John Van

This paper challenges a pervasive, if not always explicit assumption of the present state of theorising in business ethics. This is the idea that a workable theory of organizational ethics must provide a unified perspective on its subject matter. In this paper we will sketch the broad outlines of an alternative understanding of business ethics, which focuses on constraints on corporate conduct that cannot reasonably be rejected. These constraints stem from at least three different levels or spheres of social reality, i.e. the preconditions of a well-ordered society, the internal morality of economic activity and the preconditions of autonomous agency.

Recent accounts on the global workspace theory suggest that consciousness involves transient formations of functional connections in thalamo-cortico-cortical networks. The level of connectivity in these networks is argued to determine the state of consciousness. Emotions are suggested to play a role in shaping consciousness, but their involvement in the global workspace theory remains elusive. In the present study, the role of emotion in the neural workspace theory of consciousness was scrutinized by investigating, whether unconscious and conscious display of emotional compared to neutral facial expressions would differentially modulate EEG coherence. EEG coherence was measured by means of computing an average EEG coherence value between the frontal, parietal, and midline scalp sites. Objective awareness checks evidenced that conscious identification of the masked facial expressions was precluded. Analyses revealed reductions in EEG coherence in the lower frequency range for the masked as compared to unmasked neutral facial expressions. Crucially, a decline in EEG coherence was not observed for the emotional facial expressions. In other words, the level of EEG coherence did apparently vary as a function of awareness, but not when emotion was involved. The current finding suggests that EEG coherence is modulated by unconscious emotional processes, which extends common views on the global workspace architecture of consciousness

The practice of coercive measures in psychiatry is controversial. Although some have suggested that it may be acceptable if patients are a danger to others or to themselves, others committed themselves to eliminate it. Ethical, legal and clinical considerations become more complex when the mental incapacity is temporary and when the coercive measures serve to restore autonomy. We discuss these issues, addressing the conflict between autonomy and beneficence/non-maleficence, human dignity, the experiences of patients and the effects of coercive measures. We argue that an appeal to respect autonomy and/or human dignity cannot be a sufficient reason to reject coercive measures. All together, these ethical aspects can be used both to support and to reject a non-seclusion approach. The total lack of controlled trials about the beneficial effects of coercive measures in different populations however, argues against the use of coercive measures

Non-treatment decisions concerning demented patients are complex: in addition to issues concerning the health of patients, ethical and legal issues are involved. This paper describes a method for the development of a guideline that clarifies the steps to be taken in the decision making process whether to forgo curative treatment of pneumonia in psychogeriatric nursing home patients.The method of development consisted of seven steps. Step 1 was a literature study from which ethical, juridical and medical factors concerning the patient's health and prognosis were identified. In step 2, a questionnaire was sent to 26 nursing home physicians to determine the relative importance of these factors in clinical practice. In a meeting of nine experienced physicians , the factors identified in step 2 were confirmed by most of these professionals. To prevent the final guideline being too directive, a concept guideline that included ethical and legal aspects was designed in the form of a “checklist of considerations” . Experts in the fields of nursing home medicine, ethics and law reviewed and commented on the concept guideline . The accordingly adapted “checklist of considerations” was tested in a pilot study , after which all experts endorsed the checklist .The resulting “checklist of considerations” structures the decision making process according to three primary domains: medical aspects, patient's autonomy, and patient's best interest.

