Definitions of death are often referred to as legal fictions since brain death was conceived in the mid-twentieth century. Reference to legal fiction is generally paired with bioethicists’ concern that it facilitates post-mortem tissue donation and the health system generally, by determining death earlier on the continuum of dying and availing more viable tissue and therapeutic resources for others. The author argues that spatio-legal theory, drawing from legal geography, can account for the heterogeneity of effects that the fiction has in (...) spatially managing bodies (e.g., physicians, patient, family) at the bedside. The legal fiction is produced in physicians’ socio-legal practices, coordinating decision-making according to geographies of scarcity and severable, self-contained live- and dead-bodies. The determination liminally exists between private and public, enacting a sterile, affectless ordering of bodies but administered in the spectacle of sovereign death-making, conveying authority whilst managing patient’s and family’s consents. Spatialising traces of anatamo-politics and biopolitics thereby congeal and are enacted heterogeneously in and through the legal form of the fiction, securing preferred constructions of the body in the management of mortality. These spatio-legal features of the legal fiction are described from their collision with case law and literature that document competing nomoi produced from or secreted by antinomian bodies. (shrink)

"Capital is a semiotic operator": this assertion by Félix Guattari is at the heart of Maurizio Lazzarato's _ Signs and Machines_, which asks us to leave behind the logocentrism that still informs so many critical theories. Lazzarato calls instead for a new theory capable of explaining how signs function in the economy, in power apparatuses, and in the production of subjectivity. Moving beyond the dualism of signifier and signified, _Signs and Machines_ shows how signs act as "sign-operators" that enter directly (...) into material flows and into the functioning of machines. Money, the stock market, price differentials, algorithms, and scientific equations and formulas constitute semiotic "motors" that make capitalism's social and technical machines run, bypassing representation and consciousness to produce social subjections and semiotic enslavements. Lazzarato contrasts Deleuze and Guattari's complex semiotics with the political theories of Jacques Rancière, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Paolo Virno, and Judith Butler, for whom language and the public space it opens still play a fundamental role. Lazzarato asks: What are the conditions necessary for political and existential rupture at a time when the production of subjectivity represents the primary and perhaps most important work of capitalism? What are the specific tools required to undo the industrial mass production of subjectivity undertaken by business and the state? What types of organization must we construct for a process of subjectivation that would allow us to escape the hold of social subjection and machinic enslavement? In addressing these questions, _Signs and Machines_ takes on a task that is today more urgent than ever. (shrink)

This paper addresses psychological factors that might interfere with informed consent on the part of stable patients as potential early-phase clinical trial participants. Thirty-six semistructured interviews with patients who had either diabetes or gout were conducted. We investigated stable patients’ attitudes towards participating in a fictitious first-in-human trial of a novel intervention. We focused on an in-depth analysis of those statements and explanations that indicated the existence of psychological factors impairing decision-making capacity. Three main themes emerged: insufficient comprehension of the (...) inherent logic of clinical trials, the recourse to trust over comprehension, and visceral factors that override deliberative process. Overall, our results indicate a limited psychological capacity on the part of stable patients to meet the requirements of informed consent as set by Declaration of Helsinki. A redesigned informed consent procedure should take account of these psychological realities. (shrink)

Nielsen Busch and Mjaaland (2023) argue that controlled donation after circulatory death does not violate the dead donor rule because the dead donor rule “merely requires that procurement of organs...

