Moral Duty Research Articles

Global health in transition: The coming of neoliberalism

Global health as a transnational, intergovernmental, value-based initiative led by the World Health Organization (WHO), working toward improving health and achieving equity in health for all people worldwide, has for years yielded to a growing reliance on corporate-led solutions. Private organizations, non-governmental organizations (NGO), religious and other philanthropic and charitable organizations, increasingly serve a dominant role in setting the global health agenda. Short-term success in combating epidemics and in the provision of funding for project-based initiatives appeals to supporters of marketization of health services. For 30 years, a neoliberal paradigm has dominated the international political economy and hence the governance of global health. A utilitarian logic or the ethics of consequentialism have attained prominence under such banners as effective altruism or venture philanthropy. This contrasts with the merits and relevance of deontological ethics in which rules and moral duty are central. This paper seeks to explain how neo-liberalism became a governing precept and paradigm for global health governance. A priority is to unmask terms and precepts serving as ethos or moral character for corporate actions that benefit vested stakeholders.

The corporatization of global health: The impact of neoliberalism

Concomitant with the emergence of a neoliberal precept for global health is the decline in support for publicly funded programs working to alleviate health disparities in poor countries. An unequivocal faith in the privatization and marketization of public health services is evident in current day national policy reforms. Commodification of health services is perceived as a cure-all. Privatization of global health initiatives contrasts with the past institutional paradigm. Corporate and philanthropic power trumps intergovernmental governance. The epistemological precept is clear: Global health is best served with mandated private initiatives. Powerful foundations cause critical shifts in the balance of power among stakeholders and become preeminent players in global health policy agenda formation. The ethics of consequentialism have attained current day prominence. This contrasts with the merits and relevancy of de-ontological ethics in which rules and moral duty are central. In this paper, authors make a case for contesting the ethos of effective altruism or venture philanthropy, suggesting that this approach keeps nations and people from recognizing the oppressive nature of neoliberalism as a governing precept for global health.

Ethical duty, ethics and right to nutritional care

Ethical duty, ethics and right to nutritional care

Liability for Emissions without Laws or Political Institutions

Many climate ethicists maintain that climate policy costs should be borne by those who historically emitted the most greenhouse gases. Some theorists have recently argued, however, that actors only became liable for emitting once the emissions breached legitimate legal regulation governing emissions. This paper challenges this view. Focusing on the climate responsibility of states, it argues that even if we assume that legitimate legal regulation is needed to remove excusable ignorance of entitlements to emit or is constitutive of such entitlements, it does not follow that states should be exonerated from responsibility for all pre-legal emitting. This is because the pre-legal emissions may have violated moral duties not to behave recklessly and to promote the emergence of the relevant regulation. The paper closes by noting how grounding liability for emitting in such duties complicates the link between past emissions and liability.

An Analysis of Effective Implementation of Transformative Interventions for the Protection of the Best Interests of the Child in South Africa

This paper postulates that a child is a human being whose rights are guaranteed under the law, and as such, the rights must be respected and promoted. Parents have moral and legal duties and obligations to provide their children with love and care, most importantly, to ensure their children’s best interest. Under the law, the inherent rights of a child are not negotiable; hence they must be maintained by both parents depending on their financial circumstances. This responsibility needs to be discharged with love and care. However, it is unfortunate that some parents are not committed to discharging this responsibility without force; hence the Maintenance Act of 1998 was enacted to assist the system in managing and enforcing compliance by the parents toward their children. Consequently, the duty to support a child does not discriminate against an illegitimate child when maintenance issues are being processed. All children are eligible to be maintained regardless of their parent’s marital status during birth. The courts must enforce compliance through maintenance orders to ensure that children are well taken care of until they are self-sufficient.

