. The model combines the microeconomic view of liquidity as the ability to sell assets quickly and at low costs and the macroeconomic view of liquidity as a medium of exchange that influences the aggregate price level of goods...