In response to the continued expansion of “red flag” laws allowing broader classes of people to petition a court for the removal of firearms from individuals who exhibit dangerous conduct, this paper argues that state laws should adopt a double-filter provision that balances individual rights and government public safety interests. The main component of such a provision is a special statutory category — “reporting party” — that enables a broader social network, such as co-workers or school administrators, to request that (...) a law enforcement officer file a petition for an Extreme Risk Protection Order. A double-filter provision would not give reporting parties a right to file a court petition directly. Instead, parties would file a request for petition with law enforcement officers, who must seek an ERPO from the court if they find the reporting party's information credible. That information is then transmitted to the court as a sworn affidavit of the reporting party. The goal is to facilitate a balanced policy model that widens the reporting circle in order to feed more potentially life-saving information into the system, mitigates the risk of erroneous deprivation of constitutionally protected due process and Second Amendment rights. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Bridge From Analysis to Action:Psychodynamic Analyses of Religion and Michael S. Hogue's American ImmanenceAJ Turner (bio)I. IntroductionThe purpose of this essay is to work constructively with Michael S. Hogue's groundbreaking American Immanence: Democracy for an Uncertain World to demonstrate how psychodynamic analyses of religion are essential theoretical allies in the fight for resilient democracy. The "revolution in mind"1 that psychodynamic approaches contribute, especially in their analyses of religion, (...) both complements and complicates socio-political theory as a whole. In the improvisational spirit of "yes-and," the goal here is not to identify and decry the failures and shortcomings of Hogue's theopolitical vision but rather to inspire the recovery of a sibling discourse—a kind of "rebirth of a forgotten alternative"2—that also draws deeply from the American immanental tradition in order to add psychodynamic depth to Hogue's timely and important analysis. Psychodynamic theories of religion shed light on how symbolic identifications, including and especially ultimate concerns, structure personal and collective experience. By engaging religion and theology sympathetically, constructively, and creatively, theorists such as Rollo May, Gordon Allport, Karen Horney, Erich Fromm, and Ernest Becker departed from the skepticism, reductionism, and dismissal that characterized psychoanalytic analyses of religion in the wake of Freud.3 Each of these figures, and especially Becker whose work will be a focus in this essay, are noteworthy interlocutors for extending Hogue's theopolitical theorizing of resilient democracy, particularly in how they drew unique inspiration from the American immanental tradition [End Page 44] in their social analyses. In this respect, they provide a more robust theorization of the psychosocial conditions of the associational ethos needed to connect Hogue's conception of resilient democracy with forms of agonistic organization and democratic activism. Briefly stated, psychodynamic approaches are a helpful bridge for connecting these proposals to strategies of organization, their impediments, and collective action.In this way, both psychodynamic analyses of religion and Hogue's theopolitical innovation insist that no revolutionary political change is possible, and certainly not of the kind or scale needed to counter our wickedly entangled global crises, without a deep engagement with theological imaginaries. They differ, however, in their theoretical aims. Whereas Hogue compellingly argues for the political upshot of a theology deriving from the American immanental tradition, psychodynamic analysts of religion focus on the function of ultimate concerns in individual and collective life. In other words, American Immanence rests on a methodology of analyzing the philosophical and theological assumptions that have contributed to our climate crises and then presenting clear and compelling articulation of an alternative paradigm meant to open up new ways of being. In contrast psychodynamic analyses leverage conceptual clarity of psychic reality for the fundamentally therapeutic aim of transformation. At their best, both approaches share what could be called an etiological orientation to ontological questions in order to provide liberative alternatives through rational understanding and clarification, but the terrain, and thus the problems they hope to mitigate in their analyses are focused differently. Extending the visual metaphor, they are different lenses highlighting different areas of the same landscape. Furthermore, it must be said that neither are sufficient in themselves, but the psychodynamic theorists of religion to be highlighted in this essay share deeply with Hogue's heading in American Immanence.II. A Problematic AssumptionIn emphasizing and attempting to explain4 the role of non-rational processes in the both individual and social processes of perception and organization of experience, psychodynamic theories confound a widely held and problematic assumption that the triumph of rational analysis is the hallmark for building the society to which we should aspire. Political theory in general, [End Page 45] especially as it has taken its cues from a rationalist legacy about the inherently liberating force of Reason, has been weighted toward an assumption that its task of exposing the mystifications of power would suffice in inspiring more "rational" and therefore necessarily equitable social organization. This speaks to the longstanding socio-political interest in "consciousness raising" tactics, which are often meant to dispel "false consciousness." It even comes across in the emphases of Deweyan pragmatists on education. Psychologists of all stripes point out that this approach... (shrink)

Wilkinson’s discussion of the individual and family consent to organ and tissue donation is to be welcomed because it draws attention to the “incoherent hybrid” of the current position.1 I wish to highlight some areas of his discussion and propose that, in a situation of posthumous organ and tissue donation, the cadaver has no individual rights and family rights should under no circumstances automatically outweigh the potential transplant recipients’ right to a life-saving treatment.Transplant immunobiology and clinical transplantation is (...) a revolutionary area of medicine and has saved thousands of lives. In the UK, between 1 April 2004 and 31 March 2005, organs from 752 people who died were used to save or dramatically improve many people’s lives through 2242 transplants.2 In the US, 23 506 transplants were performed between January and October 2005 from 12 084 donors.3 Information from available databases shows that demand for organs, cells and tissues has outstripped the supply. As of 18 January 2006, 6553 people are still waiting for transplants in the UK and there are 90 636 waiting list transplant candidates in the US.2,3 As of 01 January 2006, there are 15 977 people active on the Eurotransplant waiting list.4 It is likely that non-compulsory posthumous donation of organs has resulted in the loss of many thousands, possibly many …. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:"And Her Substance Would Be Mine":Envy, Hate, and Ontological Evacuation in Josephine Hart's SinA. Samuel Kimball (bio)Envy involuntarily testifies to a lack of being that puts the envious to shame.—René Girard, A Theatre of EnvySin, offspring of snt-ya, "that which is," in Germanic sun(d)jo, "it is true," "the sin is real," and ultimately from es-, "to be," source of am, is, sooth, soothe; of the Sanskrit roots sat- and (...) sant-, "existing, true, virtuous"; of the Latin, esse, "to be," from which is derived such words as essence, presence, absence, and represent; of the Greek roots einei, "to be" as well as ont-, "being," which provides the name for the philosophical study of being itself, ontology.—Adapted from The American Heritage Dictionaryof Indo-European RootsI: Ruth Garton's Envious NarrationThe etymology of sin suggests that the evil it names reveals something fundamental about being, something ruinous and yet unavoidable, something that endangers or even nullifies being and yet is inseparable from it, even essential to it. In Josephine Hart's second novel, Sin, this something is a species of Girardian desire in the form of a monstrous envy, which impels the first-person narrator, Ruth Garton, to a lifelong hatred of her cousin and stepsister, Elizabeth. The focus of Ruth's confessional narrative, envy, drives Ruth to take covert and increasingly virulent revenge against her quasi-sibling in a self-deluding attempt to appropriate not only the objects of Elizabeth's desire but ultimately Elizabeth's desire itself and the apparent ontological fullness that Ruth attributes to it. Over the course of her life, then, Ruth loses the promise [End Page 239] of her name in her ruthless pursuit of her enemy. As she becomes increasingly frustrated in her efforts to destroy her sister's life, Ruth finally turns her hatred of her nemesis against herself as well as the readers to whom she appeals for understanding. If envy heightens Ruth's consciousness to the point where she can perceive that her desire signals her ontological emptiness, nevertheless, it so captures her, so dominates her emotional and cognitive life, that she is unable to find a way to affirm her own—or anyone else's—being in the world. The result is a spectacular narrative record of the cost of recognizing but being unable to resist the mimeticism of desire.1II. The Girardian Dynamic of SinAs Girard has demonstrated, one of the most difficult existential challenges is to understand that desire is mimetically mediated. The result is that we come into our desire only through someone else's and always want something more and other than we think we want. Behind every move to possess a particular object is a largely unrecognized and in principle unsatisfiable desire for absolute satisfaction in the form of ontological completeness, self-sufficiency, intactness. On the one hand, Girard writes, "by the example of his own desire…the model conveys to the subject the supreme desirability of the object" (1977, 146). On the other hand, since to desire mimetically means to come into desire through the other rather than through oneself, by this same example the model conveys to the subject the contingency, the dependency, the secondariness, hence the emptiness of the subject's desire, even the subject's lack of desire, the lack that, paradoxically, constitutes his or her desire. Therefore, to be subjected to the other's want ultimately has the effect of signaling the seeming priority, fullness, and self-origination of this other person's desire. For this reason Girard asserts that "man... desires being, something he himself lacks and which some other person seems to possess" (146).If at first the other person models the desire that the subject lacks, it is in the logic of mimesis that the other will become a rival and, unless the rivalry is somehow interrupted or abrogated, inevitably an enemy to be destroyed. The subject will become locked into a potentially deadly game of trying to obtain the same object that the model desires, so as to experience the satisfactions—ultimately, the sense of being—that the object in question seems to provide... (shrink)

On the ethics of extending human life: healthy people have a right to carry on livingHumanity has long demonstrated a paradoxical ambivalence concerning the extension of a healthy human lifespan. Modest health extension has been universally sought, whereas extreme health extension has been regarded as a snare and delusion—a dream beyond all others at first blush, but actually something we are better off without. The prevailing pace of biotechnological progress is bringing ever closer the day when humanity will (...) be able to act on the latter view by rejecting a clear and present opportunity for much longer healthy lives. Indeed, some biogerontologists contend that that day has already arrived, to the extent that our hesitation in embarking on a vigorous “war on ageing” is already delaying the point at which a cure for ageing will be developed. Here I consider whether our present caution concerning the wisdom of truly curing ageing is likely to survive the increased scrutiny that it will receive in coming years as a result of these technical advances. I conclude that it will not, because of its irreconcilability with values that are more deeply held by the large majority of humanity than any values that argue against the quest for a cure. I further conclude that all the major current reasons given for not curing ageing are mere crutches to help us cope with the immutability of ageing that we have been brought up to accept. Our failure to set aside such irrationality is already shortening potential longevity—quite probably of those already alive today—to a staggering degree. Once we realise this, our determination to consign human ageing to history will be second …. (shrink)