DBS Think Tank IX was held on August 25–27, 2021 in Orlando FL with US based participants largely in person and overseas participants joining by video conferencing technology. The DBS Think Tank was founded in 2012 and provides an open platform where clinicians, engineers and researchers can freely discuss current and emerging deep brain stimulation technologies as well as the logistical and ethical issues facing the field. The consensus among the DBS Think Tank IX speakers was that DBS expanded in (...) its scope and has been applied to multiple brain disorders in an effort to modulate neural circuitry. After collectively sharing our experiences, it was estimated that globally more than 230,000 DBS devices have been implanted for neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders. As such, this year’s meeting was focused on advances in the following areas: neuromodulation in Europe, Asia and Australia; cutting-edge technologies, neuroethics, interventional psychiatry, adaptive DBS, neuromodulation for pain, network neuromodulation for epilepsy and neuromodulation for traumatic brain injury. (shrink)

Michael A. PetersBeijing Normal UniversityMy deepest condolences to Pepe, Dom and Marcus and to Jim’s grandchildren. Tina and I spent a lot of time at the Marshall family home, often attending dinn...

This article argues that some reviewers contribute more to research than many authors, and suggests that reviewers meet the ICMJE criteria for authorship in many cases.

This manuscript reports on a landmark symposium on the ethical, legal and technical challenges of xenotransplantation in the UK. King’s College London, with endorsement from the British Transplantation Society (BTS), and the European Society of Organ Transplantation (ESOT), brought together a group of experts in xenotransplantation science, ethics and law to discuss the ethical, regulatory and technical challenges surrounding translating xenotransplantation into the clinical setting. The symposium was the first of its kind in the UK for 20 years. This paper (...) summarises the content of the expert lectures showcasing the progress which has been made in xenotransplantation including—the history of xenotransplantation, advances in gene edited animals and progress towards clinical xenotransplantation. We then set out the ethical and legal issues still to be resolved. Finally, we report the themes of the roundtable discussion highlighting areas of consensus and controversy. While the detail of the legal discussion was directed towards the UK, the principles and summary reported here are intended to be applicable to any jurisdiction seeking to implement clinical xenotransplantation. (shrink)

[V]isibility is central to the shaping of political, medical, and socioeconomic decisions. Who will be treated—how and where—are the central questions whose answers are often entwined with issues of visibility … [and] the effects that media visibility has on the perception of particular bodies .In a documentary entitled Paris: The Luminous Years , writer Janet Flanner describes the intense friendship of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Both were inspired by Paul Cézanne and his retrospective at the 1907 Salon d’Automne—which, according (...) to Paris: The Luminous Years, marked in Janus-like fashion the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries in art. Flanner tells of the frequent visits between the two painters, where they “talked and talked … two or three months that they just spent gabbling, gabbling.” And from their camaraderie and gabble emerged someth .. (shrink)

BackgroundObtaining consent has become a standard way of respecting the patient’s rights and autonomy in clinical research. Ethical guidelines recommend that the child’s parent/s or authorised legal guardian provides informed consent for their child’s participation. However, obtaining informed consent in paediatric research is challenging. Parents become vulnerable because of stress related to their child’s illness. Understanding the views held by guardians and researchers about the consent process in Malawi, where there are limitations in health care access and research literacy will (...) assist in developing appropriate consent guidelines.MethodsWe conducted 20 in-depth interviews with guardians of children and research staff who had participated in paediatric clinical trial and observational studies in acute and non-acute settings in the Southern Region of Malawi. Interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim, and thematically analysed. Interviews were compared across studies and settings to identify differences and similarities in participants’ views about informed consent processes. Data analysis was facilitated by NVIVO 11 software.ResultsAll participants across study types and settings reported that they associated participating in research with therapeutic benefits. Substantial differences were noted in the decision-making process across study settings. Guardians from acute studies felt that the role of their spouses was neglected during consenting, while staff reported that they had problems obtaining consent from guardians when their partners were not present. Across all study types and settings, research staff reported that they emphasised the benefits more than the risks of the study to participants, due to pressure to recruit. Participants from non-acute settings were more likely to recall information shared during the consent process than participants in the acute setting.ConclusionThe health care context, culture and research process influenced participants’ understanding of study information across study types and settings. We advise research managers or principal investigators to define minimum requirements that would not compromise the consent process and conduct study specific training for staff. The use of one size fits all consent process may not be ideal. More guidance is needed on how these differences can be incorporated during the consent process to improve understanding and delivery of consent.Trial registration Not applicable. (shrink)

