Individual Obligations Research Articles

Copyrighting Prose and Pros

The protection of intellectual property is a right that is taken for granted by researchers. However, as with many rights that have become established over a long period of time, infrequent thought is given to the conditions that would prevail without the right. A researcher who is familiar with even the rudiments of copyright law is rare. Researcher naivety in copyrighting is unfortunate, since there are currently strong pressures for radical changes in copyright law. The Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Patents, Trademarks and Copyrights of the U.S. Congress has been holding hearings on proposed copyright revisions this summer. Many of the proposed revisions are uncontroversial modernization moves. However, some strike at the core of traditional copyright practices. The proposed changes with greatest import address the copyright aspects of non print reproduction, storage, and retrieval capabilities. Several characteristics of the R&D community influence a predisposition to regard with favor the notion of relaxed copyright protection in these areas. The free exchange of ideas is a highly prized scientific value which on its face appears to be facilitated by informal rules of communication. The tendency of the R&D community to support full use of new technical potential creates a permissive treatment of this capability. Most importantly, the researcher typically spends more time using information created by others rather than creating information per se. The unfettered exploitation of information thus has strong initial appeal to the information user. For these reasons, Congressional testimony from both the education and the research communities has tended to support relaxation of copyright protection provisions. Interests concerned with maintaining the bounds of copyright protection have been cast in the role of money lusts or medieval luddites. Some such there may be. But one has only to contemplate for a moment the serious consequences were copyrighting protection suddenly to be removed to realize that important professional interests are at issue. The delivery mechanisms for scientific information, as well as information citation and accessing systems all rest or draw upon a copyright foundation. It is unreasonable and unnecessary to expect researchers to become instant copyright specialists. The complexity of the technical aspects are too great for that. But the consequences of the resolution of the large issues are matters in which researchers have a large stake, and here researchers are in sound position to reflect and react. Effective and efficient scientific information exchange is not a free commodity. The R&D community in education has an important stake in its sustenance and a responsibility for its nurturance. Active awareness of the issues and their resolution status would appear to represent a minimal lower bound of individual researcher obligation in maintaining the rights to intellectual property traditionally afforded by copyright protection.

Utilitarianisms

Previous articleNext article No AccessDiscussionUtilitarianismsGerald BarnesGerald Barnes Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Ethics Volume 82, Number 1Oct., 1971 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/291829 Views: 3Total views on this site Citations: 11Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1971-1972 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:John Pittard Evil and God's Toxin Puzzle, Noûs 52, no.11 (Jun 2016): 88–108.https://doi.org/10.1111/nous.12154, Shams Ul Huda Action without Planning: A Preliminary Liver Transplantation, i-manager’s Journal on Nursing 5, no.11 (Apr 2015): 1–4.https://doi.org/10.26634/jnur.5.1.3490Moran Yemini Conflictual Moralities, Ethical Torture: Revisiting the Problem of “Dirty Hands”, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 17, no.11 (May 2013): 163–180.https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-013-9429-0Brian Kierland Cooperation, ‘Ought Morally’, and Principles of Moral Harmony, Philosophical Studies 128, no.22 (Mar 2006): 381–407.https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-004-7789-yMichael J. Almeida Collective Rationality and Simple Utilitarian Theories, Dialogue 33, no.33 (Apr 2010): 363–376.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0012217300039019Michael J. Zimmerman Cooperation and doing the best one can, Philosophical Studies 65, no.33 (Mar 1992): 283–304.https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00354614Michael S. Moore Torture and the Balance of Evils, Israel Law Review 23, no.2-32-3 (Feb 2016): 280–344.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021223700016757Fred Feldman Individual Obligation and Group Welfare, (Jan 1986): 147–178.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-4570-8_7 Bart Gruzalski The Defeat of Utilitarian Generalization, Ethics 93, no.11 (Oct 2015): 22–38.https://doi.org/10.1086/292402 John Chandler Act-Utilitarianism and Collective Action, Ethics 84, no.11 (Oct 2015): 78–85.https://doi.org/10.1086/291905Íñigo Álvarez Gálvez Bibliografía, (): 387–395.https://doi.org/10.5211/9788496780842.ch9

From Indian Status to British Contract

One of the first problems confronting a colonial power after establishing de facto or de jure sovereignty over a new territory is to set up procedures for settling disputes arising within the dominated society, and to establish a whole range of rights in relation to property and obligations of individuals and groups to one another and to the state.