Fiduciary Activism From Below: Green Gentrification, Pension Finance, and the Possibility of Just Urban Futures

This article investigates the evolving concept of fiduciary duty and its role in Canadian public sector pension funds’ environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing practices. It contributes to the literature in the distinct but related fields of environmental gentrification and urban climate finance by bringing fiduciary debates into sharper focus. Engagement with issues surrounding investors’ legal and ethical duties to invest responsibly can contribute to an enhanced understanding of the global and local mechanisms of production and reproduction of environmental and spatial inequalities, as well as strategies for creating more than just urban futures. ESG, a calculative and modelling technique used to manage investment risks, overwhelmingly focuses on physical and financial climate risks (e.g., infrastructure assets and risks associated with regulatory change). This privileges the instrumental, Cartesian view of the environment as severed from its social, historical, and relational character, a perspective that has been thoroughly critiqued in the environmental/ecological gentrification literature. However, ESG investing has also introduced a potentially productive uncertainty in the realm of financial expertise; it forces questions about what it means to invest deferred compensation in the “best interests” of workers and retirees. This article has three interrelated aims. First, it reviews recent trends in environmental gentrification and urban climate finance literature to highlight an emerging but underdeveloped engagement with ESG and fiduciary duty. Second, it shows how the rise of ESG has revealed a vulnerability in the hegemonic profit maximization interpretation of fiduciary duty and invited further, open-ended, critical-theoretical engagements with the concept of the fiduciary and their responsibilities. Finally, it offers the concept of “fiduciary activism from below” to explore how grassroots agency increasingly stages a direct confrontation with corporations, institutional investors, and shareholders in the struggles over urban space and resistance to environmental and infrastructural violence.

‘Overcoming a clash of absolutes: the conflicting ethical demands posed by access to medicines litigation confronted by Latin American judges’

ABSTRACT This article analyses the conflicting professional ethical demands imposed on judges to, on the one hand, faithfully apply the existing law of the land and, on the other hand, do justice in the face of urgent global challenges such as ensuring an equal access to life-saving medicines. After establishing the precise nature of the professional ethical duties of judges (as opposed to those of lawyers) and noting the tensions they face when the duty of applying the law prevents them from complying with the duty of delivering material justice in the domain of access to medicines, the article then analyses the way this issue plays out in Latin America, a región where judicially-mandated access to medicines has been common. The article concludes by arguing that the Latin American experience suggests that judges around the world should take seriously the need to find a balance between their duty of deference towards public health authorities in this domain (when this is mandated by legislation), and the duty to do justice to individuals who cannot afford live-saving medicines.

От Канта к Франку: этика долга и проблема сопротивления злу в русской мысли.

One of the key ethical debates in Russian religious thought, initiated by Leo Tolstoy, concerned the question of nonresistance to evil by force. The purpose of this article is to assess the influence of Kant’s ethics and philosophy of religion on the course of this debate and to determine the place and significance of the arguments and considerations expressed on this issue by Semyon Frank in the early and late periods (1908 and 1940s) of his work. To this end I reconstruct the general course of the debate, notably the positions and arguments of Leo Tolstoy, Vladimir Solovyov, Ivan Ilyin and Nikolai Berdyaev. Beginning with Tolstoy, Russ­ian thinkers introduced the original ethical content of the idea of nonresistance derived from the Gospel into the ethics of duty borrowed from Kant. The Tolstoy version of this idea was challenged mainly from two directions: from the Kantian grounding of the legitimacy of coercion and attempts to bring in styles of moral thinking other than the ethic of duty. Ilyin’s apolo­gia for the use of force in the struggle against evil prompted Russian émigré thinkers to take a closer look at Tolstoy’s ethical concept and pay attention to its positive content. On this basis Berdyaev and especially Frank create their version of the Christ-centered ethic of salvation which, in the perspective of “protecting the world against evil” includes the ethic of duty and links it with the possibility of using force, always a wrongful act, but one justified “in a situation of extreme need”.

К. МакГинн. Деонтологическая теодицея/ пер. с англ. В. А. Сергеевой

The essay examines the inconsistence problem of the existence a perfect God and evil in the world. It contains criticism of the traditional view that the concept of God as a morally perfect entity is paradoxical. Essay is demonstrated that such views are based on an extreme form of utilitarianism. It is argued that the idea of God and evil coexisting in the world is not inconsistent if we accept the deontological view in ethics that the general obligation to eliminate suffering wherever it occurs cannot be one’s moral duty. It is proved that the idea of the coexistence of God and evil in the world does not contain a contradiction if we accept the deontological point of view in ethics that the obligation to eliminate suffering wherever it occurs cannot be anyone’s moral duty.