What determines whether an action is right or wrong? Morality, Rules, and Consequences: A Critical Reader explores for students and researchers the relationship between consequentialist theory and moral rules. Most of the chapters focus on rule consequentialism or on the distinction between act and rule versions of consequentialism. Contributors, among them the leading philosophers in the discipline, suggest ways of assessing whether rule consequentialism could be a satisfactory moral theory. These essays, all of which are previously unpublished, provide students in (...) moral philosophy with essential material and ask key questions on just what the criteria for an adequate moral theory might be. (shrink)

In Beyond Physicalism, an interdisciplinary group of physical scientists, behavioral and social scientists, and humanists from the Esalen Institute’s Center for Theory and Research argue that physicalism must be replaced by an expanded scientific naturalism that accommodates something spiritual at the heart of nature.

In real-time, Twitter strongly imprints world events, popular culture, and the day-to-day; Twitter records an ever growing compendium of language use and change; and Twitter has been shown to enable certain kinds of prediction. Vitally, and absent from many standard corpora such as books and news archives, Twitter also encodes popularity and spreading through retweets. Here, we describe Storywrangler, an ongoing, day-scale curation of over 100 billion tweets containing around 1 trillion 1-grams from 2008 to 2020. For each day, we (...) break tweets into 1-, 2-, and 3-grams across 150+ languages, record usage frequencies, and generate Zipf distributions. We make the data set available through an interactive time series viewer, and as downloadable time series and daily distributions. We showcase a few examples of the many possible avenues of study we aim to enable including how social amplification can be visualized through ‘contagiograms’. (shrink)

While the technologies that enable Artificial Intelligence (AI) continue to advance rapidly, there are increasing promises regarding AI’s beneficial outputs and concerns about the challenges of human–computer interaction in healthcare. To address these concerns, institutions have increasingly resorted to publishing AI guidelines for healthcare, aiming to align AI with ethical practices. However, guidelines as a form of written language can be analyzed to recognize the reciprocal links between its textual communication and underlying societal ideas. From this perspective, we conducted a (...) discourse analysis to understand how these guidelines construct, articulate, and frame ethics for AI in healthcare. We included eight guidelines and identified three prevalent and interwoven discourses: (1) AI is unavoidable and desirable; (2) AI needs to be guided with (some forms of) principles (3) trust in AI is instrumental and primary. These discourses signal an over-spillage of technical ideals to AI ethics, such as over-optimism and resulting hyper-criticism. This research provides insights into the underlying ideas present in AI guidelines and how guidelines influence the practice and alignment of AI with ethical, legal, and societal values expected to shape AI in healthcare. (shrink)

Background While the theoretical benefits and harms of Artificial Intelligence (AI) have been widely discussed in academic literature, empirical evidence remains elusive regarding the practical ethical challenges of developing AI for healthcare. Bridging the gap between theory and practice is an essential step in understanding how to ethically align AI for healthcare. Therefore, this research examines the concerns and challenges perceived by experts in developing ethical AI that addresses the healthcare context and needs. Methods We conducted semi-structured interviews with 41 (...) AI experts and analyzed the data using reflective thematic analysis. Results We developed three themes that expressed the considerations perceived by experts as essential for ensuring AI aligns with ethical practices within healthcare. The first theme explores the ethical significance of introducing AI with a clear and purposeful objective. The second theme focuses on how experts are concerned about the tension that exists between economic incentives and the importance of prioritizing the interests of doctors and patients. The third theme illustrates the need to develop context-sensitive AI for healthcare that is informed by its underlying theoretical foundations. Conclusions The three themes collectively emphasized that beyond being innovative, AI must genuinely benefit healthcare and its stakeholders, meaning AI also aligns with intricate and context-specific healthcare practices. Our findings signal that instead of narrow product-specific AI guidance, ethical AI development may need a systemic, proactive perspective that includes the ethical considerations (objectives, actors, and context) and focuses on healthcare applications. Ethically developing AI involves a complex interplay between AI, ethics, healthcare, and multiple stakeholders. (shrink)