Slow euthanasia or a good palliative intervention?There are many ways in which doctors influence the circumstances and/or the timing of a patient’s death. Some of these are accepted as normal medical practice—for instance, when a disproportional treatment is forgone, others are considered tolerable only under strict conditions or even intolerable, such as non-voluntary active euthanasia. A relatively new phenomenon in the ethical discussion on end-of-life decisions is terminal sedation. Terminal sedation is used in patients with terminal illnesses where normal medical treatments cannot relieve severe symptoms such as pain and agitation, and no option is left but to take away the perception of these symptoms. Often, the decision to start terminal sedation is accompanied by the decision to forgo the provision of artificial nutrition and hydration in these patients. In The Netherlands, terminal sedation was estimated to be applied in 4–10% of all deaths in 2001.1 The combination of these two decisions have made the moral status of terminal sedation the subject of fierce ethical debates. Is it slow euthanasia2,3 or is it a good palliative intervention that should be sharply distinguished from euthanasia?4,5 One of the characteristics of this debate is that it is a very confused one: people disagree about the meaning of the term, the appropriateness of it and, of course, about the conditions under which it would be morally justified. As a matter of fact, these three discussions are deeply connected: as is often the case, a discussion about terms is a discussion about norms in disguise.The first observation to be made is that many seemingly descriptive definitions of terminal sedation contain normative claims. Examples of this are definitions of terminal sedation in which only …

In April 2002 a new law regarding euthanasia came into effect in the Netherlands. This law holds that euthanasia remains a criminal offence unless it is performed by a physician who acts according to six specified rules of due care and reports the case to a review committee. The six rules of due care are similar to those of the previous regulation and are largely based on jurisprudence. Completely new, however, is the article concerning a competent patient who has written an advance directive requesting euthanasia under certain circumstances. The law stipulates that a physician may act according to that written request, as long as he or she fulfils all other rules of due care. The author defends the view that these requests are neither feasible nor ethically justifiable, and presents both moral and practical arguments for this, claiming that for consistency reasons one cannot act on the basis of a written statement and fulfil the other rules of due care at the same time. The author also examines a difficult case of a demented, severely depressed woman who had written a living will requesting euthanasia before she became demented

The issue of the allocation of resources in health care is here to stay. The goal of this study was to explore the views of physicians on several topics that have arisen in the debate on the allocation of scarce resources and to compare these with the views of policy makers. We asked physicians and policy makers to participate in an interview about their practices and opinions concerning factors playing a role in decision making for patients in different age groups. Both physicians and policy makers recognised allocation decisions as part of their reality. One of the strong general opinions of both physicians and policy makers was the rejection of age discrimination. Making allocation decisions as such seemed to be regarded as a foreign entity to the practice of medicine. In spite of the reluctance to make allocation decisions, physicians sometimes do. This would seem to be only acceptable if it is justified in terms of the best interests of the patient from whom treatment is withheld

The dominant view of the ventral and dorsal visual systems is that they subserve perception and action. De Wit, Van der Kamp, and Masters suggested that a more fundamental distinction might exist between the nature of information exploited by the systems. The present study distinguished between these accounts by asking participants to perform delayed matching, pointing and perceptual judgment responses to masked Müller–Lyer stimuli of varying length. Matching and pointing responses of participants who could not perceptually judge stimulus length at brief durations remained sensitive to veridical stimulus length, but not the illusion, which was effective at long durations. Distinct thresholds for egocentric and allocentric information pick up were thus evident irrespective of whether perception or action responses were required. It was concluded that the dorsal and ventral systems may be delineated fundamentally by fast egocentric- and slower allocentric information pick up, respectively.

Major depressive disorder is a prevalent condition with high relapse rates. There is evidence that cognitive reactivity is an important vulnerability factor for the recurrence of depression. Mindfulness-based interventions are designed to reduce relapse rates, with cognitive reactivity as one of the proposed working mechanisms. In a randomised controlled trial we compared the effect of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy with treatment-as-usual on cognitive reactivity in recurrently depressed patients. Depressive symptoms, cognitive reactivity, and mindfulness skills were assessed pre and post treatment. Patients in the MBCT group reported a significantly greater reduction in cognitive reactivity than those in the TAU group. The reduction of cognitive reactivity appeared to mediate the association between MBCT/TAU and decrease of depressive symptoms, using pre and post scores. The current study provides evidence that MBCT reduces cognitive reactivity and preliminar...