Etičko-moralne dimenzije agresije NATO na Saveznu Republiku Jugoslaviju

The paper discusses the NATO aggression against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia through two ethical perspectives: deontological or the ethics of duty and consequentialist or the ethics of consequences. The hypothetical starting point is that, if the aggression is based on moral principles, then those principles should also characterize it, starting from intention, motive, goals, means to final result, and if this is not the case, the aggression cannot be justified from a moral point of view. The objective of the paper is to present the unsustainability, in an ethical and moral sense, of the "humanitarian" character of the intervention and reasons such as the prevention of humanitarian catastrophe and the protection of human rights. After the introductory part of the paper, the theoretical basis and analytical approach have been presented, in order to consider the moral sustainability of the reasons for the aggression and its moral character through a deontological and consequentialist ethical perspective. It has been concluded that the aggression does not fully meet the deontological and consequentialist criteria of moral rightness, that is, that interests are hidden behind moral reasons. Morality does not have a decisive role in international relations, but it is, along with international law, the only argument that small countries can invoke. The hypothetico-deductive, descriptive and analytical-synthetic methods have been used in the paper.

EFFECT OF IMMORALITY AND INDISCIPLINE ON SOCIETAL VALUES AMONG UPPER BASIC EDUCATION LEVEL STUDENTS IN USHONGO LOCAL GOVERNMENT AREA OF BENUE STATE

This study investigated effect of immorality and indiscipline on societal values among upper basic education level students in Ushongo local government area of Benue state with the purpose to determine effect of immorality and indiscipline on societal values among upper basic education level students. Two research questions guided the study and two hypotheses were tested at 0.05 level of significance. Descriptive survey design was adopted for the study. The population of the study consisted of 6023 students from all upper basic education level students in the study area. The sample of the study was made up of 378 respondents out of the population of 6023 students using simple random sampling technique. The instrument used for data collection was a questionnaire constructed by the researcher titled "Effect of Immorality and Indiscipline on Societal Values Questionnaire" (EIISVQ). The reliability of the instrument was ascertained through trial-test using Cronbach Alpha which yielded reliability coefficient of r=0.89 which was considered good enough for the study. Data were collected by the researcher with the help of research assistance. The data collected was analyzed using Mean Scores and Standard Deviations to answer research questions and Chi-square (x2) test of goodness of fit to test the hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. The findings of the study revealed that causes of immorality and indiscipline are parental rejection, marital conflict, and lack of appropriate religious tenets, negative peer influence and lack of dedication of teachers to their moral duties. It was also found out that of immorality and indiscipline affect societal values among upper basic education level students. It was concluded that immorality and indiscipline affect societal values. Therefore, it was recommended among others that guidance and counselling services should be strengthened and forums formed whereby continuous orientation will be given to students to enable them acquire appropriate societal values.

Boomchee

At what point in a date do you owe the other party the duty to inform them you are engaged? Is marriage an exercise in love, or practicality? In this work of philosophical short story fiction, the law school student narrator working at a summer factory job decides to set up her shy female friend, Susie, with her boyfriend’s shy brother, Barry. They go on a double date and everything seems to be going fine. Only later does the narrator and her boyfriend find out that Barry is engaged to a mail-order bride from Southeast Asia that will be arriving shortly. The shy Barry, it turns out, wanted to “practice” going on a date before his new wife arrived. The law student narrator is embarrassed, and struggles with the moral duty both she, and Barry, owe to Susie.

Moral philosophy as an object of Hegel’s debate with Kant in The Phenomenology of Spirit

The history of Hegel’s critical controversy with Kant’s moral philosophy starts with the Frankfurt period of his work, when Hegel first opposed what he believed to be Kant’s absolutisation of the concept of duty and his neglect of the social content of morality. Although Hegel more than once addressed Kant’s moral philosophy, it is only in “Phenomenology of Spirit” that he formulated a more systemic and radical criticism. The basis of his critical argumentation is an attempt to reveal the main contradiction in Kant’s ethics by showing that the fulfilment of unconditional moral requirements leads to the complete elimination of morality itself. By uncovering the internal contradictions in Kant’s unconditional duty, Hegel demonstrates a certain kind of pragmatism in the interpretation of moral duty and offers instead a religious faith in the transcendental power of “communal” consciousness, which will become a principle that supposedly removes all contradictions of a moral worldview. These debates between the two most prominent classics of German idealism on the issue of whether moral demands are universal in nature or are always socially determined, has not lost its significance even today. This is because they present two substantially different ethical doctrines: one affirms the idea of the autonomy of moral consciousness and its formal unconditional character, while the other assumes that a certain moral duty can be legitimate only under specific socio-historical conditions.