David Shaw has a Master of Arts degree in Philosophy from the Aquinas Institute. This three-year in-depth study of Aristotle was illuminated with commentaries by Thomas Aquinas. Many persons believe that God has created everything that is. I do not disagree with them but I am not satisfied with this generality. There is no guidance in this belief. We have endured 300 years since the revolutionaries of modern science began their dismemberment of the Greek cosmos that had endured for (...) 2,000 years. We now have no theory of creation. The Hebrew cosmos and the Greek cosmos made up the traditional theories of creation for the western world. Since many have forgotten this history, I summarize it before venturing into my proposal for a new theory of creation. Our universe and the ancient universe are vastly different. The ancient universe was static. It was thought to have no history. Our universe is dynamic. It has a history. Harold Morowitz has identified 28 emergences of new complexity in our universe [1]. I propose a new theory of creation. I give four arguments for community as the next emergence based on the statements of four great thinkers: Plato, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Luther King, and Michael Sandel. These thinkers do not propose community as the next emergence, they do identify community as a central process in human affairs. A description of my experience with community-building projects is included. While writing this section, the importance of civic fabric in building community confronted me.Community does not flow from civic fabric. Community does not flow without civicfabric. Civic fabric is the foundation for community. 1. Morowitz, Harrold. The Emergence Of Everything: How The World Became Complex. (shrink)

One way to interpret the work of Joshua Greene (2001; 2008; 2014) is that the wave of empirical research into moral decision-making is a way for us to become more confident in our ability to gain moral knowledge. We argue that empirical research into moral judgment has shown (both survey-based and brain-based) that the grounds of moral judgment are opaque on several dimensions. We argue that we cannot firmly grasp what the morally relevant/irrelevant features of a decision context are, (...) understand which cognitive system responds to said features, and further know that we are actually basing our judgment upon what we take to be the morally relevant features. That is, we argue that moral judgment is very much like other kinds of judgment: Deeply influenced by facts about the decision-context and the decision-maker. However, if moral judgment is merely the exercise of our general judgment making faculty, we shouldn’t be surprised by this result. We conclude by considering what this means for our practice of making moral judgments. (shrink)

We ordinarily think that, keeping all else equal, a life that improves is better than one that declines. However, it has proven challenging to account for such value judgments: some, such as Fred Feldman and Daniel Kahneman, have simply denied that these judgments are rational, while others, such as Douglas Portmore, Michael Slote, and David Velleman, have proposed justifications for the judgments that appear to be incomplete or otherwise problematic. This article identifies problems with existing accounts and suggests (...) a novel alternative theory: what best accounts for our preference for an uphill over a downhill life (and many other episodes) is that losses of momentary value are themselves bad and gains in momentary value are themselves good. (shrink)

There has been considerable discussion about the impact artificial womb technology may have on debates in reproductive ethics. Much of it has focused on abortion. Some ethicists have also proposed, however, that artificial wombs will lead to more embryo adoption, and, in doing so, that they will eliminate an alleged moral tension between opposing most abortions based on a full moral status view of fetuses/embryos but not opposing the use of surplus embryos in fertility medicine. This article evaluates this argument, (...) what I will call the artificial womb argument. It defends two main claims. First, artificial womb technology is unlikely to lead to embryo adoption on the scale needed to resolve the moral tension between opposing abortion but tolerating the use of surplus embryos in what has been termed “parent-friendly” in vitro fertilization (IVF). Second, artificial womb technology is more likely to increase the use of surplus embryos. The artificial womb argument backfires, therefore, on abortion opponents. Far from mitigating the moral tensions between opposing abortion but tolerating parent-friendly IVF, artificial womb technology is more likely to exacerbate these tensions. (shrink)

