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Lawmaking provides many opportunities for proposals to be altered, amended, tabled, or stopped completely. The ideal legislator should assess evidence, update his or her beliefs with new information, and sometimes be willing to change course. In practice, however, lawmakers face criticism from the media, the public, and their colleagues for “flip-flopping.” Legislators may also only appear to change positions in some cases as a means of voting strategically.

This book presents a systematic examination of legislative indecision in American politics. This might occur via “waffling”—where a legislator cosponsors a bill, then votes against it at roll call. Or it might occur when a legislator votes one way on a bill, then switches her vote to the other side. In Indecision in American Legislatures, Jeffrey J. Harden and Justin H. Kirkland develop a theoretical framework to explain indecision itself, as well as the public’s attitudes toward indecision. They test their expectations with data sources from American state legislatures, the U.S. Congress, and survey questions administered to American citizens. Understanding legislative indecision from both the legislator and citizen perspectives is important for discussions about the quality of representation in American politics.

In riveting case studies, Robert Zussman describes how medical decisions in ICUs are considered and reconsidered, made and remade, negotiated and renegotiated. He concentrates on the practice of medical ethics, on the ways in which right and wrong are interpreted and used in the ward—how definitions of right and wrong emerge from the social situations of patients, families, doctors, and nurses and from the workings of hospitals and the courts.

His book is a portrait of the way careful planning is undermined by the unpredictability of illness and the persistence of self-interest, by high principle and curious compromise.

With today's world torn by violence and conflict, Richard B.
Miller's study of the ethics of war could not be more timely.
Miller brings together the opposed traditions of pacifism and
just-war theory and puts them into a much-needed dialogue
on the ethics of war.

Beginning with the duty of nonviolence as a point of
convergence between the two rival traditions, Miller provides
an opportunity for pacifists and just-war theorists to refine
their views in a dialectical exchange over a set of ethical
and social questions. From the interface of these two long-
standing and seemingly incompatible traditions emerges a
surprisingly fruitful discussion over a common set of values,
problems, and interests: the presumption against harm, the
relation of justice and order, the ethics of civil
disobedience, the problem of self-righteousness in moral
discourse about war, the ethics of nuclear deterrence, and
the need for practical reasoning about the morality of war.
Miller pays critical attention to thinkers such as Augustine
and Thomas Aquinas, as well as to modern thinkers like H.
Richard Niebuhr, Paul Ramsey, Martin Luther King, Jr., James
Douglass, the Berrigans, William O'Brien, Michael Walzer, and
James Childress. He demonstrates how pacifism and just-war
tenets can be joined around both theoretical and practical
issues.

Interpretations of Conflict is a work of massive
scholarship and careful reasoning that should interest
philosophers, theologians, and religious ethicists alike. It
enhances our moral literacy about injury, suffering, and
killing, and offers a compelling dialectical approach to
ethics in a pluralistic society.

Richard B. Miller is assistant professor of religious
studies at Indiana University.

In this comprehensive study, Marvin Fox offers an approach to Moses Maimonides that illuminates the intersections of his philosophical, religious, and Jewish visions—ideas that have embattled readers of Maimonides since the twelfth century.

Rather than defining and using a single concept of intuition—philosophical, practical, or neuroscientific—Braude here examines intuition as it occurs at different levels and in different contexts of clinical reasoning. He argues that not only does intuition provide the bridge between medical reasoning and moral reasoning, but that it also links the epistemological, ontological, and ethical foundations of clinical decision making. In presenting his case, Braude takes readers on a journey through Aristotle’s Ethics—highlighting the significance of practical reasoning in relation to theoretical reasoning and the potential bridge between them—then through current debates between regulators and clinicians on evidence-based medicine, and finally applies the philosophical perspectives of Reichenbach, Popper, and Peirce to analyze the intuitive support for clinical equipoise, a key concept in research ethics. Through his phenomenological study of intuition Braude aims to demonstrate that ethical responsibility for the other lies at the heart of clinical judgment.

 

Braude’s original approach advances medical ethics by using philosophical rigor and history to analyze the tacit underpinnings of clinical reasoning and to introduce clear conceptual distinctions that simultaneously affirm and exacerbate the tension between ethical theory and practice. His study will be welcomed not only by philosophers but also by clinicians eager to justify how they use moral intuitions, and anyone interested in medical decision making.

A noted philosopher and one of the most gifted and prolific novelists of the twentieth century, Iris Murdoch has anticipated and shaped many of the issues central to current ethics. These include the relation between human identity and ideas of the good, the effect of the modern critique of religion on moral thought, the relation between ethics and literature, and the contemporary debate about liberalism. In the most comprehensive engagement with Murdoch's work to date, this volume gathers contributions from philosophers, theologians, and a literary critic to explore the significance of her ideas for contemporary thought.

Inspired by Murdoch's tenacious wrestling with basic questions of human existence, these essays not only clarify her thoughts on human goodness, but also move beyond the academy to reflect on how we can and ought to undertake the human adventure in our daily lives.

Contributors are Charles Taylor, Martha Nussbaum, David Tracy, Cora Diamond, Maria Antonaccio, Elizabeth Dipple, Franklin I. Gamwell, Stanley Hauerwas, and William Schweiker. This volume also includes "Metaphysics and Ethics," a classic essay by Iris Murdoch.

The search for an ethics rooted in human experience is the crux of this deeply compassionate work, here translated from the 1983 German edition. Distinguished philosopher Werner Marx provides a close reading, critique, and Weiterdenken, or "further thinking," of Martin Heidegger's later work on death, language, and poetry, which has often been dismissed as both obscure and obscurantist. In it Marx seeks, and perhaps finds, both a measure for distinguishing between good and evil and a motive for preferring the former.

The poet Hölderlin posed the question, "Is there a measure on earth?" His own answer was emphatic, "There is none," for he was convinced that the measure for man was to be found only in the domain of the heavenly beings. Such metaphysical assumptions, as well as the attempt to found ethical conduct in the nature of man as a rational being, have been rejected by many contemporary thinkers, particularly Heidegger. Yet these thinkers have not been able to provide a satisfactory alternative to metaphysical foundations of the standards for responsible human conduct.

Marx, therefore, goes beyond Heidegger in demonstrating how several of his most basic notions could be relevant to a secular morality in our age. It is death, Marx claims, that unsettles man and transforms his conduct toward his fellow man. the common experience of mortality nourishes ethical life—and leads to the measures of compassion, love, and recognition of one's fellow human beings.

"It is only on the basis of these 'traditional virtues,'" Marx writes, "that we can find a motive for averting the impending dangers which have often enough been described so vividly and convincingly."