Following the trend of sharing, and associating being on-line with being 'on-life', many people are now demanding the ownership and control of their data across all processing phases, including the erasure of their presence on the web. In Europe, recent proposals for regulation include an explicit 'Right to be Forgotten'; this right stated in the European Commission Proposal for Regulation COM 2011/12 does not emerge without controversy. It is being criticised on several grounds, including clashing with other (...) rights, such as freedom of expression, as well as setting the terrain for censorship. Besides the purely legal aspects of the proposed provisions, the chapters of this volume discuss how those legal provisions correspond in practice to worldviews and how individual and collective memory must be governed. They look into the deeper consequences of such provisions to construction of identity, culture and community formation, and how such a right affects how, what and why individuals, groups and societies remember and forget. (shrink)

In England and Wales, there is significant controversy on the law related to abortion. Recent discussions have focussed predominantly on the health professional's right to conscientious objection. This article argues for a comprehensive overhaul of the law from the perspective of an author who adopts the view that all unborn human beings should be granted the prima facie right to life. It is argued that, should the law be modified in accordance with this stance, it need not (...) imply that health professionals should enjoy an unqualified right to object to participating in the provision of abortion. Indeed, it is proposed that – in some situations – women should be granted a positive right to abortion. While the focus of this article is on changing the law in England and Wales, it is hoped that the position developed here will also inspire legal debate and reform elsewhere. (shrink)

There are various ways of attempting to defend an extreme liberal view on abortion, according to which a woman always has the right to control what happens inside her own body. First of all, there is the popular view that appeals to the idea that there is a fundamental, underived right that women have to control what occurs within their own bodies. Secondly, there is a related type of philosophical argument advanced by Judith Jarvis Thomson in her famous (...) and oft-reprinted article “A Defense of Abortion” for the slightly weaker claim that while abortion is not always permissible, since, as she says near the end of her essay, it is impermissible in, and only in, the following circumstances: “There may well be cases where carrying the child to term requires only Minimally Decent Samaritanism of the mother, and this is a standard w must not fall below.” Subsequently, Thomson’s type of argument was then developed and defended at much greater length by David Boonin in his very carefully argued book A Defense of Abortion, though Boonin does not discuss the case of the Minimally Decent Samaritan. I believe that there is a strong objection to the Thomson/Boonin approach to justifying abortion. It was set out in an article by Richard Langer, namely, in ‘Silverstein and the “Responsibility Objection”’, Social Theory and Practice 19/3. 345-58. Langer’s discussion is not, in general, very strong, but in a very important paragraph, on pages 351-2, Langer argues that if the responsibility objection to Thomson is unsound, then it follows that there will also be circumstances in which allowing one’s children to die, simply because one no longer wishes to care for them, will also be morally permissible. David Boonin replies to Langer’s objection in his A Defense of Abortion, but in discussing, on pages 182-3, Langer’s point about a parent’s responsibility to his or her children, Boonin relies upon a tacit consent argument that appears open to decisive objections. It seems to me, then, that the only possibility for a successful defense of an extreme liberal view concerning the justification of abortion will have to involve setting out a plausible account of what it is that gives something a right to life, and I think that the right answer is that neo-Lockean persons, and only neo-Lockean persons, have a right to continued existence. This leaves one with the scientific question of when developing humans become neo-Lockean persons. The answer to that question is perhaps still not firmly settled, although the extensive research that I carried out back in the 1970s seemed to me to support the conclusion that it is not until sometime that humans acquire the capacity for thought, a capacity that is necessary if a developing human is to be a neo-Lockean person. The upshot is that if one defends an extreme liberal view on abortion in the only way that seems to be satisfactory – that is, by setting out an account of what it is that gives something a right to life, and arguing that humans before birth do not have the relevant property, one must also address the question of infanticide, and that to fail to do so is intellectually unacceptable. (shrink)

The Groningen Protocol and contemporary defences of the legalisation of infanticide are predicated on actualism and personism. According to these related ideas, human beings achieve their moral status in virtue of the degree to which they are capable of laying value upon their lives or exhibiting certain qualities, like not being in pain or being desirable to third party family members. This article challenges these notions suggesting that both ideas depend on arbitrary and discriminatory notions of human moral status. Our (...) propensity to sleep, fall unconscious, pass out and so on, demonstrates that we very often exhibit our status as “potential persons.” Our abilities can and do fluctuate. The equal dignity principle, distinguished in turn from both the excesses of vitalism and consequentialism, is analyzed in the context of human rights logic and law. The normalization of non-voluntary euthanasia, via such ad hoc practices as the Groningen Protocol is considered. Substituted ‘consent’ to the euthanasia of infants or others, is scrutinized and the implications of institutionalizing non-voluntary euthanasia in the context of financial, research and political interests are considered. The impact on the medical and legal professions, carers, families and coroners, as well as public attitudes more generally, is discussed. It is suggested that eroding the value of human life carries with it significant destructive and hazardous long-term implications for societies. To elevate some long-term implications whilst ignoring others demonstrates the irrational nature of the effort to institutionalize euthanasia. (shrink)

Genetic testing has familial implications. Counsellors find themselves in (moral) conflict between medical confidentiality (towards the patient) and a potential right or even duty to warn at-risk relatives. Legal regulations vary between countries. English literature about German law is scarce. We reviewed the literature of relevant legal cases, focussing on German law, according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines. This article aims to familiarise counsellors with their responsibilities, compare the situation between countries and point (...) out legally unresolved areas.According to the German Genetic Diagnostics Act (Gendiagnostikgesetz) in case of an ‘avoidable or treatable’ genetic disorder, geneticists ought to confine themselves to the obligated advice to the patient. Whether a breach of the duty of confidentiality can be justified in exceptional cases by ‘necessity as justification’ for actively informing relatives at risk remains legally unclear. In case of a ‘neither avoidable nor treatable’ genetic disease, geneticists should also refrain from actively informing relatives as the justifiable state of emergency does not permit to break the duty of confidentiality. (shrink)

Background. South African surrogacy law includes a provision, known as the genetic link requirement, that commissioning parents must use their own gametes for the conception of a surrogate child. As a result, infertile persons who cannot contribute gametes for the conception of a child are prohibited from accessing surrogacy as a way to establish families. The genetic link requirement was previously the subject of a constitutional challenge, but the challenge was rejected by a divided Constitutional Court bench with a seven-to-four (...) majority. The genetic link requirement is again being challenged in a new lawsuit.Objective. In light of the history of the issue, this article investigates the viability of relying on infertile persons’ right to family life in the new lawsuit. Method. The investigation takes the form of a human rights analysis.Results. The right to family life was not considered in the previous case. As such, the right to family life constitutes a new legal issue that falls outside the scope of the precedent set by the Constitutional Court, and can therefore be relied upon. The genetic link requirement is a clear violation of infertile persons’ right to family life, which includes the right to establish a family. Potential justifications for such violation are considered, but found wanting. Accordingly, the genetic link requirement is unconstitutional and should be struck out.Conclusion. The outcome of the previous lawsuit was an injustice towards infertile persons. The new lawsuit presents an opportunity for this injustice to be rectified by vindicating infertile persons’ right to family life. (shrink)

The advent of personal genomics companies offering direct translation of scientific data into personal health information, calls into question traditional policies to refuse disclosure of such scientific data to research participants. This seems especially true for population biobanks, as they collect not only genotype information but also associated phenotype information, and thus may be in a unique position to translate their scientific findings into personal health information for their participants. Disclosure of such information seems mandated by the expectations raised by (...) biobanks and their participants' rights to know health information, to know clinical research results, to life and health and particularly their right to benefit. Refusals to disclose such information can be grounded in the lack of analytical validity and/or clinical utility of most findings, the need to avoid the therapeutic misconception, the complexity and costs involved in translation and disclosure and the disproportionate burden resulting from the obligation to respect participants' right not to know before any disclosure can be made. Currently, any demands by participants in population biobanks for full disclosure of all pertinent personal health information potentially resulting from the biobank's scientific findings are unlikely to be granted by a Dutch court under Dutch and international law. As the law stands now, a population biobank is neither a doctor nor a personal genomics company. However, in view of the rapid scientific, medical, technological, commercial and social developments, population biobanks must prepare to take more care of their participants' legitimate interest in receiving as much validated personal health information as reasonably possible, in a timely fashion, by developing appropriate translation and disclosure mechanisms. This paper examines whether population biobank participants have the right, under Dutch civil law and international law, to full disclosure, i.e. to all information generated by the biobank that is pertinent to their present and future health. It pioneers the format of a hypothetical court case to elucidate the legal and policy arguments" for and against full disclosure. (shrink)

