As genomic science has evolved, so have policy and practice debates about how to describe and evaluate the ways in which genomic information is treated for individuals, institutions, and society. The term genetic exceptionalism, describing the concept that genetic information is special or unique, and specifically different from other kinds of medical information, has been utilized widely, but often counterproductively in these debates. We offer genomic contextualism as a new term to frame the characteristics of genomic science in the debates. (...) Using stasis theory to draw out the important connection between definitional issues and resulting policies, we argue that the framework of genomic contextualism is better suited to evaluating genomics and its policy-relevant features to arrive at more productive discussion and resolve policy debates. (shrink)

Curbside ethics consultations occur when an ethics consultant provides guidance to a party who seeks assistance over ethical concerns in a case, without the consultant involving other stakeholders, conducting his or her own comprehensive review of the case, or writing a chart note. Some have argued that curbside consultation is problematic because the consultant, in focusing on a single narrative offered by the party seeking advice, necessarily fails to account for the full range of moral perspectives. Their concern is that (...) any guidance offered by the ethics consultant will privilege and empower one party’s viewpoint over—and to the exclusion of—other stakeholders. This could lead to serious harms, such as the ethicist being reduced to a means to an end for a clinician seeking to achieve his or her own preferred outcome, the ethicist denying the broader array of stakeholders input in the process, or the ethicist providing wrongheaded or biased advice, posing dangers to the ethical quality of decision-making. Although these concerns are important and must be addressed, we suggest that they are manageable. This paper proposes using conflict coaching, a practice developed within the discipline of conflict management, to mitigate the risks posed by curbside consultation, and thereby create new spaces for moral discourse in the care of patients. Thinking of curbside consultations as an opportunity for clinical ethics conflict coaching can more fully integrate ethics committee members into the daily ethics of patient care and reduce the frequency of ethically harmful outcomes. (shrink)

Curbside ethics consultations occur when an ethics consultant provides guidance to a party who seeks assistance over ethical concerns in a case, without the consultant involving other stakeholders, conducting his or her own comprehensive review of the case, or writing a chart note. Some have argued that curbside consultation is problematic because the consultant, in focusing on a single narrative offered by the party seeking advice, necessarily fails to account for the full range of moral perspectives. Their concern is that (...) any guidance offered by the ethics consultant will privilege and empower one party’s viewpoint over—and to the exclusion of—other stakeholders. This could lead to serious harms, such as the ethicist being reduced to a means to an end for a clinician seeking to achieve his or her own preferred outcome, the ethicist denying the broader array of stakeholders input in the process, or the ethicist providing wrongheaded or biased advice, posing dangers to the ethical quality of decision-making. Although these concerns are important and must be addressed, we suggest that they are manageable. This paper proposes using conflict coaching, a practice developed within the discipline of conflict management, to mitigate the risks posed by curbside consultation, and thereby create new “spaces” for moral discourse in the care of patients. Thinking of curbside consultations as an opportunity for “clinical ethics conflict coaching” can more fully integrate ethics committee members into the daily ethics of patient care and reduce the frequency of ethically harmful outcomes. (shrink)

In May 2011, the clinical ethics group of the Center for Ethics at Washington Hospital Center launched a 40-hour, three and one-half day Clinical Ethics Immersion Course. Created to address gaps in training in the practice of clinical ethics, the course is for those who now practice clinical ethics and for those who teach bioethics but who do not, or who rarely, have the opportunity to be in a clinical setting. “Immersion” refers to a high-intensity clinical ethics experience in a (...) busy, urban, acute care hospital. During the Immersion Course, participants join clinical ethicists on working rounds in intensive care units and trauma service. Participants engage in a videotaped role-play conversation with an actor. Each simulated session reflects a practical, realistic clinical ethics case consultation scenario. Participants also review patients’ charts, and have small group discussions on selected clinical ethics topics. As ethics consultation requests come into the center, Immersion Course participants accompany clinical ethicists on consultations.Specific to this pilot, because participants’ evaluations and course faculty impressions were positive, the Center for Ethics will conduct the course twice each year. We look forward to improving the pilot and establishing the Immersion Course as one step towards addressing the gap in training opportunities in clinical ethics. (shrink)