Through a glass darkly / Joshua Mitchell -- Skepticism, self, and toleration in Montaigne's political thought / Alan Levine -- French free-thinkers in the first decades of the Edict of Nantes / Maryanne Cline Horowitz -- Descartes and the question of toleration / Michael Gillepsie -- Toleration and the skepticism of religion in Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus / Steven B. Smith -- Monopolizing faith / Alan Houston -- Skepticism and toleration in Hobbes' political thought / Shirley Letwin -- John (...) Locke and the foundations of toleration / Nathan Tarcov -- Pierre Bayle's atheist politics / Kenneth R. Weinstein -- Of believers and barbarians / Diana Schaub -- Tolerant skepticism of Voltaire and Diderot / Patrick Riley. (shrink)

Abortion opponents are sometimes accused of having inconsistent beliefs, actions, and/or priorities. If they were consistent, they would regard spontaneous abortions to be a greater moral tragedy,...

Several states have recently adopted more restrictive abortion policies yet permit fertility clinics to create surplus IVF embryos. This essay examines this issue: Is it morally inconsistent to prohibit abortion yet permit surplus embryos to be used in fertility medicine? I consider various arguments that try to reconcile this tension. None succeed. Either one holds that embryos have full moral status, and opposes both abortion and surplus embryos, or one denies that embryos have full moral status, which would permit surplus (...) embryos to be used but would entail that some abortions should be permissible as well. (shrink)

Humor is a surprisingly understudied topic in philosophy. However, there has been a flurry of interest in the subject over the past few decades. This article outlines the major theories of humor. It argues for the need for more publications on humor by philosophers. More specifically, it suggests that humor may not be a well-understood phenomenon by questioning a widespread consensus in recent publications – namely, that humor can be detached from laughter. It is argued that this consensus relies on (...) a cognitivist account of emotion, one that is open to debate, and that it becomes unclear what sorts of phenomena a theory of humor is supposed to explain when one questions this assumption. (shrink)

Recently, several states in the United States have sought to adopt more restrictive abortion policies. Most have tried to enact “heartbeat bills” that prohibit most abortions once a fetal heartbeat becomes detectable. This article explores this question: Are heartbeat bills ethically defensible? I argue that they are not. There are at least four problems with them. First, heartbeat bills rely on a problematic understanding of human death. Second, they contradict and even undermine the leading arguments in ethics against abortion. Third, (...) they are ambiguous not just in terms of when they judge fetal heartbeats to be detectable but also in what they deem to be heartbeats. Finally, there is a case to be made that heartbeat bills are disingenuous, both in their intentions and in their underlying motives. (shrink)

This essay presents a challenge to the parental obligation objection. This objection is usually made by abortion opponents who argue that because child support laws hold men postnatally responsible for children they helped bring into existence, women too have prenatal parental responsibilities that should prevent them from ending pregnancies through abortions. My essay draws on recent publications in bioethics that distinguish procreative from parental responsibilities. This distinction was originally developed to clarify the duties of third-party participants in assisted reproduction. However, (...) the distinction inadvertently poses a problem for the parental obligation objection, for it raises questions about whether women who do not wish to carry a child to term have parental rather than procreative responsibilities. It does not necessarily follow that the objection must be wrong. But rather, that there is an explanatory gap in it. If abortion violates procreative responsibilities, then drastic changes must be made to fertility medicine. Conversely, there does not appear to be non-question-begging criteria that would explain why pregnant women must have parental responsibilities, in addition to procreative ones, whereas third-party participants in assisted reproduction, such as fertility doctors, embryologists, gamete donors, and surrogates, have only procreative responsibilities. (shrink)

Advances in fertility medicine have led some ethicists to call for stricter regulations on assisted reproduction. One counterargument is that such restrictions are unfair, for they impose far more...