Demands for access to experimental therapies are frequently framed in the language of rights. This article examines the justifiability of such demands in the specific context of surgical innovations, these being promising but non-validated and potentially risky departures from standard surgical practices. I argue that there is a right to access innovative surgery, drawing analogies with other generally accepted rights in medicine, such as the right not to be forcibly treated, to buy contraceptives, and to choose to have (...) an abortion, including a post-viability abortion where the mother's life or health is threatened by the pregnancy. I argue that we accept these rights because we believe that people are entitled to try to preserve their lives and health and to make choices of an important and intensely personal kind, and I suggest that a person's choice of medical treatment should be seen in the same light. However, since few rights are absolute, I also consider the circumstances in which it may be justifiable to limit the right to access innovative surgery. In discussing this question, I apply the human rights standard of proportionality, comparing the importance of the reasons for limiting the right with the severity of the invasion on liberty. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Recovering Aquinas's Common-Good-Oriented Right of RebellionNathaniel A. MoatsIntroductionAs recent events have woefully displayed, armed rebellion is not a topic of merely theoretical interest.1 While theory seemingly has very little impact on the citizens participating in armed rebellions, theory still remains of paramount importance, providing crucial criteria to evaluate, restrain, apply, and respond to such force. Criteria such as legitimate authority, just cause, right intention, necessity, proportionality, and (...) likelihood of success have been offered by thinkers advocating "just war" theory from across diverse political, philosophical, and religious backgrounds, garnering widespread agreement over the centuries. Contemporary scholars who identify as "historically oriented" just war thinkers have continued to defend that historical tradition as a sufficient and substantial guide for contemporary practice.2 Yet some have questioned whether the it can provide useful aid for dealing with contexts of political tyranny. In a 2013 article, Valeria Morkevičius describes [End Page 175] Western culture as divided over the moral permissibility of armed rebellion, with advocates basing their views on the Enlightenment ideas found in John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whereas traditional just war theorists have generally denied a right to armed rebellion.3 In Morkevičius's perspective, she argues that there can be justified use of armed force against tyranny and calls upon other scholars to help create a "just rebellion theory" that would "radically reimagine" traditional just war thinking.4 She claims that there is a "lack of a systematic and rigorous ethical framework for evaluating the justness of rebellions"5 and that "a new theory of just rebellion—a systematic way of evaluating the justness of real world rebellions, of determining appropriate state responses to domestic rebellions, and of weighing the pros and cons of intervention" is needed.6In line with Morkevičius' sentiments, the last ten years has seen the increasing rise of self-proclaimed just war revisionists.7 Jeff McMahan, the figurehead for this movement, claims that the classical just war criteria "can no longer stand."8 McMahan argues that traditional just war theory has [End Page 176] depicted war as a morally sui generis category of violence in which unique moral principles apply.9 The moral asymmetry of war is also reinforced by a "statist" and "collectivist" orientation that overrides the importance of individuals and their rights of life, liberty, property, and other fundamental goods. Instead of seeing war as a distinct category of violence, McMahan argues that war and self-defense are morally symmetrical. Further, he argues that combatants should be depicted as individuals distinct from their political or collective identity.10 In other words, McMahan offers a theory of war oriented around individuals and their rights based in the concept of justified self-defense.11 Extending McMahan's theory, Cécile Fabre has particularly targeted the criterion of legitimate authority as morally problematic.12 Rejecting the exclusive authorization of armed force by political authorities, she argues in favor of an individual's right to war, and by extension the right to rebellion.13 Therefore, given the historical just war tradition's emphasis on the criterion of legitimate authority (i.e., the restriction of armed force [End Page 177] to established authorities) and resistance to support armed rebellions due to the lack of recognized political leaders, revisionists conclude that traditional just war thinking is inadequate for providing contemporary guidance in the context of rebellion.14To challenge revisionist claims, I analyze Thomas Aquinas's ingenuity and relevance for future "just rebellion" thinking. First, I argue that classical just war thinking is not as antithetical to armed rebellion as suggested.15 One just rebellion theory has coexisted alongside the classical formation of just war theory, albeit often neglected or ignored by contemporary thinkers.16 It is well known that Aquinas formalized the Augustinian classical just war theory revolving around the criteria of legitimate authority, just cause, and right intention. Much less known, however, is the fact that Aquinas also crafted criteria for justified armed rebellions. While Aquinas's just war thinking rearticulates Augustine's perspective, Aquinas appropriated his mentor's views to allow for justified armed rebellions. Aquinas's originality was displayed not only in allowing justified armed... (shrink)

Human rights protect the conditions of a minimally decent life of which mental health is an indispensable element. Adequate care for mental health is thus recognized as part of the human right to health. However, for populations living far from urban centers, adequate in-person (mental) health care is often extremely costly and thus not provided. Digital mental health care options have become an effective alternative to in-person treatment. Benefitting from these new digital opportunities, though, requires sufficient access (...) to the internet. Because everyone has a human right to adequate health care, and digital mental health care is now an effective option for progressively realizing this human right for people who live in remote regions, these people also have to be understood to have a right to access to the internet. This right to internet access creates duties for public authorities and the international community to create the required digital infrastructure and (where needed) to cover the costs of internet access where this is the only feasible way of delivering, or progressively realizing, the mental health care that is indispensable for having the opportunity to lead minimally decent lives. (shrink)

Spatial localization, often demarcated by food miles, has emerged as the dominant theme in movements for more socially just and environmentally benign alternative food systems, especially in industrialized countries such as the United States. We analyze how an emphasis on spatial localization, combined with the difficulty of defining and measuring adequate indicators for alternative food systems, can challenge efforts by food system researchers, environmental writers, the engaged public, and advocacy groups wanting to contribute to alternative food systems, and facilitates exploitation (...) by the mainstream players using “localwash” to maintain the status quo. New indicators are urgently needed because research shows that spatial localization in general and minimized food miles in particular are not adequate or even required for most of the goals of alternative food systems. Creating indicators to operationalize goals for alternative, local food systems requires asking the right questions to make sure indicators are not misleading us: What are the goals of alternative food systems? What actions and policies will most effectively achieve those goals? What is the potential of reducing food miles as an action and a policy for achieving goals? What are the best indicators for measuring progress toward goals? We discuss how these questions can be answered for a wide range of alternative food system goals via four categories according to the role of food miles reduction as an action and policy in promoting them: necessary and sufficient, necessary but not sufficient, potentially important, and potentially supportive. (shrink)

In his book Engineered Death: Abortion, Suicide, Euthanasia and Senecide, John Woods uses an argument from analogy to establish the following conclusion: even if one grants that foetuses are not persons but only potential persons, killing foetuses is murder. Murder, according to Woods, is the defeasibly wrongful violation of the right to life ascribed to persons. If this argument is successful, it would of course have profound consequences for the ongoing philosophical debate over the morality of abortion. Whether (...) or not they hold that foetuses are persons, philosophers would be forced to adopt the same moral attitude toward foeticide as they would adopt toward the killing of persons. That is, the killing of foetuses and the killing of persons would be defeasibly wrong in the same way; their wrongfulness could be defeated only in special and limited circumstances, perhaps like those suggested by Judith Thomson in her “Defense of Abortion”. (shrink)

Neither anti-illegal drug proponents nor their detractors have wholly plausible arguments for their positions, because neither takes responsibility for drug use sufficiently seriously. Instead, only a policy that places users’ responsibility at the forefront of the problem is acceptable, one that is sufficiently respectful of actual or potential nonusers’ rights not to be wrongfully harmed, directly or indirectly, by drug use, or coerced to support it in any way.

Linkage arguments, which defend a controversial right by showing that it is indispensable or highly useful to an uncontroversial right, are sometimes used to defend the right to health care. This article evaluates such arguments when used to defend RHC. Three common errors in using linkage arguments are neglecting levels of implementation, expanding the scope of the supported right beyond its uncontroversial domain, and giving too much credit to the supporting right for outcomes in its (...) area. A familiar linkage argument for RHC focuses on its contributions to the right to life. Among the problems with this argument are that it requires a positive conception of the right to life that is not uncontroversial and that it only justifies the subset of RHC that seeks to prevent loss of life. A linkage argument for RHC with better prospects claims that a well-realized right to health care enhances the realization of a number of uncontroversial rights. (shrink)

In this discussion note on Michal Pruski and Richard C. Playford’s “Artificial Wombs, Thomson and Abortion – What Might Change?,” I consider whether the prospect of ectogenesis technology would make abortion impermissible. I argue that a Thomson-style defense may not become inapplicable due to the right to life being conceived as a negative right. Further, if Thomson-style defenses do become inapplicable, those who claim that ectogenesis would be an obligatory alternative to abortion cannot do so without first (...) showing that fetuses have a right to life, something that Thomson assumed rather than argued for. I also include a discussion on ethical problems concerning what to do about children born from artificial wombs put there by those who looked to terminate their pregnancies because they sought to avoid parenthood. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Imagining Karma, Ethical Transformation in Amerindian, Buddhist, and Greek RebirthA. L. HermanImagining Karma, Ethical Transformation in Amerindian, Buddhist, and Greek Rebirth. By Gananath Obeyesekere. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. 448 pp.Gananath Obeyesekere, professor emeritus of anthropology at Princeton University, is probably one of the world's greatest living anthropologists. The proof of that assertion lies in this his latest work on comparative anthropology, a study of the concept (...) and practice of rebirth—"reincarnation" as he calls it—from ancient Greece and India to modern West Africa, Melanesia, and North America. In what follows let me briefly set forth what I understand his central thesis to be, the evidence for it, and the conclusions to be drawn from it. I will end with two very modest problems connected with this altogether intriguing and brilliant investigation into the doctrine of rebirth.As a modified structural anthropologist, Gananath Obeyesekere rejects the rationalist model structuralism of Claude Levi-Strauss. He follows instead the lead of two of his empiricist predecessors, Max Weber and Fernand Braudel, pointing out that structures, types, or models "are constructions of scholars, not universals waiting to be discovered" (p. 351). Consequently, as this book aptly proves, Obeyesekere's own "imagined" models are based on parole data following the actual language of the cultures being studied.Obeyesekere thus begins his book with an elementary rebirth structure based on such parole. He refers to this primitive, first structure as "rebirth eschatology," which entails the rebirth of a deceased's soul into the body of a newborn relative of the deceased but without any determining ethical component as found in the more sophisticated and complex "karmic eschatologies." Such ethically neutral kin group rebirths are found among certain small-scale societies in West Africa, the Trobriand Islands, the Northwest American coast tribes, and the Inuits (Eskimos). Obeyesekere [End Page 303] draws extensively on field studies of these groups to bolster his conclusions about them. This simple rebirth eschatology is non-Indic in origin, Obeyesekere claims, since no evidence of influences have been found between these practitioners of rebirth eschatology and work relating to the Indic religions (Hinduism and Buddhism). The entry of the soul into postdeath life, either in this world or the world of the ancestors, depends not at all, consequently, on one's this-worldly behavior such that "morality does not affect the fate of the soul after death" (p. 74).Obeyesekere turns next to the "transformation" of this rebirth eschatology. It occurs with the introduction of the concept of ethicization, "the processes whereby morally right or wrong action becomes a religiously right or wrong action that in turn affects a person's destiny after death" (p. 75). It is Obeyesekere's contention that when ethicization is systematically introduced into any rebirth eschatology the latter must logically transform itself into a so-called "karmic eschatology." In other words, this second topological model or conceptual structure, karmic eschatology, the new ethicized rebirth eschatology, says that the otherworld for the dead is not simply a way station for departed souls waiting to be reborn, but rather that otherworld is now a place of retribution and punishment. Kinship affiliation alone no longer determines who goes where after death but moral action does. My own guess is that rebirth eschatology was introduced to answer the question of why the grandchild resembles the deceased grandparent. Karmic eschatology, on the other hand, was probably introduced to solve a more complex and sophisticated puzzle: Why is it, if there really is justice in the universe, that the wicked never get appropriately punished and the good never get sufficiently rewarded? At this stage of transformation, the law of karma, or some other principle of universal justice, now says that everyone gets what's coming to them, either in this life or the next, and that rebirth is necessary to make that principle of justice workable.1 In arguing that "rebirth cannot be divorced from ethics; it looks as if it is generated from ethics" (p. 82), Obeyesekere would seem to concur that karmic eschatology was introduced to answer the question: Why do the wicked seem to prosper and the good appear to suffer?Following... (shrink)

