We report here an emerging dispute in Italy concerning triage criteria for critically ill covid-19 patients, and how best to support doctors having to make difficult decisions in a context of insufficient life saving resources. The dispute we present is particularly significant as it juxtaposes two opposite views of who should make triage decisions, and how doctors should best be supported. There are both empirical and normative questions at stake here. The empirical questions pertain to the available level of evidence (...) that healthcare professionals would rather not be left alone with their ‘clinical judgments’ to make triage decisions, and to the accounts of distributive justice that doctors and healthcare professionals rely on, when making triage decisions. The normative questions pertain to how this empirical evidence should inform guidelines on how prioritisation decisions are made in a context of emergency, and who gets to have the authority to do so. This debate goes beyond the discussion of the care of critically ill patients with COVID-19 and has broader implications beyond the national context for the discussion of how to relieve moral distress in contexts of imbalances between healthcare resources and clinical needs of a population. (shrink)

The traditional paradigm of medicine assumes that health is a natural given depending on a body's intrinsic teleology, and that medicine aims at restoring or preserving health, making a physician only an "assistant to nature." I argue that nowadays this paradigm is becoming obsolete, because the concept of health is no longer a "natural given" and interventions on the human body attempt not only to help nature's teleology, but also to change it whenever doing so can satisfy human needs and (...) wants. We should abandon the term "medicine" and adopt the term "health care" to mark such an epoch-making transition, analogous to that marking the passage from "alchemy" to "chemistry.". (shrink)

>Engelhardt’s After God gives a comprehensive perspective on the deepest and hardest issues in both moral philosophy and bioethics of our time. Although the book is an intelligent critique of contemporary moral philosophy in favor of a kind of traditionalism rooted in the perspective of the Orthodox Church, containing numerous forceful arguments, I ultimately disagree with Engelhardt on several main points stemming from his pessimistic view of our current culture and society. I have neither the pretense to open new perspectives, (...) nor to put forward new arguments, and I am aware that I might be wrong. I simply want to present a different position on the quest for meaning. (shrink)

The paper is mostly limited to an analysis of the main theses advanced by Engelhardt in his great book After God, compared with those elaborated in the first edition of The Foundation of Bioethics. The first part is devoted to a summary of Engelhardt’s proposals, and two of them are criticized in the second part. In particular, Engelhardt is doubtful that a morality after God is possible, while I argue that it is going to be produced and possibly will be (...) more adequate than traditional morality. In the same line, Engelhardt holds that without God everything is meaningless, while I argue that meanings are instilled by humans in our projects, and that even in our forthcoming post-history age people will continue to have meaningful ethical actions. (shrink)

The authors analyze deficiencies and perils of the European Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine , in particular the concept of human rights as given by natural law and the Conventions stand on germline therapy and its refutation of therapeutic enhancement.

From 28 February to the end of March 2012, the Italian media reacted fiercely to the Giubilini and Minerva paper published in the Journal of Medical Ethics a few days earlier. The first article viewed the proposal as analogous to ‘barbaric invasions’, but in a first stage of the debate it could be seen as a case of the usual controversy between Catholics and secularists. Then emotive reactions prevailed and a flood of papers expressed strong opposition to ‘infanticide’. The authors (...) were even deemed insane; the fact that both are Italian certainly increased interest in the subject as well as surprise at their proposal, which some reckoned to be an insult to their ‘national identity’. Even freedom of academic research and discussion was put in question, and defenders of free debate were accused of being supporters of the theory of infanticide. (shrink)

INDICE -/- Note biografiche Introduzione, di Riccardo Faucci -/- Parte I - Da Verri a Toniolo 1. Jeremy Bentham: Contemporary Interpretations, di M.D.A. Freeman 2. Su Helvétius, Beccaria e Bentham, di Letizia Gianformaggio 3. L'etica utilitaristica di Pietro Veti, di Vincenzo Polignano 4. ll liberismo interventista di Vincenzo Emanuele Sergio, di Anna Li Donni 5. Il concetto di " felicità pubblica, nella << Genesi del diritto penale » di Romagnosi, e il rapporto Romagnosi-Bentham, di Robertino Ghiringhelli 6. « La più (...) grande felicità per il maggior numero » all'Accademia dei Georgofili ( 18)0-1850), di Gabriella Gioli 7. Una nota su Manzoni critico dell'utilitarismo, di Maurizio Mori 8. Sul concetto di utile in Francesco Ferrara e in Maffeo Pantaleoni, di Daniela Parisi Acquaviva 9. Sul pensiero sociale cristiano di fronte all'edonismo, di Luciano Avagliano 10. Giuseppe Toniolo e il recupero cattolico dell'utile e del valore, di Anna Camaiti -/- Parte II Aspetti di storia del pensiero economico nell’età classica -/- 1. La filosofia economica di Thomas Hobbes, di Marco Bertozzi 2. Ordinamento del sapere, modelli metodologici ed economia politica in Adam Smith, di Sergio Cremaschi 3. Elementi classici nel pensiero di Adam Smith: giurisprudenza romana e morale stoica, di Gloria Vivenza 4. Il “lusso” negli economisti italiani del Settecento, di Cosimo Perrotta 5. Prezzi naturali, prezzi di mercato e legge degli sbocchi nel dibattito fra Malthus e Ricardo, di Lilia Costabile 6. Marx e la moneta, di Roberto Petrini -/- . (shrink)

A short presentation of the first Italian translation of a classic of Modern Ethics ignored by Italian philosophers for more than a century.