Tarzian and ASBH Core Competencies Update Task Force (2013) say that making ethics consultation accountable means examining the abilities and qualifications of health care ethics consultants (HCECs...

Cathryn Vasseleu _Textures of Light: Vision and Touch in Irigaray, Levinas, and Merleau-Ponty_ London: Routledge, 1997 ISBN 041514233 (hbk) 0415142741 (pbk) 157 pp.

This paper analyzes the following question: What do women deserve, ethically speaking, when they agree to gestate a fetus on behalf of third parties? I argue for several claims. First, I argue that gestational motherhood’s moral significance has been misunderstood, an oversight I attribute to the focus in family ethics on the conditions of parenthood. Second, I use a less controversial version of James Rachels’s account of desert to argue that gestational mothers deserve a parent-like voice as well as significant (...) care and support, conclusions that have implications for commercial surrogacy. Finally, I argue that we should not make requests of others when fulfilling them will lead others to deserve goods we cannot reasonably expect them to receive, and I conclude based on this thesis, what I call the “strings attached thesis,” that pro-life arguments in support of prohibitions on abortion commit their proponents to policies which they may not be willing to support. (shrink)

This article defends misanthropy against what I take to be an underappreciated objection. Several recent defenders of misanthropy have held that it should be understood as involving a critical judgment of humanity based on the belief that human life is saturated with moral failings. The first half of this article identifies a problem for this view: namely, most people do not experience their lives in ways that would seem to be entailed by the misanthrope’s judgment. The second half proposes a (...) solution to this objection—an error theory for misanthropy. Several arguments are given. A common theme among them, however, is that there are good reasons to think that human beings habitually ignore and/or suppress certain displays of their moral failings. A misanthrope can also argue that beings whose lives are choked in moral failings will be more likely to overlook and to disavow them. (shrink)

Peter Lamarque recently reported on current trends in aesthetics in the Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics. Noticeably absent from his list, however, is the emergence and acceptance of feminist approaches in aesthetics, especially among analytic philosophers. Yet feminism is an important movement, one that should have been included among those he discusses. Indeed, my goal is to convince you that feminism should have made it onto Lamarque’s list. Rather than criticize him, however, I want to use his oversight to ask why (...) feminist philosophers working in analytic aesthetics have trouble getting the recognition they deserve. My suggestion will be that the specificity of feminist critiques in aesthetics is often what makes it difficult for philosophers to appreciate their significance. I will also argue that it is precisely because of this specificity that feminism is a uniquely important movement in contemporary aesthetics. (shrink)

Aaron Smuts argues that the holiday film It's a Wonderful Life should be understood as both an illustration and a cinematic vindication of objective list theories of worth. This article argues that he is right about the first point but wrong about the second. It's a Wonderful Life is an excellent illustration of objective list theories. However, it also exposes a problem for them – their susceptibility to sceptical anxieties about whether we can know if our lives are worth living. (...) More specifically, I argue that It's a Wonderful Life shows how our lives are vulnerable to two sceptical anxieties, one arising from our potential inability to confirm our successes in promoting the good, the other from our potential inability to ascertain which goods can properly be said to be in our lives due to gaps in our self-knowledge and our potential for self-deception. (shrink)

We argue that dynamical and mathematical models in systems and cognitive neuro- science explain (rather than redescribe) a phenomenon only if there is a plausible mapping between elements in the model and elements in the mechanism for the phe- nomenon. We demonstrate how this model-to-mechanism-mapping constraint, when satisfied, endows a model with explanatory force with respect to the phenomenon to be explained. Several paradigmatic models including the Haken-Kelso-Bunz model of bimanual coordination and the difference-of-Gaussians model of visual receptive fields are (...) explored. (shrink)

This is a selective annotated bibliography of publications in the area of feminist aes-thetics from 1990 to 2003. It is intended to compliment the bibliography presented by Linda Krumholz and Estella Lauter in the Spring 1990 issue of Hypatia.