THE PEDIATRICIAN AND THE PUBLIC

The subject of this talk concerns social medicine in the Scandinavian countries, not socialized medicine. The term socialized medicine has a political bias which is not in conformity with the conception of social medicine in Scandinavia. Every step in the development of the Scandinavian social medicine program has been adopted unanimously by all parties, irrespective of their attitudes toward socialism itself. Political parties have advocated liberalism and opposed socialism with the same ardor with which they have supported the expansion of social medicine. In Scandinavia, therefore, it is not necessary to advise us to "Keep politics out of this picture." Politics have always been omitted, even to the extent that a phrase corresponding to the American "socialized medicine" has never been used in Scandinavia. And if you were to try introducing it, it would not be understood. What is social medicine? It can be defined as an organization of the medical services according to a certain conception of individual or human rights and public obligations in a modern society. In all countries it is accepted that there are some basic needs which everyone has the right to satisfy, irrespective of income. Protection of personal freedom belongs to this group; so does education of the children.

The Character of the Gallienic Renaissance

It is at least a tenable hypothesis that the acute phase of transition from classical to post-classic culture lies in the third century A.D. rather than in the fifth. The confused and tangled epoch between the accession of Septimius Severus and the accession of Diocletian seems either to foreshadow or to shape the future both for the Western Provinces and for the East. So much that had marked the civilisation of the Antonines, the sense of gravitas and the restraint of form, the tranquil acceptance of the interplay of individual privilege and obligation within a social structure conceived as effortlessly stable, the solid bourgeois standard of what was perhaps essentially a small-town culture, went down in the chaos of an economic collapse. The emergence of Neo-Platonism, the creation of the new conventions in Imperial portraiture and the triumph of the cult of Sol Invictus all seem to symbolise a change in the conception of the functions of personality and of the relationship of man with the Divine and of man with men.

The Fact of the Family

The title I have chosen ‘for this brief essay is both comfortable and soporific. Come what may—like the earth on which we stand— by very reason of our existence, the family will always be with us. But (here’s the rub) what do you mean by family? The greatest clanger to it is perhaps our complacent disregard of its history. The popular conception of the family as an unchanging political entity is a snare as well as a delusion, for it blinds us to the possibility of another and disastrous stage in its ‘evolution.’Already, the family is regarded by many as a quaint relic (like marr’age or Sunday worship) of the Christian era. ‘The unit of ancient society,’ in the well-known words of Sir Henry Maine, ‘was the family, of modern society the individual ‘(Ancient Law, p. 121). The movement of progressive societies has been uniform in one respect. Through all its course it has been distinguished by the gradual dissolution of family dependency and the growth of individual obligation and privilege in its place. The individual, Maine continues, is steadily substituted for the family as the unit of which civil law takes account. Professor F. G. Peabody in his brilliant book (Jesus Christ and the Social Question) comments on the fact that this substitution has been for several generations the key of English jurisprudence, philosophy and economics; and to show that this is true also of the spiritual life and thought of Protestantism h,e quotes the judgement of Hecker’s biographer that Protestantism is mainly unsocial, being an extravagant form of individualism whose Christ deals with men apart from each other, furnishing humanity with no cohesive element.

Individual Conscience and Social Obligation

Individual Conscience and Social Obligation

Wealth-Contributing Factors in the Building of Modern Homes

PROTECTION from the elements constitutes one of the most fundamental necessities in the life of man. Passing from the period of bare necessity to the modern electrically equipped home represents man's capacity to cooperate with the laws of nature in establishing what to the wealthy of the Middle Ages would be called an ideal home. Along with home development has gone the increased wealth of our country. It is only when a man actually starts to build a house that he fully appreciates the composite interdependence of modern industry. The materials raw and already manufactured consisting of lumber, nails, hardware, glass, stones, cement, tools, and roofing are neither a house nor a home. The transitional stages are from raw and manufactured products into a constructed house and its final conversion into a home. Multitudes of workmen and varied industries throughout the country are reciprocally dependent for a livelihood upon this most elementally constructive instinct of man. It is quite significant that the word home is used in preference to house. The word home implies not alone shelter but a place wherein the parental and sacred obligations of individuals to each other are given an environmental setting. It is a place which affords a setting for the different instincts which man is capable of expressing. The social instinct, the deeper instinct of constructive workmanship combined with the deeper emc tions pertaining to beauty, pride, and self-realization are among the forces at work ultimately to establish a home. So vital is this thought of the far-reaching consequences of home life on the development of the individual that any city is exceedingly proud when it can be characterized as a city of homes.