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Little research has explored the dilemmas of practice experienced by practitioners working with rehabilitation clients who are assimilating disabilities, resulting from injury or chronic conditions, into their lives. Consequently, there is limited literature to support educational initiatives or clinicians' decision-making in these settings. Accordingly, this qualitative study was designed to explore 'expert' physical therapists' perceptions of dilemmas of practice in rehabilitation settings. Using an ethnographic design, multiple interviews were conducted over a period of six months with each of ten participants. The researcher's theoretical background and 'insider' role were thoroughly explicated. Interpretive analysis was grounded in three overarching themes that emerged from the participants' accounts and compared with relevant theoretical constructs and research in physical therapy and other health professions. In the first theme the 'authority' of the concept of evidence-based practice as it is currently promoted within physical therapy was questioned. A need was identified to develop rigorous alternative sources of 'evidence' to support current practice that are more congruent with the multifactorial and client-centred nature of rehabilitation service provision. A second theme explored situations interpreted as causing moral distress in which the participants found themselves prevented from acting effectively on behalf of the clients, as a result of admission and discharge decisions and perceived misuse of rehabilitation resources within the organization and health system. The third theme related to the advantages and disadvantages of being involved with the interdisciplinary team. A lack of understanding of different professional philosophies of practice was perceived as a contributing factor to conflict and miscommunication. These themes are related to issues of professional accountability and suggest that physical therapy needs to develop a clearly articulated philosophy and conceptual models, including the concept of client-centred practice, that would reflect practice, serve to guide research and promote interdisciplinary collaboration. Alternative sources of 'best' evidence need to be developed that more realistically reflect complex 'practice' knowledge. In addition, the profession needs to commit to developing a comprehensive ethics curriculum offered in education programs and through interdisciplinary learning opportunities, by which physical therapists will be better prepared for the moral deliberations inherent in their professional role.

The present study is designed to outline the approaches towards moral development and moral education over the past four decades, and to show how the findings of second-generation cognitive science compel a re-thinking of the role of narrative and narrative thinking in moral education. Examined also, are the psychological and philosophical assumptions that underpin and lend substantiation to these findings. Narrative, as an essential instrument for moral education, is now on the way to being rehabilitated, by virtue of the emerging trend to apply the narrative method of autobiographical mythology, or personal narrative to moral education. Through the increased implementation of this process, it is envisioned that the cognitive-developmental, rationalistic view of moral education will be supplanted by other cognitive models, with their implications for moral development and moral education, of a nature closer to the way human beings make meaning of experience.

This project attempts to question the way the relation between communication and ethics has traditionally been conceptualized, and to offer an alternative perspective on that relation. An implicit premise in many communication theories is that successful communication is ethically favorable, particularly in facilitating ideals such as greater understanding, participation and like-mindedness. Contrary to that view, this project proposes that ethical communication may lie in the interruption of communication, in instances wherein communication falls short, goes astray or even fails. Such interruptions, however, do not mark the end of ethical communication but rather its very beginning, for it is in such moments that communication faces the challenge of otherness. Mobilizing relevant ideas from the work of French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas to the field of communication studies, this project proposes the concept of interruption as the main correlative between ethics and communication. The investigation then sets out to explore three limit-cases in which the stakes of ethical communication are most crucial: understanding and misunderstanding, communicability and incommunicability, and silence and speech. The discussion employs a distinctive approach to study the place of alterity in communication: dislocation—a double gesture which implies both tampering with the proper activity of communicational procedures and pointing to the ethical possibilities opened up by interruptions. The issues above are addressed through critical analyses of themes such as: universal language or the undoing of Babel; the ethical significance of misunderstanding and the challenge introduced by translation; autism as a paradigmatic case of incommunicability in medical, scientific and social discourses; the epistemological status and the ethical stakes of incommunicability; and, finally, the ethical dimension of free speech, the significance of silence and the responsibility to the silent Other.