Anxieties about the creation and destruction of human embryos for the purpose of scientific research on embryonic stem cells have given a new urgency to the question of whether embryos have moral rights. This article uses a thought experiment involving two possible worlds, somewhat removed from our own in the space of possibilities, to shed light on whether early embryos have such rights as a right not to be destroyed or discarded . It is argued that early embryos do (...) not have meaningful interests or any moral rights. Accordingly, claims about the moral rights of embryos do not justify restrictions on stem cell research. (shrink)

Most discussions about the risks associated with synthetic biology tend to begin and end with the same message. That is, in these revolutionary times, when the capabilities for designing and reengineer­ing biological agents are advancing at previously unimag­inable rates but have still not realized their full potential, when risks therefore remain uncertain, and where the actors are generally well‐meaning people who seek im­portant benefits for society and environment, the most reasonable approach is to exercise “prudent vigilance,” to minimize proscriptive oversight, (...) and to avoid judgments about and limitations on research until some elusive date when greater clarity might be achieved. This approach may be useful in allowing scientific research to move forward, but it strikes me as a politi­cal expedient that minimizes conflict between would‐be opposing factions with different values and backgrounds and as an excuse to avoid some difficult problems. Uncertainties about key features of the landscape seem to justify a reluctance to formulate judgments and promote action. I believe there are reasonable kinds of conclusions that can be made right now about when and how to con­duct and publish potentially dangerous research in the life sciences. These conclusions are enabled by a more rigorous examination of the nature of uncertainty in the conduct of experiments in synthetic biology and genetic engineering. (shrink)

continent. 2.2 (2012): 155–158 Michel Serres. Biogea . Trans. Randolph Burks. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing. 2012. 200 pp. | ISBN 9781937561086 | $22.95 Conveying to potential readers the significance of a book puts me at risk of glad handing. It’s not in my interest to laud the undeserving, especially on the pages of this journal. This is not a sales pitch, but rather an affirmation of a necessary work on very troubled terms: human, earth, nature, and the problematic world we made. (...) It is this world that aspirates the silence (so to speak), and therefore the subject which, along with the development of the “made world” exports the excess augmentation of the cosmically missing, this silence of the natural, et cetera. Had we learned from Locke that lesson of “labor,” to consume what we need… but perhaps we need more than what matters? Serres’ Biogea has several functions on this manner, if it is indeed a book to be consumed. First, readers searching for novelistic entertainment have a place to dwell. Biogea deserves a place in your back pocket; biographical generosity and poetic fluidity should satisfy most textual fetishes. For lay philosophers who want to refresh their acumen, Biogea deserves a place on the book shelf, one already reads a sorely needed postmodern tune-up here. Serres’ style is clearly French; he leaves few cheese crumbs on his words, rather preciseness and breathing in the work give way to a sweeping manner that breaks the narrative line of sight. A circular narrative and anachronistic fragmentation of terms allows an abyssal atmosphere to swell, if only to pump into the book the externality of its broader text. Biogea aspires to a higher standard and the book, at times, is thinking this negentropic problem too. Univocal, the publisher, has crafted a book appropriate for the hands to hold and the translations are an achievement of an otherwise difficult writer to translate. Terms are the conditions of a broader text. It is important to note that Serres’ content is as much a thinking of terminal ports. There is a regard for the transportation technology of the written word. For me, this is the mark of genius, a craftiness that tells of a book device that I may trust. Serres is an accomplished thinker and a necessary voice to check the putative trendiness of anti-postmodernist and market-driven theory of endless cultural liquidation. Offering interventions on subjectivity as an open system we are given a chance to affirm the human, not merely to discard it, but to engage its poetic image emotion, the calibratory silent sense of the analogic world; the terms on which we base our efforts. 1 The human is the center of its own negation, constantly mediating it. Something deeper at stake appears in the work then, and it is quite obvious from the onset. Certainly, a book is an intensification of possible text and those who brought this actual book into existence have captured a rarity in regards to the subject matter and artistic accomplishment. I mentioned terms as conditions, so let us understand Biogea as bio-yea, a yes to bios . An affirmation of living and accepting presence for all of its defiance of images, words, and things temporal. Therefore Serres’ existence and its existants plays parts; out of linearity and still like a porous bone pumping blood it manufactures into the fleshy life it becomes. Starting from a man named silence chaos emerges, or the man “Old Taciturn” takes up a journey anticipating a great flood. In other words, a development akin to the one in Genesis. In dealing with this ancestral occupation, fusing Genesis with contemporary philosophical terms, Serres initiates this anachronistic fragmentation under the forming subjectivity of his own autobiography. This mutation in the open system is precisely one of Serres’ terms. There an abyss is at work, stated, but also measured by heels on the ground—the abyss dispatching earthen tensions, that which plays our tunes, that which we abide by and recognize in volcanoes, rivers, oceans, earthquakes and weaponry in the battles of the world. Set in later stages of the book, such tensions are harnessed through scientific principles in an attempt to unify the terms of natural force if only to terminate the world. Thus the elevation of the earth into the world is clearly set forth. Here already, and few pages in, a resonance is set forth under appellations such as the river Garonne, a subjectivity as much as it is inhuman, the river is the inhuman that makes us human. I get the sense that Serres is taking up a challenge issued by Wallace Stevens; namely, that the great poems of heaven and hell have been written, but that only the poem of the earth has resisted composition. 2 On this level we cannot avoid the killing factor of silence, given that our cognition blocks its pure, radical obliteration. Thus a silence of attunement to the earth is in a novel dialectic of the rithmic and rhythm. A technological world, a triumph of termination is set forth. If a text imposes its will given the reader who authorizes it, it is made to convey or convect a presupposition to a reader or its inhabitant(s). Text is therefore both, in-content, contenting, contentedness, and in reading it, a way to navigate self-destruction (dis-content). Here then would one note that the “inhuman” reveals itself, “an aperiodic rhythm of lovers and beloved…the sea as our friend…but as our enemy…maternal vivifying sea.” The sea is an open book, or vaginal birth canal, where the engagement of text comes forth: “…woman sea, open vulva.” One sees like the sea, but only after it, when the uninhabitable truth of inhabiting it switches the polarity of the sailors soul: “I was seeing like the sea” (9-11). In other words, we are invited to embrace the nonsense of the visible. At this point I am taken to Jean-François Lyotard’s work The Inhuman , specifically the first entry on negentropy that would be congruent with Serres’ thematic. 3 The human being exports, deports, or transplants its relation through text, through the system— and this is its sense or relation to silence, to music. Unaware of Serres’ proximity to this work, the concept of gender interrelation as regards a solar catastrophe runs clear. It would be, on this basis, that Serres references his peers, the other texts that, as mentioned above, are discarded in philosophy today. For students of philosophy what we have here is perhaps a gift, a needed project. If silence and death are at work, there is a political valence to deal with, and here, much like the domain of the text and the dominion of the reader, we confront the world of natural, fluid violence. The anti-postmodernist critique is in part based on a weak idea that the loss of ideology, of a world vision, motivates the “correlationist” project. 4 Serres seems to offer another way to view this when he notes that whereas persons “sometimes kill,” it is clearly “the collective” that “always kills” (17). What is the collective today, if not an organizing function we never see yet acts in its favor in the name of truth? One feels a sense of enigma here, if only to link to what Stevens remarked of communism as a “grubby faith,” providing this applies for capitalism as well, namely any ideology of progress overly interested in absolutes. Here we get the sense that the inhuman, silence, this type of killing, always killing, could not be matched by human-made, political dynamos. Or that if it comes to an equilibrium, a catastrophe is never too far from us to read with our heels. We are left to note that the forces of nature presuppose and permeate political systems, the more these systems obtain force, the more the system takes upon itself the proper name of nature that motivates its dissemination, albeit falsely. This note, that in an age of ecocide and technological captivity (sustainability and transparency) political regimes won’t grow our soul-learning ears any larger than our tongues, stands clear to us. The promise of technological desubjectification is here pushed aside. Regarding politics, Serres illustrates this fact: Where did this corpse come from? Who was it? Who killed it? I don’t know. I won’t try to find out. I refuse to get vengeance for it. And I only see Garonne. For our victims, today, are the rivers, too. Their waters have irrigated my life, enchanted my thought, invigorated my body; I’ve known them to be threatening, untamable, as dangerous as the sea when it rages. Yes, murderous. They decided to control their courses; dams, sometimes senseless, destroying sites and valleys, reduced entire populations to servile displacements; programs for the irrigation of thirsty farmland, often beneficial of course, completed their drying up.(22) Serres enters into his idea concerning the captivity of language from the natural into a world system: For thousands of years, we have been licking things with our tongues, covering and daubing them so as to appropriate things for ourselves. If language boils down to a convention, this convention took place between the speakers without consulting the thing named, become as a result the property of those who covered it in this way with their drawn or voiced productions. Malfeasance analyzes these acts of appropriation. Thus every inert object, every living thing as well, sleeps under the covers of signs, a little in the way that, today, a thousand posters shouting messages and ugly riots of color drown, with their filthy flood, the landscapes, or better, exclude them from perception because the meaning, almost nil, of this false language and these base images forms an irresistible source of attraction to our neurons and eyes. This appropriation covers the world’s beauty with ugliness. (38-39) Technological concealment coming to bear, we begin to get a sense of another commentary on the condition of sensing, driving home the necessity of a text dealing with such subject matter to be what its terms insist. Thus toward new openings: The new opening. As low beneath our feet as you like, the Biogea opens us to another space, high enough for us to be able to acquire a wisdom there, that of redeveloping this same place differently from our fathers, this place that’s still politically cut up by old hatreds, beneath the flood of tears and blood that we call history. Without this soft place, spiritually very old, but newly conceived in this way, without the juridical construction of a common good, opposed to our filthy ownership, I don’t see how our planet, hard, will survive. Hardness that depends on a softness, material belonging that depends on this temporary rented location (51). Serres enters into a summit on the content and the structure of his work. Archimedes is brought in with the concept of three volcanoes. Meaning fire, but as well earth, water, air. For it was Archimedes’ war machines that sought to lift the earth, thus bringing in the question of principles of science: “can a principle be invented while controlling its consequences?” (66-7). May the earth be put in a sentence, terminated by terminology, appellations, gone wild? By means of these element-dominating laws, this old physicist began to tear nature away from the ancient myths; by a strange return, today we’re plunging our successes back into the anxieties and terrors from which that ancient physics was born. Yes, our new history of science and technology is plunging, today, as though in a loop, into the fundamental human myths from which Empedocles’ first laws came. A major progression and a regression on the nether side of the origins. Consequently, the contemporary time requires that we try to return to that unity in which the principles of hate and love are at the same time human, living, inert and global. We will never attain a deontology of our knowledge and actions without thinking the subjective, the objective, the collective, and the cognitive all together simultaneously. Here, hate and love are the result of these four components.(71) Working then on the concept of fire-starting mirrors to the atomic annihilation of the Second War, Serres works into the subjectivity in question on the matter of rhythm—say rithmic— precisely at that point: Knowledge is changing today. The all-political is dying; the monarchy of the sciences said to be hard is coming to a close. The science of the things of the world will have to communicate just as much as the things of the world do, which do it much better than humans do, who don’t always want to do it. Let’s celebrate two changes this morning. The first one strikes a new blow to our narcissism. No, knowledge and the world don’t resemble our analytical enjoyments of refined cutting up, of endless debates and of exclusions full of hate. They, on the contrary, form a bloc and a sum, alliance and alloys. Uniting the fields of knowledge among themselves the way the things are connected among themselves, the second newness puts into place sets united by interlacing, webs and simplexes that combine with the things of the world, themselves combined, the combined knowledge that understands them.(130-1) Biogea closes on its opening flood thematic, approaching the initial telos of Genesis. Here the trees are brought into a position with atmosphere, the opaque abyssal reservoir, the tomb of the sun, sea in the polarity of the earthen heaven and hell. The poem of the earth then is silent but deadly, indeed, as funny as that phrase is, mainly a tomb gas. The meaning of the living and the non-meaning of things converge in the muteness of the world; this meaning and non-meaning plunge there and come out, the ultimate eddy. Mundus patet: through a fissure, through an opening, a fault, a cleft come noises, calls as small as these apertures. I’m listening, attentive, I’m translating, I’m advancing in the scaled-down meaning and science. Mundus patet: should the world open greatly, it will launch me into its silence. The totality remains silent. Knowledge expanded in elation. White origin of meaning, fountain of joy. (198) Final Remarks One test of a review is the long term trajectory the referee thinks the book will have. I see Serres’ text lending greatly into the vision of Biogea . In fact, in the vision of the novel inquiries of Stephen Jay Gould’s work there is something to be thought on the level of the individual and the species; namely, that humanity and its uniqueness is in its deferral, its thinking and naming, a thinking surrounded by silence that filters into everything, that pulls us through the world, the kinetic pulse we recognize, and all of that we cleave away in the base philosophical maxim of difference itself. Unique individuals are spatial creatures: we dwell, and we ought to get good at it. Yet this is an imaginative space that, if you are crazy enough to believe it, de-term-ine the conditions of its own terms. That is why we are not merely creating spaces on the acceleration of time, or so this ignoramus thinks, to accidentally transcend. Imagination already has this insatiable silence that we drink up and fail to manifest. Space is timeless. The imagination itself, shared by humans for themselves, their objects, and the species as a whole, is a non-defined space of relation; a whole human trajectory as part of nature, and part of worlds that are the other side of thinking nature, the consequence of it, at least our attempt to do so. Our survival is based on our deliberation, our caution, our natural deconstructive sense toward this silence that is already part of the song, sung, singing of this century without end. Good books will let us inhabit this space and recognize a form of life. Serres’ text moves toward dwelling, as noted, in masterful and accessible ways. The pitched battles are the falling replays of anemic and dead politics. As soon as we realize there is humanity, we may be able to enjoy the end of it, our inhuman capability of listening to silence. NOTES 1. See Michel Serres. The Parasite . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2007. 2. Wallace Stevens, “Imagination as Value” [ca. 1945], in Collected Poetry and Prose . New York: The Library of America. 1997. 724-39. 3. Jean-François Lyotard. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time . Trans. Geoffrey Bennington & Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 1992. 4. See the introduction: Quentin Melliassoux. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency . Trans. Ray Brassier. New York: Continuum. 2008. EDITOR'S NOTE: This review was updated on August 8, 2012. Substantial edits include block quotes from the book under review as well as the inclusion of comments from the author. (shrink)