The notion of καθῆκον in the Early Stoa and “moral duty.” Reflections on Jack Visnjic’s book “The Invention of Duty. Stoicism as Deontology.”

In this paper, I argue against Jack Visnjic’s claim (in his recent book “The Invention of Duty”) that the Stoic term καθῆκον conveys the idea of moral duty. First, I examine Visnjic’s explicit argumentation and find it inconclusive. Then, I provide additional objections based on the evidence which Visnjic, in my opinion, either underestimates or completely disregards. Basically, I believe that at least the early Stoics regarded καθήκοντα as morally neutral activities that can become both morally right and wrong depending on the agent’s motivation.

НРАВСТВЕННЫЙ ФОРМАЛИЗМ И. КАНТА В ИНТЕРПРЕТАЦИИ РУССКОЙ ДУХОВНО-АКАДЕМИЧЕСКОЙ ФИЛОСОФИИ КОНЦА XIX – НАЧАЛА ХХ ВЕКА

The article presents the arguments of Orthodox moral philosophers against Kant's moral formalism. Representatives of spiritual and academic science believed that the formal moral law, due to similarities with empirical, does not at all deny the right to have a mate-rial principle in ethics. This is confirmed by the example of Kant himself, who actually admits in his formalism the material prerequi-site for the reasonableness of his morality. Such properties of the moral law as universality and necessity do not at all confirm the specific qualities of the moral law due to the fact that the formal moral law is not identical with the empirical law, and the latter is only a type, and at the same time an imperfect one. Thus, the pure form of moral law, when applied to reality, reveals a clear insuf-ficiency, so it is impossible to derive certain moral duties from it.

Ethical Aspects in Medical Practice: Investigation of Ethical Dilemmas and Principles Related to Medical Practice

Medical ethics or medical deontology is a set of ethical norms and principles of behavior of medical workers in the performance of their professional duties, i.e. deontology provides mainly norms of relationships with the patient. In the medical understanding, deontology is the teaching of legal, professional and moral duties and rules of conduct of a medical worker in relation to a patient. In addition, deontology establishes norms of relationships between medical professionals and relatives of patients, as well as between colleagues in the medical team. The article is a study of ethical aspects related to medical practice. Doctors and other medical professionals face many ethical dilemmas that require making difficult decisions in their daily work. The purpose of this study is to analyze various ethical problems faced by medical professionals and identify the basic ethical principles that help them make decisions in these situations. A medical worker should always remember about the patient, have the ability to conquer and subdue the soul of the patient. The core issues of medical ethics and deontology are the relationship between a medical worker and a patient. The personality and appearance of a medical worker are determined by the economic, political and social conditions of the society in which he works. The paper discusses several ethical dilemmas faced by doctors, such as confidentiality and protection of patients' personal data, principles of fairness and accessibility of medical care, as well as ethical issues that arise when making decisions about consultations, consent to treatment and termination of a patient's life. It also examines the various ethical principles that medical personnel apply to solve these dilemmas, such as the principles of benevolence, non-harm, respect for patient autonomy and justice.

Decentralising science: a moral duty and a huge opportunity

Symmetries have always been important in the description of natural phenomena. From the structure of various materials and the ordered fashion of the atoms, many properties can take place and many others can be modulated. In particular, the electronic properties of a certain system are tightly connected to the system’s crystal structure. Hence, magnetism, transport of carriers, and the intertwining between these effects strongly rely on the underlying symmetries of a material.