Ethics rounds in clinical ethics have already taken hold in multiple venues. There are “sit-down rounds,” which usually consist of a bioethicist setting a specific, prescheduled time aside for residents and/or others to bring a case or two for discussion with the bioethicist. Another kind of rounds that occurs on an ad hoc or infrequent basis is to have either a staff or outside bioethicist give hospital-wide and/or departmental “grand rounds.” Grand rounds is a traditional educational format in medicine and (...) adding bioethics to the topics covered in grand rounds is an important means of elevating ethical awareness within a department or throughout a healthcare organization. Newer is the rounding practice of adding a bioethicist to other established rounding processes, such as case management and utilization review rounds. All of these kinds of ethics rounds are important opportunities to elevate the level of moral discourse within a healthcare setting and are becoming part and parcel of any full-service hospital bioethics program. (shrink)

This paper presents the behavioral interview model that we developed to formalize our hiring practices when we, most recently, needed to hire a new clinical ethicist to join our staff at the Center for Ethics at Washington Hospital Center.

This paper presents the behavioral interview model that we developed to formalize our hiring practices when we, most recently, needed to hire a new clinical ethicist to join our staff at the Center for Ethics at Washington Hospital Center.

ABSTRACT This essay argues that science education can gain from close engagement with the history of science both in the training of prospective vocational scientists and in educating the broader public about the nature of science. First it shows how historicizing science in the classroom can improve the pedagogical experience of science students and might even help them turn into more effective professional practitioners of science. Then it examines how historians of science can support the scientific education of the general (...) public at a time when debates over “intelligent design” are raising major questions over the kind of science that ought to be available to children in their school curricula. It concludes by considering further work that might be undertaken to show how history of science could be of more general educational interest and utility, well beyond the closed academic domains in which historians of science typically operate. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This essay argues that science education can gain from close engagement with the history of science both in the training of prospective vocational scientists and in educating the broader public about the nature of science. First it shows how historicizing science in the classroom can improve the pedagogical experience of science students and might even help them turn into more effective professional practitioners of science. Then it examines how historians of science can support the scientific education of the general (...) public at a time when debates over “intelligent design” are raising major questions over the kind of science that ought to be available to children in their school curricula. It concludes by considering further work that might be undertaken to show how history of science could be of more general educational interest and utility, well beyond the closed academic domains in which historians of science typically operate. (shrink)

Over the past decade, interest in human enhancement has waxed and waned. The initial surge of interest and funding, driven by the US Army’s desire for a ‘Future Force Warrior’ has partly given way to the challenges of meeting operational demands abroad. However the ethical opportunities provided by soldier enhancement demand that investigation of its possibilities continue. Benefits include enhanced decision-making, improved force capability, reduced force size and lower casualty rates. These benefits — and enhancement itself — carry concomitant risks, (...) including morale issues due to tension between enhanced and unenhanced soldiers, the issues of enhanced veterans and ownership of enhanced bodies, challenges to the army’s core values and personal identity issues. A range of measures should be designed to highlight the opportunities offered by enhancement while also minimising the potential risks. This includes providing advice on which areas the army ought to demonstrate restraint in research for ethical reasons. (shrink)

Invisible Hand accounts of the operations of the competitive market are often thought to have two implications for morality as it confronts economic life. First, explanations of agents economic activities eschew constitutive appeal to moral notions; and second, such moralism is pernicious insofar as it tends to undermine the operations of a socially valuable social process. This is the Mandevillean Conceit. The Conceit rests on an avarice-only reading of the profit-motive that is mistaken. The avarice-only reading is not the only (...) way of characterising the profit-motive, and there are some positive grounds for thinking the benefits of profit pursuit are better attributed to the "lucrephile", and not the avarice-only "lucrepath". (shrink)

In this book, author John Lynch shows how three controversial experiments--the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the Willowbrook Hepatitis Study, and the Cincinnati Total Body Irradiation Study--have been remembered and forgotten, and why their memorialization or their erasure matters today.

