Do doctors and other medical staff have an obligation to treat those who need their help? This paper assumes no legal or contractual obligations but attempts to discover whether there is any general moral obligation to treat those in need. In particular the questions of whether or not the obligation that falls on medical staff is different from that of others and of whether doctors are more bla...

Even though widely recognized as one of the core disciplines of international economic law, the interpretation of national treatment (“NT”) obligation has been long marked by legal indeterminacy. More recently, a series of landmark cases, including US—Clove Cigarettes, US—Tuna II (Mexico), US—COOL and EC—Seal Products, have fundamentally reshaped our collective understanding of the NT obligatio...

In the third of a series of articles examining ethical issues in primary care research, we argue that family doctors, when considering what they ought to do in relation to research, have a positive obligation to participate in research and that one means of discharging this obligation is to collaborate in research studies by aiding recruitment. We offer three arguments in support of this obliga...

According to Fox’s (2000) recent history of the Great Depression in Victoria, efforts to assist the unemployed were characterised by an overarching desire to ‘remoralise’ unemployed people and promote a ‘reinvigorated work ethic’. Book reviewer, Brian Dickey summarises Fox’s argument saying that ‘the notion that the unemployed had lost their moral standing and hence their rights to full partici...

We present a qualitative, decision-theoretic account for statements of the form: "You ought to do A, if C". We show that adding a qualitative causal theory (in the form of a graph) as part of an epistemic state is sufficient to facilitate the analysis of action sequences, their consequences, their interaction with observations, their expected utilities and, hence, the assertability of condition...