Some commentators have claimed that Emmanuel Levinas's philosophy should be understood as a response to the Holocaust. This study assesses that claim. It begins by clarifying what it means to call his philosophy a “response.” The bulk of the article then analyzes his essay, “Useless Suffering,” one of the few works in Levinas's philosophic oeuvre where he discusses the Holocaust. Levinas is widely read as claiming that there can be no explanation for the Holocaust—that it marks “the end of theodicy.” (...) It is shown, however, that his point is not that it cannot be explained, but that we misjudge the nature of evil when we view it as calling for explanation rather than practical activity. Based on this analysis, it is argued that Levinas's philosophy can be understood as a response to the Holocaust in the sense of being a performative writing that sought to address the evil that occurred in the Holocaust by transforming the ethical sensibilities of his readers. (shrink)

This paper draws attention to overlooked similarities between John Rawls’s and Emmanuel Levinas’s understandings of justice. Its first part provides a synopsis of each philosopher’s ideas as well t...

This paper draws attention to overlooked similarities between John Rawls’s and Emmanuel Levinas’s understandings of justice. Its first part provides a synopsis of each philosopher’s ideas as well t...

Three-dimensional ‘bioprinting’ is under development, which may produce living human organs and tissues to be surgically implanted in patients. Like tissue engineering and regenerative medicine generally, the process of bioprinting potentially disrupts experience of the human body by redefining understandings of, and becoming actualised in new practices and regimes in relation to, the body. The authors consider how these novel sociotechnical imaginaries may emerge, having regard to law’s contribution to, as well as its possible transformation by, the process of 3D (...) bioprinting. The authors draw on Gilbert Simondon and corporeal, material feminists to account for these disruptions as ‘ontogenetic,’ in the sense that technology can produce new ontologies or beings. The authors focus namely on ontogenesis, individuation and the pre-individual forces that comprise, and yet remain inexhausted by, the process of 3D bioprinting. The authors argue legal phenomena are pre-individual forces that ‘in-form’ ontogenesis. These pre-individual forces are indistinguishable from those implicated in the individuation of the body’s physical form; thereby, the individuation of the bodily material through 3D bioprinting may be expressive and generative of sociolegal phenomena, at least as those relate to the body. The authors conclude that 3D bioprinting shores up conventional, liberal conceptions in law of the human body as individual, bounded and primarily contractual. Three-dimensional bioprinting may introduce ontological difference to the extent it promises and realises a new temporality of the human as a species- and legal-subject, although such a development would only seem to expand, rather than attenuate, a biopolitical regime. (shrink)

My dissertation addresses a frequent criticism of Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas is best known for his powerful claims about the importance of ethics. Many critics fault him, though, because he never specifies any useful, action-guiding ethical principles. Many also charge that he cannot offer any such principles. Levinas thinks there is an aspect of our encounters with other persons, one involving the responsibilities we have to them, that cannot be fully comprehended, and he criticizes philosophers for not respecting this fact. Yet (...) it would seem contradictory for him, in turn, to develop ethical rules or norms that purport to be expressive of this side of human life. My dissertation shows that this criticism is misplaced. I argue, first, that he draws his epistemic conclusions about the transcendence of what he calls "the human other" by reflecting on the fact that our ethical responsibilities to others override other relationships we have to them. Another person is always, first and foremost, a being to whom I have certain obligations; Levinas uses the rhetoric of transcendence and infinitude to emphasize the way in which acknowledging these responsibilities differs from other acts of cognition. Nothing in his argument, however, prevents him from specifying a normative ethics. I develop this argument in part through a close reading of pivotal sections of Totality and Infinity. I also test it by reviewing claims he makes about the inexplicability of the Holocaust. My dissertation's later chapters show that Levinas does, in fact, specify a normative ethics in his work. I review several places where he endorses liberal ethical ideals. I also clarify his brand of liberalism by faulting recent efforts to assimilate his ethics to some form of Kantian liberalism. (shrink)