Part I Philosophic Traditions Introduction to Part I 3 1 Philosophy and the Afro-American Experience 7 CORNEL WEST 2 African-American Existential Philosophy 33 LEWIS R. GORDON 3 African-American Philosophy: A Caribbean Perspective 48 PAGET HENRY 4 Modernisms in Black 67 FRANK M. KIRKLAND 5 The Crisis of the Black Intellectual 87 HORTENSE J. SPILLERS Part II The Moral and Political Legacy of Slavery Introduction to Part II 107 6 Kant and Knowledge of Disappearing Expression 110 RONALD A. T. JUDY 7 (...) Social Contract Theory, Slavery, and the Antebellum Courts 125 ANITA L. ALLEN AND THADDEUS POPE 8 The Morality of Reparations II 134 BERNARD R. BOXILL Part III Africa and Diaspora Thought Introduction to Part III 151 9 “Afrocentricity‘: Critical Considerations 155 LUCIUS T. OUTLAW, JR. 10 African Retentions 168 TOMMY L. LOTT 11 African Philosophy at the Turn of the Century 190 ALBERT G. MOSLEY Part IV Gender, Race, and Racism Introduction to Part IV 199 12 Some Group Matters: Intersectionality, Situated Standpoints, and Black Feminist Thought 205 PATRICIA HILL COLLINS 13 Radicalizing Feminisms from “The Movement Era‘ 230 JOY A. JAMES 14 Philosophy and Racial Paradigms 239 NAOMI ZACK 15 Racial Classification and Public Policy 255 DAVID THEO GOLDBERG 16 White Supremacy 269 CHARLES W. MILLS Part V Legal and Social Philosophy Introduction to Part V 285 17 Self-Respect, Fairness, and Living Morally 293 LAURENCE M. THOMAS 18 The Legacy of Plessy v. Ferguson 306 MICHELE MOODY-ADAMS 19 Some Reflections on the Brown Decision and Its Aftermath 313 HOWARD McGARY 20 Contesting the Ambivalence and Hostility to Affirmative Action within the Black Community 324 LUKE C. HARRIS 21 Subsistence Welfare Benefits as Property Interests: Legal Theories and Moral Considerations 333 RUDOLPH V. VANTERPOOL 22 Racism and Health Care: A Medical Ethics Issue 349 ANNETTE DULA 23 Racialized Punishment and Prison Abolition 360 ANGELA Y. DAVIS Part VI Aesthetic and Cultural Values Introduction to Part VI 373 24 The Harlem Renaissance and Philosophy 381 LEONARD HARRIS 25 Critical Theory, Aesthetics, and Black Modernity 386 LORENZO C. SIMPSON 26 Black Cinema and Aesthetics 399 CLYDE R. TAYLOR 27 Thanatic Pornography, Interracial Rape, and the Ku Klux Klan 407 T. DENEAN SHARPLEY-WHITING 28 Lynching and Burning Rituals in African-American Literature 413 TRUDIER HARRIS-LOPEZ 29 Rap as Art and Philosophy 419 RICHARD SHUSTERMAN 30 Microphone Commandos: Rap Music and Political Ideology 429 BILL E. LAWSON 31 Sports, Political Philosophy, and the African American 436 GERALD EARLY. (shrink)

This paper discusses recent neuroscientific research that indicates a solution for what we label the ''causal problem'' of pain qualia, the problem of how the brain generates pain qualia. In particular, the data suggest that pain qualia naturally supervene on activity in a specific brain region: the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). The first section of this paper discusses several philosophical concerns regarding the nature of pain qualia. The second section overviews the current state of knowledge regarding the neuroanatomy and physiology (...) of pain processing. The third section highlights the recent research by Rainville et al. [(1997) Pain affect encoded in human anterior cingulate but not somatosensory cortex, Science, 277, 968-971], which suggests that pain affect is encoded in the ACC. The final section of the paper spells out exactly how these data affect the causal problem of pain qualia. (shrink)

This article examines three films by the Swedish director Ruben Östlund: Play, Force Majeure, and The Square. It describes the role of mobile phones in the films, both on the level of content and in terms of aesthetics. Within the films, the failure of the phone to connect the protagonists to significant others is seen as symbolic of an alienation that leads them to points of crisis. Here, the mobile phone works as a device in two ways. First, as a (...) significant communication technology, and second, as a plot contrivance to advance the dramatic conflict. Critically, the mobile phone opens an uncertain space where subjectivity becomes increasingly insecure, precisely as it becomes fundamentally intertwined with it. There is a cinematic tradition of mobilizing this ambiguity to which this process can be connected. Further, the form of these works is considered in relation to the notion of traumatic repetition, and how this expands into the wider contemporary image-culture and the key influence of YouTube within this. Here, the films are considered in relation to the changing dynamic of the public sphere in the light of the mobile recording capabilities, that have come to shape an emergent cinematic aesthetic evident in these films. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:The foundation story of bioethics is, as Susan Reverby (2009) argues, one of a trinity of horror stories culminating in what we commonly call the "Tuskegee Syphilis Study." The foundation story emphasizes that medical researchers violated participant autonomy by deceiving them about their medical conditions, the goals of the study, and the treatments they would receive, and by failing to consider the health and best interests of the research participant. While this story reflects some key elements of the Tuskegee study, (...) it is only a selection of all the possible facts that, as a consequence, deflects attention from equally salient and problematic elements of the Public Health Service's unethical study and its context. Those elements not included in the bioethics foundation story represent the types of racial and social inequities that COVID-19 and other contemporary events have thrown into stark relief. If bioethics plans to emphasize translational work around public policy and public engagement understood broadly, then it will need to revise and expand the story it tells about itself and its founding. (shrink)

