Daniel Cook

At the heart of the ethics debate regarding healthcare service advertising is the erosion of the trust bestowed upon physicians by patients and society at large. However, no study has empirically examined the relationship between advertising and trust in the medical profession. The current study addresses this gap using a survey of adults in a U.S. state. Contrary to some ethicists’ assertions, exposure to healthcare service advertisements resulted in higher trust via a more positive attitude toward healthcare service advertising. At the same time, exposure to healthcare service advertisements was related to lower trust via a more positive attitude toward physicians who advertise: The more advertisements consumers saw, the more they liked physicians who advertised, resulting in lower trust in the medical profession. The ethics of healthcare service advertising should be understood in a broader context of access to healthcare and patient-provider relationships.

Leibniz wrote the “Discourse on the Natural Theology of the Chinese” during the last year of his life. Previously, he had praised the polity and societal peace of the Chinese empire, deeming it superior to that of Christian Europe. Various thinkers used such a claim to argue that a pagan society could be ethical and politically stable without the belief in God. Leibniz sought to demonstrate that the intellectual and spiritual foundations of ancient Confucianism were indeed monotheistic and that this was the basis of their well-ordered society. He attempted to show that the classical Chinese believed in the tenets of a natural theology (i.e. belief in the existence of a monotheistic God and an incorporeal and hence immortal soul). He even attributed the discovery of binary arithmetic, not to himself, but to the ancient founder of the _Yi Jing_, thus further legitimating ancient Chinese knowledge (“science”).

Emmanuel Levinas’s writings militate against an ontological way of thinking that he claims dominates the history of European philosophy. In their drive towards truth and knowledge, Levinas argues that thinkers like Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger efface the alterity of the Other, the Other’s “otherness,” by appropriating alterity as a moment of self-consciousness or Being. This ontological thinking, Levinas argues, attempts to violently reduce the unthematizable excess of the Other by systematically assimilating the Other in the concepts of totalizing thought. Levinas articulates his opposition to this tradition at length in Totality & Infinity by insisting upon an irreducible heteronomy: an Other who remains radically outside of any relationship that I might have with them.