In England and Wales, Section 15 of the Sexual Offences Act (2003) criminalizes the act of meeting a child—someone under 16—after grooming. The question to be pursued in this paper is whether ...grooming—I confine myself to online grooming—is justly criminalized. I shall argue that it is. One line of thought will be indirect. I shall first try to rebut a general argument against the criminalization of acts that are preparatory to the commission of serious offences. Grooming is one such act, but there are others, sometimes associated with terrorism. According to me, the general argument misapplies certain considerations about autonomy that are alleged to be in force in other areas of criminal law. Contrary to that general argument, criminalization of preparatory acts does
not
, in general, bypass the agency of citizens. Moreover, the criminalization of preparatory acts can disrupt activity that would have led to very serious crime, and with relatively low costs to the perpetrators, costs that reflect the non-occurrence of the more serious crime. There is evidence that grooming is harmful in itself, and so another point against the general argument is its assumption that preparatory offences are often harmless or at least victimless. There are objections to some of the undercover policing techniques that lead to a Section 15 prosecution, but these objections are not all weighty.
By comparison with the prevention of terrorism, the prevention of acts of organized crime might be thought easier to conceptualize precisely and less controversial to legislate against and police. ...This impression is correct up to a point, because it is possible to arrive at some general characteristics of organized crime, and because legislation against it is not obviously bedeviled by the risk of violating civil or political rights, as in the case of terrorism. But there is a significant residue of legal, moral and political difficulty: legislation against organized crime is hard to make effective; the harm of organized crime is not uniform, and so some preventive legislation seems too sweeping and potentially unjust. More fundamentally, the scale and rewards of organized crime are often dependent on mass public participation in markets for proscribed goods, which may point to a hidden public consensus in favour of some of what is criminalized. For all of these reasons, I argue that existing preventive policing and legislation against organized crime may be harder to justify than their counterparts in counterterrorism, at least in the UK.
Law and equity in Hobbes Sorell, Tom
Critical review of international social and political philosophy,
01/2016, Letnik:
19, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Equity is clearly central to Hobbes's theory of the laws of nature, and it has an important place in his doctrine of the duties and exercise of sovereignty. It is also prominent in his general theory ...of law, especially as it is articulated in the late Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England. Still, it is not more central to Hobbes's ethics, politics and legal philosophy than his concept of justice, or even as central. On the contrary, his theory of justice is presupposed by his views about equity - in the sense that fidelity to a social contract is a condition of adjudication and definitive interpretation of law. Nor does equity contribute to a genuinely anti-authoritarian strand in Hobbes's political philosophy. It is not as if, between the lines of that philosophy, Hobbes is a liberal. He does not think that the sovereign should exercise self-restraint because liberty and autonomy are good and sovereign self-restraint creates a space for both. Rather, he thinks that heavy-handed rule saps initiative, wealth and other resources from the people, making them less able to participate in or finance military action or internal state security. In other words, heavy-handed rule can make it harder for the sovereign to discharge the principal duty of sovereignty - ensuring public safety.
In Europe, telecare is the use of remote monitoring technology to enable vulnerable people to live independently in their own homes. The technology includes electronic tags and sensors that transmit ...information about the user's location and patterns of behavior in the user's home to an external hub, where it can trigger an intervention in an emergency. Telecare users in the United Kingdom sometimes report their unease about being monitored by a "Big Brother," and the same kind of electronic tags that alert telecare hubs to the movements of someone with dementia who is "wandering" are worn by terrorist suspects who have been placed under house arrest. For these and other reasons, such as ordinary privacy concerns, telecare is sometimes regarded as an objectionable extension of a "surveillance state." In this article, we defend the use of telecare against the charge that it is Orwellian. In the United States, the conception of telecare primarily as telemedicine, and the fact that it is not typically a government responsibility, make a supposed connection with a surveillance state even more doubtful than in Europe. The main objection, we argue, to telecare is not its intrusiveness, but the danger of its deepening the isolation of those who use it. There are ways of organizing telecare so that the independence and privacy of users are enhanced, but personal isolation may be harder to address. As telecare is a means of reducing the cost of publicly provided social and health care, and the need to reduce public spending is growing, the correlative problem of isolation must be addressed alongside the goal of promoting independence.
We aim to bring both digital pathology in general and computational pathology in particular within the scope of Helen Nissenbaum’s theory of appropriate information transfer as contextual integrity. ...In Section
1
, the main lines of the theory of contextual integrity are introduced, and reasons are given why it is not properly speaking a theory of privacy, but rather a theory of morally permissible information transfer in general. Then the theory is applied to uses of digitised pathology images for (a) patient-by-patient analysis (Section
2
); and (b) computational pathology (Sections
3
and
4
). Although big data exercises involving personal data are sometimes seen by Nissenbaum and colleagues as particular threats to existing data-sharing norms and other social norms, we claim that patient-by-patient digital pathology is riskier, at least in forms it has taken during the pandemic. At the end, we consider some risks in computational pathology that are due to the interaction between health institutions, particularly in the public sector, and commercial algorithm developers.
Health Care, Ethics and Insurance provides an essential survey of the key ethical issues in health insurance, providing valuable reading for students and teachers of business studies as well as ...health professionals.
Healthcare workers (HCWs) will be key players in any response to pandemic influenza, and will be in the front line of exposure to infection. Responding effectively to a pandemic relies on the ...majority of medical, nursing, laboratory and hotel services staff continuing to work normally. Planning assumes that during a pandemic normal healthcare service levels will be provided, although it anticipates that as caseloads increase only essential care will be provided. The ability of the NHS to provide expected service levels is entirely dependent upon HCWs continuing to work as normal.
This study is designed as a two-phase multi-method study, incorporating focus groups and a questionnaire survey. In phase one, qualitative methods will be used to collect the views of a purposive sample of HCWs, to determine the range of factors associated with their responses to the prospect of working through pandemic influenza. In phase two, the findings from the focus groups, combined with the available literature, will be used to inform the design of a survey to determine the generalisability of these factors, enabling the estimation of the likely proportion of HCWs affected by each factor, and how likely it is that they would be willing and/or able to continue to work during an influenza pandemic.
There are potentially greater than normal health risks for some healthcare workers working during a pandemic, and these workers may be concerned about infecting family members/friends. HCWs will be as liable as other workers to care for sick family members and friends. It is vital to have information about how motivated HCWs will be to continue to work during such a crisis, and what factors might influence their decision to work/not to work. Through the identification and subsequent management of these factors it may be possible to implement strategies that will alleviate the concerns and fears of HCWs and remove potential barriers to working.
PDF