There are several strategies to promote health in individuals and populations. Two general approaches to health promotion are behavior change and empowerment. The aim of this article is to present those two kinds of strategies, and show that the behavior-change approach has some moral problems, problems that the empowerment approach (on the whole) is better at handling. Two distinct ‘ideal types’ of these practices are presented and scrutinized. Behavior change interventions use various kinds of theories to target people’s behavior, which (...) they do through information, persuasion, coercion and manipulation. Empowerment is a collaborative method where those ‘facilitated’ participate in the change process. Some ethical problems with the behavior-change model are that it does not sufficiently respect the right to autonomy of the individuals involved and risks reducing their ability for autonomy, and that it risks increasing health inequalities. Empowerment, on the other hand, respects the participant’s right to autonomy, tends to increase the ability for autonomy, as well as increasing other coping skills, and is likely to reduce inequalities. A drawback with this approach is that it often takes longer to realize. (shrink)

Recent scholarship has drawn attention to John Rawls’s concern with stability—a concern that, as Rawls himself notes, motivated Part III of A Theory of Justice and some of the more important changes of his political turn. For Rawls, the possibility of achieving ‘stability for the right reasons’ depends on citizens possessing sufficient moral motivation. I argue, however, that the moral psychology Rawls develops to show how such motivation would be cultivated and sustained does not cohere with his specific (...) descriptions of ‘pluralist ’ doctrines. Considering Rawls’s claims that ‘most’ citizens—both in contemporary liberal democracies and in the well-ordered society—possess such doctrines, this incompatibility threatens to undermine his stability arguments. Despite the enormous importance of pluralist doctrines and the potential difficulties they pose for Rawls’s project, remarkably little attention has been paid to them. By critically examining these difficulties, the article begins to address this oversight. (shrink)

As the author mentions in the preface to the English edition, this History of Philosophy is the fruit of ideas and research efforts shared in common by the Madrid School of Ortega y Gasset, 1931-1936. Most of these men were educated in Germany, and, besides being original authors in their own right, carried out remarkable efforts of historical research in philosophy, practicing the best techniques of German historical investigation. Marias benefited from these efforts and complemented them with meritorious personal (...) studies. Given the circumstances of its composition, the book is an introduction to, and a dictionary of, philosophy. Because of this, the properly historical side of it is strongly interpretative and somewhat unbalanced. Although Anglo-American philosophy is given some attention, it is not, sufficiently or intimately appreciated. It gives certain authors-the Stoics, Leibniz, Kant, Brentano, the philosophers of life of recent time—a special emphasis that is necessary for a good understanding of our philosophical present. The translation is adequate in preserving the author's elegant and suggestive style.—A. M. (shrink)

In ‘Discrimination Against the Dying’, Phillip Reed argues that terminally ill patients are subjected to a distinct form of discrimination called ‘terminalism’. One of Reed’s primary examples of terminalism is right to try laws, which offer terminally ill patients the option to request medications that are not FDA-approved and without IRB involvement. In this analysis, we consider additional contextual factors about right to try, suggesting that it may not neatly count as an exemplar of terminalism. When pursued with (...) appropriate protocols and oversight, right to try has the potential to broaden treatment opportunities for the terminally ill by bypassing FDA and IRB restrictions, functioning as a less stringent alternative to expanded access for patients with limited time and dwindling options. Reed acknowledges that differential treatment of patients is not inherently unjust. For instance, Reed praises expanded access laws that grant patients with severe or life-threatening diseases access to treatment options otherwise unavailable. Patients not afflicted by severe illness or who have found success with standard treatment options are unlikely to face discrimination for inability to access nonessential treatment. Conversely, availability of these treatments for the terminally ill could enhance their well-being and prolong their lifespan. It is also significant to highlight important …. (shrink)