This thesis examines questions concerning the place of animals within our moral thought. In particular it is an investigation of the rationale behind extending our ethical systems to encompass the inclusion of animals. The thesis begins with a presentation of a general framework defining rights and their relationship to obligations. It then includes an assessment of whether or not animals, according to the general framework, can properly be called rights bearers. In order to do this, the questions of whether or not animals have value independent of their value to human beings and whether or not animals have interests are examined. / Though the thesis concerns itself with animals it is not merely an examination of animal rights. In order to investigate fully the place of animals within our moral thought, many concepts which are central to ethics such as "rights", "equality", "value", and "affinity" are examined. The thesis concludes with the implications its findings have on human actions.

There is recent interest in a narrative approach to values education. Perhaps with the intention of responding to needs of the pluralistic, multicultural society emerging at the end of the 1990s, values educators are turning their attention to the role of story telling and narrative in our moral development. This is an important contribution to values education because narrative approaches allow bridges to be built between different individuals and cultures and for a profound understanding of others to become possible. Many of the narrative approaches rest on a fuzzy or narrow definition of moral imagination. My thesis tries to clarify imaginations' abilities and gifts. I have reflected on the writings of Kieran Egan to establish what imagination brings to education and also the relationship between narrative and imagination. The final piece of my thesis sketches an outline of a moral imagination in consultation with two authors: Daniel Maguire and Mark Johnson. Through very different approaches, they both arrive at the idea that it is imagination which in fact underpins moral understanding. Kieran Egan opens the door to the idea of imagination and Daniel Maguire and Mark Johnson complete the picture by pointing out that imagination is our capacity to create moral understanding.

I begin my discussion of the question 'Why should I be moral?' by drawing distinctions both between possible different senses of 'moral' and also between different conceptions of what morality requires. I then criticize the idea that one should be moral because it serves self-interest. Self-interest is served by one's having benevolent concern for only a fairly small number of others, but being moral involves more than this. Furthermore, having moral dispositions other than benevolence is in one's interest only if these dispositions are required by the moral code predominant in one's society. Moreover, even if we confine our attention to people who live in such a society, each person would probably be better off with moral dispositions that were not so strong that they would always get their way, but the completely moral person would presumably have overriding moral dispositions. Finally, having the correct moral beliefs may not be in one's interest. But whatever the gap between self-interest and morality, might one not have most reason to be moral? Derek Parfit has recently argued that the view that one has most reason to do whatever best achieves one's present aims (and these may sometimes be moral aims) is at least as good as the view that one has most reason to do what best promotes one's own long-term good. I attack some of his arguments. But I then go on to argue that moral requirements as such—i.e., independently of whether they are reflected in present desires—do generate reasons for action. But are these moral reasons always stronger than reasons of other kinds? On the basis of an example I describe in the closing pages, I reluctantly conclude that they are not.

This thesis seeks to answer the question of what it would be for a person to be persuaded rationally to believe that God exists, and tries to explain in a related way the possibility of rationality in Christian faith. I begin by explicating and defending the "ethics of belief" approach to epistemology. Then two competing ethics of belief are described: "Strong Formalism", which holds, through a voluntaristic decision, a deductivist epistemology; and "Soft Rationalism", which contains an infonnalist epistemology, and rejects voluntarism. Arguments for and against each view are canvassed. But I show that our attempted adjudication is blocked by the "Ultimate Rationality Problem": no ethic of belief seems able rationally to justify its view of rationality. I reduce the Problem to this fact: any view of rationality refutes itself which tries to give a foundational method of epistemic evaluation that both gives a verdict on every proposition and avoids self-justification. I reject several suggested solutions in favour of one which replaces the foundational view of justification by a contextual view. I then generate from the process of justification itself several common epistemic standards, which allow us rationally to favour Soft Rationalism over Strong Formalism. But the former is both foundationalist and needlessly opposed to formalism. I remedy these faults by developing a "Modest Formalist" ethic of belief: a'partly formal set of standards for rational metaphysical argument,"given in. the form of a set of constitutive rules for certain games of interpretive argument. In doing this I defend an improved theory of epistemic probability, and reveal the structure of our substantive views of rationality - as this virtue would be required of believings per se, of actions based on believings, and'of actions (such as living a Christian life) based on what I describe as "experimental faith".