Realitism: the postmodern attack on reality -- Realism: things that have existed since the beginning of the world -- Reconstruction: why criticism starts from reality -- Emancipation: unexamined life has no value.

The case for an unprecedented penetration of life mechanisms into the politics of Western modernity has been a cornerstone of 20th-century social theory. Working with and beyond Foucault, this article challenges established views about the history of biopower by focusing on ancient medical writings and practices of corporeal permeability. Through an analysis of three Roman institutions: a) bathing; b) urban architecture; and c) the military, it shows that technologies aimed at fostering and regulating life did exist in classical antiquity at (...) the population scale. The article highlights zones of indistinction between natural and political processes, zoē and bíos, that are not captured by a view of destructive incorporation of or over life by sovereign power. In conclusion, the article discusses the theoretical potential of this historical evidence for contemporary debates on ‘affirmative biopolitics’ and ‘environmental biopower’. (shrink)

The rise of molecular epigenetics over the last few years promises to bring the discourse about the sociality and susceptibility to environmental influences of the brain to an entirely new level. Epigenetics deals with molecular mechanisms such as gene expression, which may embed in the organism “memories” of social experiences and environmental exposures. These changes in gene expression may be transmitted across generations without changes in the DNA sequence. Epigenetics is the most advanced example of the new postgenomic and context-dependent (...) view of the gene that is making its way into contemporary biology. In my article I will use the current emergence of epigenetics and its link with neuroscience research as an example of the new, and in a way unprecedented sociality of contemporary biology. After a review of the most important developments of epigenetic research, and some of its links with neuroscience, in the second part I reflect on the novel challenges that epigenetics presents for the social sciences for a re-conceptualization of the link between the biological and the social in a postgenomic age. Although epigenetics remains a contested, hyped, and often uncritical terrain, I claim that especially when conceptualized in broader non-genecentric frameworks,. (shrink)

Niccolò Machiavelli is one of most influential modern political thinkers. His works, above all The prince, The discourses on Livy, The Florentine histories, and The art of war, are still passionately discussed in the intellectual community. Against the trite commonplace that Machiavelli was a teacher of evil who justified political immorality, Maurizio Viroli shows, on the basis of a rigorous study of his texts, that Machiavaelli taught instead the best way to attain true glory through political action.

L'impianto didattico di questa 'Storia' consente di: conciliare l'esposizione piana dei concetti con il rigore del linguaggio filosofico; favorire la percezione delle strutture concettuali, con il duplice scopo di illustrare adeguatamente sia l'impianto filosofico dei singoli autori sia lo sviluppo storico dei diversi problemi; presentare la storia del pensiero moderno in una chiave di categorie filosofiche, oltre che storico-evolutiva; delineare i contesti storici in cui nascono le diverse espressioni del pensiero moderno; rimarcare la diversità dei generi letterari utilizzati dagli autori, (...) mostrandone la connessione con il loro modo di filosofare. (shrink)

This book studies a central but hitherto neglected aspect of Rousseau's political thought: the concept of social order and its implications for the ideal society which he envisages. The antithesis between order and disorder is a fundamental theme in Rousseau's work, and the author takes it as the basis for this study. In contrast with a widely held interpretation of Rousseau's philosophy, Professor Viroli argues that natural and political order are by no means the same for Rousseau. He explores the (...) differences and interrelations between the different types of order which Rousseau describes, and shows how the philosopher constructed his final doctrine of the just society, which can be based only on every citizen's voluntary and knowing acceptance of the social contract and on the promotion of virtue above ambition. The author also shows the extent of Rousseau's debt to the republican tradition, and above all to Machiavelli, and revises the image of Rousseau as a disciple of the natural-law school. (shrink)

In recent years, a proliferation of books about empathy, cooperation and pro-social behaviours (Brooks, 2011a) has significantly influenced the discourse of the life-sciences and reversed consolidated views of nature as a place only for competition and aggression. In this article I describe the recent contribution of three disciplines – moral psychology (Jonathan Haidt), primatology (Frans de Waal) and the neuroscience of morality – to the present transformation of biology and evolution into direct sources of moral phenomena, a process here named (...) the ‘moralization of biology’. I conclude by addressing the ambivalent status of this constellation of authors, for whom today ‘morality comes naturally’: I explore both the attractiveness of their message, and the problematic epistemological assumptions of their research programmes in the light of new discoveries in developmental and molecular biology. (shrink)

Maurizio Ferraris explores how, through the reading of Proust's _In Search of Lost Time_, one can explore memory, art, and society, using the book as a guide for living life.

Les stratégies de Bayle et de Hume devant la question de l’athéisme sont bien plus proches qu'on ne le croit généralement. Cet accord découle de l’influence constante que Bayle exerça sur Hume. Pour Bayle et pour Hume, l’athéisme et le scepticisme sont très étroitement liés – celui-là n’est qu’une forme du celui-ci. La force des Dialogues sur la religion naturelle de Hume ressort précisément de cette alliance entre athéisme et scepticisme qui, puisant la plupart de ses arguments chez Bayle, aboutit (...) à une critique de la théologie fondée sur une analyse sans concession des fondements épistémologiques de la croyance, tout en se gardant, comme le Straton de Bayle, de réduire l’athéisme à un dogmatisme métaphysique abstrait. (shrink)