In the reported, experiment participants hit a ball to aim at the vertex of a Müller–Lyer configuration. This configuration either remained stable, changed its shaft length or the orientation of the tails during movement execution. A significant illusion bias was observed in all perturbation conditions, but not in the stationary condition. The illusion bias emerged for perturbations shortly after movement onset and for perturbations during execution, the latter of which allowed only a minimum of time for making adjustments. These findings indicate that allocentric information is exploited for online control when people make rapid adjustments in response to a sudden change in the environment and not when people guide their limb movements to interact with a stable environment.

Introduction In 2007, a national review committee was instituted in The Netherlands to review cases of active ending of life for newborns. It was expected that 15–20 cases would be reported. To date, however, only one case has been reported to this committee. Reporting is essential to obtain societal control and transparency; the possible explanations for this lack of reporting were therefore explored. Methods Data on end-of-life decision-making were scrutinised from Dutch nation-wide studies (1995, 2001 and 2005), before institution of the committee. Physicians received a questionnaire about their medical decision-making for stratified samples of deceased infants up to 1 year, drawn from the central death registry. Results In 2005, 58% of all deaths were preceded by an end-of-life decision, compared with 68% in 2001 and 62% in 1995. The use of drugs with a possible life-shortening effect tended to be lower. In 2005, all four cases in the study in which an infants' life was actively ended were preceded by a decision to forego life-prolonging treatment. In three cases, the infant's life expectancy was short; one case involved a longer life expectancy. Discussion The expected number of cases is probably an overestimation due to changes in medical practice such as the tendency to attribute less life-shortening effects to opioids. The lack of reports is probably also associated with requirements in the regulation; it may be difficult to fulfil them due either to time constraints or the nature of the suffering that is addressed. If societal control of active ending of life is considered useful, changes in the regulation may be needed.

The clinical introduction of medical devices often occurs with relatively little oversight, regulation and (long-term) follow-up. Some recent controversies underscore the weaknesses of the current regime, such as the complications surrounding the metal-on-metal hip implants and the scandal surrounding the global breast implant scare of silicone implants made by France's Poly Implant Prothese (PIP) Company. The absence of national registries hampered the collection of reliable information on the risks and harms of the PIP breast implants. To warrant long-term safety, a case can be made for mandatory post-marketing surveillance by means of the establishment of compulsory registries. In this edition of Public Health Ethics, Schofield calls for debate on how such a registry system should be initiated and maintained and how it would relate to the ethical requirement of consent. Here we use breast implant registries as a case to discuss whether and when a so-called ‘thick opt-out’ would be an appropriate method to include people in medical device registries. We conclude that a thick opt-out procedure for medical device registries is only justifiable in cases where inclusion does not involve burdens (or very low), when it does not involve a sensitive subject and when the data are stored anonymously (or at least not directly linked to the medical record). Otherwise, inclusion should be sought by means of an opt-in.

Mazur & Booth's (1998) target article concerns basal and reciprocal relations between testosterone and dominance, and has its roots in Mazur's (1985; 1994) model of primate dominance-submissiveness interactions. Threats are exchanged in these interactions and a psychological stress-manipulation mechanism is suggested to operate, making sure that face-to-face dominance contests are usually resolved without aggression. In this commentary, a recent line of evidence from human research on the relation between testosterone, cortisol, and vigilant (dominant) and avoidant (submissive) responses to threatening “angry” faces is discussed. Findings, to a certain extent, converge with Mazur & Booth's theorizing. However, the strongest relations have been found in subliminal exposure conditions, suggesting that biological instead of psychological mechanisms are involved.

In response to the paper by Keown and Jochemsen in which the latest empirical data concerning euthanasia and other end-of-life decisions in the Netherlands is discussed, this paper discusses three points. The use of euthanasia in cases in which palliative care was a viable alternative may be taken as proof of a slippery slope. However, it could also be interpreted as an indication of a shift towards more autonomy-based end-of-life decisions. The cases of non-voluntary euthanasia are a serious problem in the Netherlands and they are only rarely justifiable. However, they do not prove the existence of a slippery slope. Persuading the physician to bring euthanasia cases to the knowledge of the authorities is a problem of any euthanasia policy. The Dutch notification procedure has recently been changed to reduce the underreporting of cases. However, many questions remain