Sentiment and Sexual Servitude: White Men of Feeling and The Woman of Colour

The Woman of Colour (1808) refuses to provide its biracial heroine with “the usual meed of virtue— a husband !” This article argues that the novel’s dismissal of the marriage plot results from its scathing critique of white men of feeling. Olivia’s rejection of marriage acts as a Romantic-era version of Black women’s “culture of dissemblance”: a deliberate cultivation of privacy and dis-avowal of reproductive sexuality that is designed to evade the threat of sexual violation in a hostile society. Rather than abolitionist allies, sentimental men are shown to be self-serving and hypocritical: deploying benevolence, moral duty, and emotion to abuse and coerce. Sentimental paternalism entails white women’s conjugal misery, as the transatlantic marriage market secures British colonial networks at the expense of women’s happiness. Olivia’s white father facilitates his daughter’s exploitation at the hands of emotionally incontinent, self-absorbed, and sexually threatening white men of feeling whose behaviour discredits the authority of imperial masculinity and forces readers to evaluate the moral and political inadequacies of white abolitionism.

Social responsiveness: The key ingredient to achieve social accountability in education and health care.

While social accountability (SA) is regarded as an obligation or mandate for medical school administration, it runs the danger of becoming a bureaucratic checkbox. Compassion which leads to social responsiveness (SR), in contrast, is often recognized as an individual characteristic, detached from the public domain. The two, however, complement each other in practice. Institutions must be truly socially accountable, which is possible if there is spontaneous SR to the needs, and is fueled by compassion. Compassion in this article is defined as a "feeling for other people's sufferings, and the desire to act to relieve the suffering." Compassion has a long history, whereas SA is more recently described concept that follows the historical development of social justice. SR is the moral or ethical duty of an individual to behave in a way that benefits society. Not everyone feels the need to do something for others. Even if the need is felt, there may be a lack of will to act for the needs or to act effectively to fulfill the needs of society. The reasons are many, some visible and others not. SR provides the basis for being compassionate; hence, medical schools need to include SR as a criterion in their admissions process for student recruitment and inculcate compassion in health professions education and health care. By fostering SR and engaging compassion and self-compassion to achieve SA, we can humanize medical education systems and health care.

Sticanje bez osnova - uporednopravni pregled

Unjust enrichment is very highly positio ned as one of the sources of obligations in the Law on Obligations. Research of comparative legal literature (both doctrinal type and judgments of national courts) indicated significant differences in the attitude towards this institute both bet ween the legal systems of continental law and within the corpus of countries in which the so-called common law system is dominant. In the paper, a detailed analysis of both domestic and COM parative legal literature and court practice was carried out. During the research, special emphasis was placed on the legal solutions in force in other, primarily European legal systems. The analysis included both those legal systems (French, German) that have a decisive influence on the civil law codes of other continental law countries, as well as those that are of decisive importance in coun tries characterized by precedential law (Great Britain, United States of America). A re view was al so made of solutions from the Hungarian legal system, whose impact on our law is not ne arly as far-reaching as the aforementioned legal orders, but due to the similarity of the genesis of civil law in our two countries in the last hundred years, they arouse interest. One of the basic differences bet ween continental and commonlaw is reflected in the fact that in the former the central question is whether there was a legal basis for the defendant to gain some benefit, while the latter the focus is on the question of whether the plaintiff has a basis to claim restitution. Consequently, in continental law systems, the court will, first of all, order the restitution of what the defendant unjustly acquired, while in "common law" systems the plaintiff has the obligation to first prove that he has a reliable basis for restitution. In addition to recognizing the differences between the two groups of systems, through analysis we also come to distinctions within the groups themselves. For example, unlike French law, German law, albeit with certain difficulties, resolves the problem of unjust enrichment due to the actions of a third party. According to our ZOO, when a part of one person's property has been transferred in any way to the property of another person, and that transfer has no basis in a legal transaction or in the law, the acquirer is obliged to return it, and when this is not possible - to compensate the value of the benefits achieved. Obligation to return, i.e. compensation of value also occurs when something is received with regard to a basis that was not realized or that later fell away. The obligation to return is not subject to those goods that were given in the name of fulfilling some natural obligation or some moral or social duty, amounts that were paid even though the payer knew that he was not obliged to make the payment, as well as funds that, without a legal basis, were paid in the name of compensation for damages due to bodily injury, health impairment or death, if the payment was made to a bona fide recipient. The review of domestic judicial practice shed light on a wide range of situations in which legally unjustified enrichment can occur, i.e. acquisition without grounds. Although we are talking about an institution that has long been present as a source of obligations in the Law on Obligations, certain judgments, which are contra legem, show that in connection with this institution there are, still, numerous doubts.