Three Quaker elders, all scholar activists, have just published two important works for anyone studying nonviolence, works that are framed very differently but which complement each other well. One is a new work by the estimable George Lakey, who has trained nonviolent resisters around the world in many countries for decades, and whose thinking has always been structural, strategic, and careful. The other work is by Alice and Staughton Lynd, two historians whose activism education stretches far back to teaching in (...) the Freedom Summer schools of Mississippi in 1964 and even earlier. The Lynds have just published the third edition of their Nonviolence in America: A Documentary History. (shrink)

“Public health is directly shaped by war, conflict, and capitalism, yet exploring the connections between these processes remains neglected in scholarship and policymaking arenas.” This chapter five lede by social work professors Scott Harding and Kathryn Libal could serve as the epigraph to the entire volume. War and Health is edited by two prominent researchers from Brown University’s Watson Institute Costs of War Project, which seeks a meaningful aggregation of the actual cost of wars, especially those of the new millennium. (...) The volume presents significant findings from nineteen researchers at various institutions, including culturally competent anthropologists. The result is a deep exegesis of syndemics—or synergistic epidemics—that endanger the health of all combatants and civilians. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Principles of Biomedical Ethics. By Tom L. Beauchamp and James F. Childress.

In their papers in this supplement, Ruth Faden and colleagues conclude that research ethics and regulation must change to accommodate a changed and changing health care environment. The reality, however, is that the widely understood and accepted ethical framework embedded in the regulatory requirements known as the Common Rule, and recent proposals to modify the Common Rule have become stalled, at least for the foreseeable future, if not permanently. Meaningful systemic modernization of the Common Rule is not likely to occur (...) any time soon. All the same, modernization of the Common Rule is desperately needed. In the short term, the agencies responsible for implementing it must be willing to develop practical guidance for implementing the current regulatory requirements in a way that promotes clarity and understanding and allocates human and fiscal resources based on the level of risk to subjects. To this end, the Veterans Health Administration recently implemented policy to address the research‐practice distinction—a distinction that is especially relevant to VHA's current challenges and that the authors of the “ethical framework” articles have identified as particularly outmoded. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Life and Death: Philosophical Essays in Biomedical Ethics. By Dan W. Brock.

In the helpful article “Why Bioethics Needs a Disability Moral Psychology,” Joseph Stramondo adds to the critique of actually existing bioethics and explains why disability activists and scholars so often find fault with the arguments of bioethicists. He is careful not to stereotype either community—rightly, given that bioethicists endorse positions as disparate as utilitarianism, deontology, virtue ethics, and feminist ethics, among others. Although Stramondo never explicitly mentions utilitarians or liberals, it seems probable that these are the main targets of his (...) discontent. The disability community, as he concedes, is also a broad church. Yet for this reason, I do not believe that you can read off positions on bioethics questions from either disability embodiment or disability organization affiliation. (shrink)

The research importance of biobanked biological materials and their derived data is growing, especially as these are increasingly linked with individual and population‐level medical and health information. The number, diversity, and size of biobanks are growing in tandem. So, too, is the number of individuals whose donations are being used in biobank‐supported research, with or without their knowledge. Pretty soon, we all will be “participants” in a variety of research projects we know nothing about. Until recently, our leftover tissue or (...) deidentified medical information could be used for research without our consent or even our knowledge. Even if we've been asked–as the current regulations require when research uses are anticipated‐we were most likely asked to give a blanket consent to any future use, with no prospect of learning about or controlling how our material is later used. This is an ethically problematic state of affairs, but there are options for improving it. (shrink)