Background: A fair distribution of healthcare services for older patients is an important challenge, but qualitative research exploring clinicians’ consideration in daily clinical prioritisation in healthcare services for the aged is scarce.Objectives: To explore what kind of criteria, values, and other relevant considerations are important in clinical prioritisations in healthcare services for older patients.Design: A semi-structured interview-guide was used to interview 45 clinicians working with older patients. The interviews were analysed qualitatively using hermeneutical content analysis and template organising style.Participants: 20 (...) physicians and 25 nurses working in public hospitals and nursing homes in different parts of Norway.Results and interpretations: Important dilemmas relate to under-provision of community care and comprehensive approaches, and over-utilisation of certain specialised services. Overt ageism is generally not reported, but the healthcare services for the aged seem to be inadequate due to more subtle processes, for example, dominating considerations and ideals and operating conditions that do not pay sufficient attention to older patients’ needs and considerations of justice. Clinical prioritisations are described as being dominated by adapting traditional biomedical approaches to the operating conditions. Many of the clinicians indicate that there is a potential for improving end of life decisions and for reducing exaggerated use of life-prolonging treatment and hospitalisations.Conclusion: The interviews in this study indicate that considerations of justice and patients’ perspectives should be given more attention to strike a balance between specialised medical approaches and more general and comprehensive approaches in healthcare services for older patients. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ibsen's Drama of Self-Sacrifice William A. Johnsen Michigan State University Henrik Ibsen, like Flaubert, is a fundamental precursor of all subsequent modern literature. His development, which takes place over a lifetime of playwriting, is nevertheless only obscurely recognized in theories ofthe modern. Critics quarrel about his antecedents: Scribe, Feydeau, as well as Norwegian and Scandinavian dramatists and poets. Yet nothing in any of his predecessors could prepare one for (...) the great prose plays of the last twenty-five years of his career. How did he modernize himself? Ibsen said ofhis transition to prose, that he could no longer allow his characters to speak in verse, the language of the gods.1 It is tempting to begin reading Girard in here, because Ibsen offers us a fascinating variation on the historical moment ofcrisis represented by Flaubert, the moment of modernization itself, where the disintegration ofan accepted political and cultural aristocracy forced everyone to compete for prestige and for unique being in a common marketplace. In the case ofNorway during Ibsen's time, it is the crisis caused by the delegitimation ofDano-Norwegian as the uncontested literary language, in favor of competing versions of an emerging national language for a 1 Ibsen's famous comment is in a letter to Edmund Gosse, 15 January, 1874: "Speaking generally, the dialogue must conform to the degree of idealization which pervades the work as a whole. My new drama is no tragedy in the ancient sense. What I sought to depict were human beings, and therefore I would not let them talk the 'language of the Gods'" (Sprinchorn 145). 142William A. Johnsen uniquely national literature that provokes a rivalry for atavistic or nativist preeminence: Who is the most Norwegian ofall? Ibsen and Henry James (as well as Borges) do not choose chauvinist atavism, yet they also avoid becoming mere disciples of the dominant philosophical traditions which have marginalized them. They are more outspoken discussants of the significant historical and cultural developments analyzed in Girard's Deceit, Desire, and the Novel because they are from "new" countries, outsiders to European culture. It is here we must avoid the occupational hazard ofcritical theory: we must not permit a resemblance between a literary and a theoretical text to degenerate into a transcoding of the former into the latter, without ever considering that their resemblance means that each proposes some contribution to a converging theory ofhuman behavior. Critics who merely convert literature into the theories they already know contribute little to literary knowledge, and nothing to theory. Girard has insisted on the quasitheoretical potential of literary texts from the beginning. Only by staying as close to Ibsen as possible, can we ever hope to add to the considerable work that Girard's hypothesis has already achieved. If there is a general principal at stake in not prematurely transcoding the language of Ibsen's plays into theoretical language (not being prematurely theoretical for the sake of a more inclusive theory), there is also the specific risk of burying the peculiar diversity of his dramatic accomplishment. Ibsen is above all the playwright of complex characterization —no one before him was as subtle in motivating the ordinary characters ofeveryday life. Yet during his time, his plays were awaited for the intense discussions of ideas that they were certain to provoke. How is it that Ibsen is not considered the most theoretical and didactic of writers? Partly, the sheer number of controversial ideas and positions dramatized in play after play kept him from being seen (for very long) as the propagator ofany one ofthem. Michael Meyer reproduces in his biography ofIbsen a contemporary Norwegian political cartoon, which depicts Ibsen flailing first right, then left, then all (Meyer 447). More importantly, Ibsen, beginning with Samfundets Stotter (1877) [Pillars ofSociety], created a drama of ensemble theorizing conducted by characters themselves. Ibsen's work, beyond the creation ofcharacter, was to imagine the conditions and events that might make it possible for ordinary individuals to contribute discoveries about human behavior which, collectively, allow amplification and consolidation as a hypothesis. Ibsen 's Drama ofSelf-Sacrifice143 The mimetic hypothesis first found itself explaining the spectacular results of negative reciprocity in modern resentment, the unperceived commonality ofan isolation... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Music Education in an Age of Virtuality and Post-Truth by Paul WoodfordPanagiotis A. KanellopoulosPaul Woodford, Music Education in an Age of Virtuality and Post-Truth (New York, Routledge, 2018)This book is provocative. And challenging. It is written with passion, aiming to induce controversy. And with good reason. For we live in times when populism professes an illusionary sense of community, invoking a seemingly 'anti-systemic' but highly hypocritical, racist, and (...) sexist discourse;1 in times where "bullshitting"2 has advanced to the highest governmental levels in many countries; in times where "authoritarian neoliberal statism"3 becomes the new status quo, inducing a scandalous increase of economic inequalities, forcing large populations to live precarious lives; in times where privatization of educational services in the context of market-oriented practices impose restrictive and ultimately unjust politics of accountability and performativity;4 in times where instrumentalization of educational ends has taken the lead, assisted by a systematic co-option and misappropriation of notions such as excellence and creativity;5 in times, finally, where spaces that allow for "the sharing (out) of the incalculable,"6 forging unknown potentialities in education, life, and thought, are being destroyed. In such times, Paul Woodford has stepped in, reclaiming his right to speak uncompromisingly.Hannah Arendt has written that "[w]hen men [sic] are deprived of the public space--which is constituted by acting together and then fills of its own accord [End Page 108] with the events and stories that develop into history--they retreat into their freedom of thought."7 Woodford refuses to retreat. He writes as a public intellectual of the highest order, committed to upset and not please those in power. A great service that his latest book performs is that it speaks daringly, stirring a debate that helps us all to do away with fear. For as Bertrand Russell has aptly said quite a long time ago, "[I]f thought is to become the possession of many, not the privilege of the few, we must have done with fear. It is fear that holds men [sic] back."8Resisting the "melancholy of inner exile,"9 but not immune to possible accusations of left melancholy, understood as "a refusal to come to terms with the particular character of the present,"10 the author wrote a book that provokes music educators to actively think beyond their sealed and safe world of convictions that is based on ideology-free conceptions of music teaching. Estelle Jorgensen has long ago brought to our attention the urgency of this task: "in an era in which the mindset and political reality have changed dramatically, … there is an urgent need to revisit the political character of music education and the ways in which it needs to address the cultural issues of our day."11Along this pathway, Woodford's book encourages music educators to live and teach as public intellectuals, forging "a democratic purpose for music education"12 that acts against the "anachronistic and formalist conception of music that reduces music education to supply-side economics as children are conceived as either future professional musicians or consumers and not as citizens to be prepared in schools to participate intelligently in the political life of society."13 Woodford articulates a vision of music education "as preparation for adulthood and democratic and global citizenship."14 He strongly advocates an approach that balances performance and creativity-based experiences with a socio-historical study of the social, ideological, and cultural workings of different musics in a wide variety of contexts. He encourages music educators to teach "how music's structural properties and qualities contribute to the shaping of people's perceptions and understandings of themselves and their world,"15 "asking the who, what, when, where, how, to, with, or for whom, and, most importantly of all, why of music."16 He envisions a music classroom that exercises social criticism "directly and self-consciously"17 both through "learning how to make music"18 and through thinking about music. He sees this approach as a tool for raising students' consciousness. Woodford's ultimate vision of music education is one that casts it as a means for cultivating "a justice-oriented" approach... (shrink)

For the purposes of this article, the right to confidentiality of communications between a lawyer and a client (legal professional privilege) is analysed and understood as a rule under which, in judicial or administrative proceedings, the content of communications between a lawyer and his client shall not be disclosed; if this rule is breached, the content of the communications in question is not treated as evidence in the process. Legal professional privilege is related to several articles of the Convention (...) for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. The European Court of Human Rights has found that the violation of the right of an accused to communicate with a lawyer without a third party departs from Article 6(3)(c) of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms which entitles to defend oneself in person or through a legal assistant. This kind of communication also relates to the Article 8 of the Convention, which provides a right to respect for private and family life, home and correspondence. In the opinion of the European Court of Human Rights, according to the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms there is no difference if a lawyer representing a client is a practitioner or not. However, when dealing with the violations of EU competition law, the Court of Justice of the European Union acknowledges the protection of legal professional privilege only with regard to the communications between an accused companies and an independent lawyer (who does not work for his client on an employment contract basis). When the protection of legal professional privilege is not granted for communications of the accused company with its own legal personnel, a question may arise whether it is considered that sufficient level of confidentiality is ensured for these companies. (shrink)