The Willowbrook Hepatitis Study is one of the best-known examples of unethical medical research, but the research has always had defenders. One of the more intriguing defenses continually used was that critics did not know the researchers on the study and, therefore, could not assess their ethics. This essay traces the appeal to the researchers’ characters across published research and archival sources from the 1960s through today. These appeals reflect the observation as old as Aristotle that one of the most (...) potent modes of persuasion is ethos or character. The specific types of character in these appeals develop out of the paternalistic nature of clinical and research practice in the mid-twentieth century. If the individual physician is the locus of medical judgment, then the physician’s character becomes a key concern for bioethics. These appeals still appear and have implications for bioethics in the present day. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article is an attempt to firstly locate and situate the creative practice of Björk in the cultural and musical milieu of late 1970s, early 1980s punk and post-punk world. It traces the impacts, relevancies and typifications that were a part of this milieu and describes their affect on the development of Björk’s work. Secondly it sugg ests that this particular cultural practice worked through notions of the utopian that were and are imbued within processes of cultural hybridity and (...) evolved through a globalized travelogue that was always a transitory moment of unification in different locations and situations. This analysis attempts to give a sense of how the utopian can be actualized momentarily in ‘pirate spaces’ but also how a body of knowledge and practical work can be developed and turned into ‘lifeworld’ practice by these continued engagements. The article utilizes and develops ideas from Schutz, Deleuze and Guattari, Bloch, Levitas and Durrschmidt. (shrink)

This collection of essays explores the metaphysical thesis that the living world is not made up of substantial particles or things, as has often been assumed, but is rather constituted by processes. The biological domain is organised as an interdependent hierarchy of processes, which are stabilised and actively maintained at different timescales. Even entities that intuitively appear to be paradigms of things, such as organisms, are actually better understood as processes. Unlike previous attempts to articulate processual views of biology, which (...) have tended to use Alfred North Whitehead’s panpsychist metaphysics as a foundation, this book takes a naturalistic approach to metaphysics. It submits that the main motivations for replacing an ontology of substances with one of processes are to be found in the empirical findings of science. Biology provides compelling reasons for thinking that the living realm is fundamentally dynamic, and that the existence of things is always conditional on the existence of processes. The phenomenon of life cries out for theories that prioritise processes over things, and it suggests that the central explanandum of biology is not change but rather stability, or more precisely, stability attained through constant change. This edited volume brings together philosophers of science and metaphysicians interested in exploring the consequences of a processual philosophy of biology. The contributors draw on an extremely wide range of biological case studies, and employ a process perspective to cast new light on a number of traditional philosophical problems, such as identity, persistence, and individuality. (shrink)

Lee emphasizes the need to better understand the moral relationship between researchers and participants connoted by precision medicine, with the framework of “the gift” offering bioethics a...

This article extends earlier research concerning the relationship between corporate social performance and corporate financial performance, with particular emphasis on methodological inconsistencies. Research in this area is extended in three critical areas. First, it focuses on a particular industry, the chemical industry. Second, it uses multiple sources of data-two that are perceptual based (KLD Index and Fortune reputation survey), and two that are performance based (TRI database and corporate philanthropy) in order to triangulate toward assessing corporate social performance. Third, it (...) uses the five most commonly applied accounting measures in the corporate social performance and corporate financial performance (CSP/CFP) literature to assess corporate financial performance. The results indicate that the a priori use of measures may actually predetermine the CSP/CFP relationship outcome. Surprisingly, Fortune and KLD indices very closely track one another, whereas TRI and corporate philanthropy differentiate between high and low social performers and do not correlate to the firm's financial performance. (shrink)

Discovered one hundred years ago, Aristotle's Athenaion Politeia is invaluable to contemporary understanding of Athenian democracy. As a historical record, however, it has been found to be so unreliable that some have questioned its true authorship, and it has remained largely ignored by those studying philosophy and literature. Keaney uses a literary approach to reassert Aristotle's authorship and to present the Athenaion Politeia as a document that defies the constraints of any particular genre--probably never intended to be a piece of (...) historical writing. He goes beyond the traditional approach of historical analysis to consider the work as characteristic of a new and innovative genre created by Aristotle, that of empirically-based cultural history. (shrink)