In this article I consider whether there a right to incestuous marriage. I begin by suggesting that the liberal state get out of the "marriage" business by leveling down to a universal civil union or "registered domestic partnership" status. Removing the symbolism of the term "marriage" from political conflict, privatizing it in the same way as religion, would have the advantage of both consistency and political reconciliation. The question is then whether incestuous unions should be both legal and eligible (...) for this status. I argue that the arguments compatible with public reason for prohibiting them outright, or even for excluding them from the permissible types of legally registered partnerships, are quite weak. The objections to allowing such relations are those from (1) child abuse; (2) unfair burdening of society; and (3) the creation of bad lives. I argue that while rape and other forms of child abuse would be no more legal or tolerated than they are now, the concern about any form of weakening a society's legal and political resources to combat such abuses does indeed register on the justificatory scale, but does not prove that such first-degree incestuous sexual relations are inherently bad enough to warrant intervention in their own right. I then argue that the concern about unfairly burdening society with unhealthy persons is not as dangerously totalitarian as we might initially fear, but nor is it strong enough to justify an outright prohibition. Finally, I argue that a concern to dissuade persons from creating certain kinds of lives (children with extreme birth defects) is also not as dangerously totalitarian as we might initially fear, and in fact goes further towards explaining why we might have a legitimate interest in intervening. Nonetheless, I argue that the criminalization of such acts only make sense when they are indicators of other offenses, namely negligence or abuse, and it thus seems that the act of consanguineous reproduction is itself insufficient. One potentially surprising conclusion of this inquiry is that far from creating strong reasons for tolerating these practices, religious or cultural reasons for valuing incest (as well as polygamy) actually seem to count against tolerating them. The reason is that from a liberal perspective, tolerating polygamy and incest involves the assumption that it is possible to disassociate polygamy and incest simpliciter from abusive practices associated with them, including environments where children are raised to devalue their own sexual (and other) autonomy. However, the presence of comprehensive doctrines which include polygyny or incest as part of a good life actually makes it harder to justify disassociating polygamy and incest themselves from the likely abuse and coercion practiced by those who would value polygyny or incest. (shrink)

Within the framework of a new interdisciplinary scientific scientific field – epistemological urbanism – the authors develop the idea of the human right to their city and show the epistemological nature of this right, which is explained by the fact that it is conditioned by the processes of cognition and scientific communication. Three main provisions are substantiated. Firstly, the city is an intelligent system. “The right to your city” is a specific right to scientific and intellectual (...) production and consumption. Such a right is not realized in every locality designated as a city, but only where there are conditions for intellectual dynamics – where art, education and science are developing. Secondly, the intellectual system of the city has autonomy. Each city has its own intellectual resource. Realizing the right to their city, citizens are involved in the activity of the city's scientific and intellectual autonomy. In other words, a city where there are opportunities to realize the “right to the city” generates an autonomous scientific school or a set of scientific schools. Thirdly, cities how research centers form a scientific network. Not a scientific consortium with common ideas and goals, but a network based on the principles of proliferation. The authors insist on the decentralization of science not for the purpose of its enclavization, but for the purpose of developing the potential, multi-vector and intellectual self-realization of urban communities themselves. It is shown that the development of science as a whole can be ensured by the heterogeneity of science itself : integration and differentiation give rise to an integration scientific and communicative process. (shrink)

The view that the fetus' potential for human consciousness confers upon it the right to life has been widely criticised on the basis that the notion of potentiality is so vague as to be meaningless, and on the basis that actual rights cannot be deduced from the mere potential for personhood. It has also been criticised, although less commonly, on the basis that it is not the potential to assume consciousness, but rather the potential to resume consciousness which (...) is morally significant, and on the basis that the fetus does not really possess the potential for consciousness. In response, I argue that these criticisms are mistaken and that the potential for human consciousness is a sufficient condition not simply of potential, but actual, personhood. Since it possesses this potential from the moment of conception, the fetus should be considered an actual person from the moment of its conception. (shrink)

It may be unethical to deny children with cystic fibrosis access to ethically approved clinical trials from which they might benefitDespite advances in nutritional management, aggressive antibiotic usage, and physiotherapy, cystic fibrosis remains a life limiting illness with high morbidity that imposes considerable burdens on children and families.1 Although survival to 40 years is predicted for children born in 1990s, the median age of death in 2003 was 24.2 years .The pathophysiological features of CF are produced by a defective (...) gene on chromosome 7, resulting in the defective production of a protein that regulates cellular ion transport. Defective ion transport is thought to lead to increased mucus viscosity , with poor airway clearance, recurrent bacterial infection, lung damage, and death.Gene therapy , the insertion of a normally functioning gene into deficient host cells using a suitable vector, is a potential treatment or cure for diseases produced by single gene defects—for example, CF. Gene therapy does, however, have potential or actual risks, leading many to suggest that evidence of efficacy in adults should be demonstrated before trials are conducted in children. Many serious diseases in adults such as CF have their onset in childhood. If early treatment provides greater hopes of benefit, children may be more appropriate targets for GT in CF than adults. It may be unethical to deny them access to properly constructed, ethically approved clinical trials from which they might benefit.Since research in children should be scientifically valid, in the child’s best interests, and the subject of valid consent, this article will consider these parameters in relation to trials of GT in children with CF. Because of the importance of consumer participation in the design of research we present the results of a questionnaire about GT trials delivered …. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 10.1 (2000) 103-108 [Access article in PDF] Letters "Small Sacrifices" in Stem Cell Research Madam: I agree with Professors McGee and Caplan (in their article "The Ethics and Politics of Small Sacrifices in Stem Cell Research," KIEJ, June 1999) that the question of the nature and status of the source of stem cells must be addressed. However, in their eagerness to convince us of (...) the smallness of the sacrifices, I think the authors use some unfortunate rhetorical devices and move much too quickly over some necessary distinctions.The rhetorical display is unfortunate if the article is intended to be a fair and rational development of an argument--e.g., those who hold a position in opposition to the authors do not argue they "inveigh." The section on the political area of the controversy seems particularly dismissive of other's positions.However, I will focus on just two areas where I think a more nuanced consideration would make the question of the moral legitimacy of the "small sacrifices" of embryos less obvious than the authors' rhetoric would suggest.First, they claim that opponents of such research assume some sort of "super status" for an embryo. The rights generally conceded to born human beings may not be as "weak" as they characterize. But even considering only the "negative right against unwarranted violence," I think the authors misdescribe the situation. Contrary to their assertion, I do not know when "adults and even children are... forced to give life... in the defense or at least interest of the community's highest ideals and most pressing interests" (p. 153). Could they be speaking of capital punishment, justified in the name of protecting the community? But then why mention children?It is true that not everyone can be guaranteed every means to preserving and enhancing life. But this limitation on positive rights is not a "forced giving." Adults may be compelled to risk life--e.g. in a draft for the sake of a war. But, again, the more or less justifiable imposition of a risk is not the same as selecting out one particular individual or class to be directly killed. Neither adults nor born children are compelled to be killed for the sake of organ "donation," even if a greater number might be saved. If one grants equivalent status to the embryo (as the authors seem to do here for the sake of argument), opponents do not have to claim a "super status" for embryos, just the ordinary human right not to be killed even for "compassionate" motives.A second area where I think the authors move too quickly is in their impoverished definition of the essential humanity of the early embryo as exhaustively represented by the physical structure of its DNA. The authors seem to recognize [End Page 103] that, ordinarily, there is more to personhood than sheer physical structure. For example, they mention memories and habits (p. 154). They could also speak of relationships, attitudes, and the like. Since an early embryo has no such components of personality as we experience it, the authors hold that its identity could only be contained in its DNA. Since this DNA is preserved, even spread far and wide, by the use of stem cells, it almost seems as if we are doing the early embryo a favor by breaking it up.However, just because the embryo does not have any conscious memories or other attributes of character or personality, that does not mean its identity is constituted only by its physical structure described statically. The early embryo is not just a bundle of discrete structures, and its DNA is not just an inert lump made up of certain smaller lumps. Both the embryo and its DNA are active. Thus the identity of even an early embryo includes both its current processes and the innate potential for further activity and development. Although lacking a conscious will, the early embryo is already in a sense an agent, already doing things--growing, changing, and heading toward something that... (shrink)

Health research increasingly relies on organized collections of health data and biological samples. There are many types of sample and data collections that are used for health research, though these are collected for many purposes, not all of which are health-related. These collections exist under different jurisdictional and regulatory arrangements and include: 1) Population biobanks, cohort studies, and genome databases 2) Clinical and public health data 3) Direct-to-consumer genetic testing 4) Social media 5) Fitness trackers, health apps, and biometric data (...) sensors Population biobanks, cohort studies, and genome databases Clinical and public health data Direct-to-consumer genetic testing Social media Fitness trackers, health apps, and biometric data sensors Ethical, legal, and social challenges of such collections are well recognized, but there has been limited attention to the broader societal implications of the existence of these collections. Although health research conducted using these collections is broadly recognized as beneficent, secondary uses of these data and samples may be controversial. We examine both documented and hypothetical scenarios of secondary uses of health data and samples. In particular, we focus on the use of health data for purposes of: Forensic investigations Civil lawsuits Identification of victims of mass casualty events Denial of entry for border security and immigration Making health resource rationing decisions Facilitating human rights abuses in autocratic regimes Forensic investigations Civil lawsuits Identification of victims of mass casualty events Denial of entry for border security and immigration Making health resource rationing decisions Facilitating human rights abuses in autocratic regimes Current safeguards relating to the use of health data and samples include research ethics oversight and privacy laws. These safeguards have a strong focus on informed consent and anonymization, which are aimed at the protection of the individual research subject. They are not intended to address broader societal implications of health data and sample collections. As such, existing arrangements are insufficient to protect against subversion of health databases for non-sanctioned secondary uses, or to provide guidance for reasonable but controversial secondary uses. We are concerned that existing debate in the scholarly literature and beyond has not sufficiently recognized the secondary data uses we outline in this paper. Our main purpose, therefore, is to raise awareness of the potential for unforeseen and unintended consequences, in particular negative consequences, of the increased availability and development of health data collections for research, by providing a comprehensive review of documented and hypothetical non-health research uses of such data. (shrink)

In _Discrimination Against the Dying_, Philip Reed argues, among other things, that ‘right to die laws (euthanasia and assisted suicide) also exhibit terminalism when they restrict eligibility to the terminally ill’. 1 Additionally, he suggests ‘the availability of the option of assisted death only for the terminally ill negatively influences the terminally ill who wish to live by causing them to doubt their choice’. 1 I argue that on scrutiny, neither of these two points hold. First, we routinely limit (...) a course of treatment to only those for whom we believe the treatment might provide a benefit. Typically, we do not think hastening death provides benefit when an individual is not experiencing a terminal illness. Thus, I conclude, either all treatments are discriminatory, or medical aid in dying is not. Second, I argue that permitting individuals to refuse or remove life sustaining care may very well cause... (shrink)

Supernaturalism about meaning in life appears plausible insofar it is reasonable to think that a meaningful life can come only from a world in which there is a perfect value of some kind. Call the view that meaningfulness depends on perfection the ‘perfection thesis’. My aim in this chapter is to develop the contrasting ‘imperfection thesis’, the claim that a life that is significant on balance does not require any perfect value. I argue that principles that naturalists (...) have offered (or suggested) in the literature are all implausible. None fits the considered judgments that naturalists themselves would, upon reflection, have about which degree of value is sufficient for a person’s existence to be significant. Working within a naturalist mindset, I demonstrate that a new theory needs to be developed, and I indeed develop one that I believe should be weighed up against the perfection thesis in future work. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this article, I reply to criticisms of Dean Stretton of the pro‐life argument from substantial identity. When the criterion for the right to life proposed by most proponents of the pro‐life position is rightly understood – being a person, a distinct substance of a rational nature – this position does not lead to the difficulties Stretton claims it does.

House of Lords ruling on assisted dyingIn July 2009, the House of Lords ruled that the Director of Public Prosecutions must produce clear guidelines on the prosecution of those who help friends or relatives travel abroad for assisted suicide. 1 As previously reported here, both the High Court and Court of Appeal had rejected Debbie Purdy’s case before it reached the Lords.2 As a person with primary progressive multiple sclerosis, she had asked the court to rule that her husband would (...) not face prosecution if he accompanied her to Switzerland if she decides to end her life. 3By requiring the DPP to publish offence-specific guidelines about the circumstances in which a prosecution would be brought, the law lords did not go so far as to assert a right to assistance in dying by legalising assisted suicide. It was reiterated that any change to the criminal law against aiding and abetting suicide remained a political matter for Parliament. The Lords did, however, acknowledge that the right to privacy, and the associated right to autonomy, was potentially infringed by the absence of a transparent policy about those who are competent and terminally ill, or severely and incurably disabled, and who need help to travel abroad for assisted dying. The five law lords unanimously agreed that Ms Purdy’s right to a private life, as protected by article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, included the right to clarity regarding the exercise of the DPP’s discretion as to whether or not to prosecute.Following the Lords’ ruling, the DPP, Keir Starmer, confirmed that the new guidance would apply to all acts of assisted suicide, those taking place within and outside of the jurisdiction.4 He then published an interim policy for wide consultation in September 2009, and is expected to produce the final policy in …. (shrink)

Ravelingien et al1 argue that, given the restrictions that must be imposed on recipients of xenotransplanted organs, we should conduct clinical trials of xenotransplantation only on patients in a persistent vegetative state. I argue that there is no ethical barrier to using terminally ill patients instead. Such patients can choose to waive their rights to the liberties that xenotransplantation would probably restrict; it is surely rational to prefer to waive your rights rather than to die, and permissible to allow patients (...) to make this choice.Perhaps the single most important advance in the history of moral thought occurred when it came to be generally recognised that all people are protected by rights that are inviolable, at least without their consent. The precise nature and content of these rights is controversial, but there is a consensus among reasonable people over their core. We all have a right to life, to liberty, to security of person and to equality before the law. Other rights—so-called positive rights, such as the right to economic security, or cultural rights, for instance—may be controversial, but we all agree at least on these.Ravelingien et al1 therefore seem to be on solid ground when they conclude that it would not be permissible to use living persons as subjects in clinical trials of xenotransplantation, as such trials, potentially or actually, result in the violation of the core human rights of the subjects. Their argument is as follows:" Xenotransplantation carries with it a currently unquantifiable risk of the transmission of viruses, from the animal that is the source of the organ transplanted, to the human recipient. Such viruses could have potentially catastrophic consequences, up to and including triggering a global and devastating pandemic. Therefore, it would be necessary to monitor the health status of recipients of … ". (shrink)

Background This pilot study evaluated the speaking book ‘What it means to be part of a clinical trial’. The book aims at empowering populations with information on their rights and responsibilities when enrolled in clinical research. Wide publication of the book—at significant cost—is anticipated. It is important that the book is evaluated within the communities for whom it is intended, and the necessary changes (if any) are made, before translation and large-scale publication takes place. Objective The objective of the study (...) was to measure the efficacy and ease of use of the book. Methods Participants were recruited from a catering company. Participants were questioned on their knowledge of clinical trials and were then given the book. Instructions for use of the book were given to one group (‘experimental’ group). The other group (‘control’ group) was not given any instructions. A week later, the investigators returned, repeated the knowledge questions and asked ‘ease of use’ questions. Results A two-way repeated measure of covariants showed a statistically significant positive increase in knowledge of clinical trials among the intervention group (p=0.02). Results for the control group displayed trends that were not statistically significant. Percentage analysis of ‘ease of use’ questions proved that the book is easy to use, although some changes would be beneficial. Conclusion This study revealed that the speaking book is easy to use. It significantly increased knowledge of clinical trials among the study sample if instructions on use of the book were provided. (shrink)

A "wrongful life" suit is based on the purported tortious liability of a genetic counsellor towards an infant with hereditary defects, with the latter asserting that he or she would not have been born at all if not for the counsellor's negligence. This negligence allegedly lies in the failure on the part of the defendant adequately to advice the parents or to conduct properly the relevant testing and thereby prevent the child's conception or birth. This paper will offer support (...) for the thesis that it would be both feasible and desirable to endorse "wrongful life" compensation actions. The genetic counsellor owed a duty of due professional care to the impaired newborn who now claims that but for the counsellor's negligence, he or she would not have been born at all. The plaintiff's defective life constitutes a compensable injury. A sufficient causal link may exist between the plaintiff's injury and the defendant's breach of duty of due professional care and an appropriate measure of damages can be allocated to the disabled newborn. Sanctioning a "wrongful life" cause of action does not necessarily entail abandoning valuable constraints with regard to abortion and euthanasia. Nor does it inevitably lead to an uncontrolled slide down a "slippery slope". (shrink)

South Africa’s groundbreaking constitution explicitly confers a right of access to sufficient water. But the country is officially ‘water-stressed’ and around 10 % of the population still has no access to on-site or off-site piped or tap water. It is evident that a disconnect exists between this right and the reality for many; however the reasons for the continuation of such discrepancies are not always clear. While barriers to sufficient water are myriad, one significant factor contributing (...) to insufficient and unpredictable access to water is the high percentage of broken water pumps. Previous studies have reported that between 20 and 50 % of all hand operated water pumps installed on the African continent are broken, or out of use. Monitoring and maintenance of pumps, which in South Africa is the responsibility of local municipalities is often ineffective, in part due to the distances between municipal centres and rural communities and the consequent costs of site visits, as well as breakdowns within the local bureaucratic system. The emergence of new telemetry tools that can remotely monitor water applications constitutes a novel and cost-efficient alternative to undertaking regular sites visits. Sustainable, appropriate, low-cost telemetry systems are emerging that could be used to monitor the operational performance of water pumps, or a wide range of other field parameters, and to communicate this information swiftly and cheaply to water service providers, using SMS messages. Data on the performance of water pumps could also be made available to the public online. This is an example of how ICT can be used for water resources management and environmental regulation, as well as in the governance of socio-economic rights: helping to optimize water allocation by improving communication and strengthening accountability. (shrink)

This paper reports on a study of ethical decision-making in a fair trade company. This can be seen to be a crucial arena for investigation since fair trade firms not only have a specific ethical mission in terms of helping growers out of poverty, but they tend to be perceived as (and are often marketed on the basis of) having an "ethical" image. Eschewing a straightforward test of extant ethical decision models, we adopt Thompson''s proposal for a more contextualist understanding (...) rooted in ethnographic data. Our findings suggest that the fair trade mission of the firm is experienced as an over-riding ethical claim, which is often invoked to justify potentially ethically questionable decisions. Moreover, decision precedents emerge which can mean that the decision process is bypassed or hurried through. Finally we provide evidence that the significance of these precedents, and indeed, even moral intensity itself, could be actively shaped and constructed by organization members to support different, even shifting, conceptions of what is a morally acceptable decision for a fair trade company to make. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this article, I reply to criticisms of Dean Stretton of the pro‐life argument from substantial identity. When the criterion for the right to life proposed by most proponents of the pro‐life position is rightly understood – being a person, a distinct substance of a rational nature – this position does not lead to the difficulties Stretton claims it does.

In response to Mandler , I argue in this comment that a more unified psychology generally, and a more unified experimental, scientific psychology specifically, are more difficult to obtain than he suggests. Furthermore, I contend that Mandler does not sufficiently maintain a clear distinction between disciplinary psychology generally, and experimental, scientific psychology, specifically in his discussions of broaching greater unity. This distinction is particularly important, as how it is treated has serious implications for the many specializations and schools of thought (...) within disciplinary psychology that do not fall under the umbrella of experimental, scientific psychology—and, at minimum, these other areas of psychology constitute a large minority of disciplinary psychology. As a specific example, I argue that Mandler's treatment of psychodynamic/psychoanalytic perspectives belies an experimental, scientific psychology bias, which does not do justice to these important perspectives on their own terms. I also highlight some important theoretical divisions that Mandler overlooks. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Some of the objections to life-extension stem from a concern with overpopulation. I will show that whether or not the overpopulation threat is realistic, arguments from overpopulation cannot ethically demand halting the quest for, nor access to, life-extension. The reason for this is that we have a right to life, which entitles us not to have meaningful life denied to us against our will and which does not allow discrimination solely on the grounds of age. (...) If the threat of overpopulation creates a rights conflict between the right to come into existence, the right to reproduce, the right to more opportunities and space , and the right to life, the latter ought to be given precedence. (shrink)