In this essay, I describe Bob Veatch’s career from the perspective of a colleague and friend. Bob and I started our professional careers at the same time and quickly came into professional contact. With Bob’s move from the Hastings Center to the Kennedy Institute, we became colleagues and worked for almost a decade on our book on death and dying. He was an outstanding co-editor and author. I believe he knew more about the philosophically connected issues in this area (...) of bioethics than anyone publishing in the area, and it was an area of intellectual interest that he pursued throughout his career. Beyond bioethics, Bob and I shared our shared love of contemporary bluegrass music, especially the songs of The Seldom Scene. Bob studied them much as he studied bioethics—with deep knowledge and seriousness. He was just a scholar by nature and with excellent training and experience. If we were to create a Hall of Fame for bioethics, Bob might be the first person elected. (shrink)

We are living through a demographic transition from a world in which there were lots of young people and very few older adults to one in which the numbers in these age groups are becoming more evenly balanced. One reason for this is that more of us are living into our seventies, eighties, nineties, and beyond. That is the good news. Unfortunately, the chance of developing chronic illnesses (including diabetes, arthritis, and dementia) is typically higher for people in these older (...) age groups than for those who are younger. Because we do not know how to cure these illnesses, many of us will spend at least some of this extra time with one or more chronic illness. While we are more likely than in the past to live into older age, we are likely to be living with illness when we get there. That raises a challenge: how should we respond to this change? (shrink)

‘Time’ has been central to Zygmunt Bauman’s theory of modernity and his subsequent account of its solid and liquid variants. The experience of time in these accounts announces the coming of new opportunities, but it also signals a corrosion of our moral sensitivity. In this article, I assess Bauman’s contribution to the sociology of time and the centrality of our temporal character for his philosophical anthropology. There is a unique chance to be moral in liquid modernity, by unshackling the outdated (...) and habitual ethics of the past. The danger, however, lays in an increasingly ‘hurried life’, where a ‘nowist’ culture demands endless answers to the most banal of choices, often before these choices have even arrived. I argue that for Bauman the historical power of culture is to raise the ‘ought’ above the ‘is’. This results from our character as temporally-aware creatures. In our liquid modern times, the haste of life and its individualizing forces shift the character of that temporal awareness, endowing us with a false set of needs crafted by the market. The project of humanity itself has become, in Bauman’s diagnosis, subservient to maintaining the goals of the market. (shrink)

Hospital futility policies are ethically defensible, but they require the proper understanding of futility and should be embedded in a larger process for making decisions about limiting treatment.

Like many other bioethicists, I often give talks on clinical topics that may touch on the patient's right of autonomy with regard to medical treatment and, from there, may move to questions about whether said patient has the capacity to exercise said right. When I get to that subject, I might ask, “Is this person competent to refuse treatment?” A stunned silence falls over the room, until finally a hand shoots up. “‘Competent’ is a legal term,” I am instructed. “Don't (...) you mean to ask whether he has the capacity to make decisions for himself?” The tone suggests that I'm being helped to make a very important distinction. But it's not a very important distinction; and it's misleading to boot. (shrink)

A response to commentaries by David Wendler and by Bartha M. Knoppers, Edward S. Dove, and Ma'n H. Zawati on “Respecting Donors to Biobank Research,” from the January‐February 2013 issue.

Book reviewed in this article: Taking Care of Strangers: The Rule of Law in Doctor‐Patient Relations. By Robert A. Burt.

Response to Emily A. Largent, Franklin G. Miller and Steven Joffe, A Prescription for Ethical Learning, Hastings Center Report, 43, s1, (S28-S29), (2013).

Book reviewed in this article: Life and Death: Philosophical Essays in Biomedical Ethics. By Dan W. Brock.

The New Medicine and the Old Ethics. By Albert R. Jonsen.

Book reviewed in this article: Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics. By Annette Baier.

Calls are increasing for American health care to be organized as a learning health care system, defined by the Institute of Medicine as a health care system “in which knowledge generation is so embedded into the core of the practice of medicine that it is a natural outgrowth and product of the healthcare delivery process and leads to continual improvement in care.” We applaud this conception, and in this paper, we put forward a new ethics framework for it. No such (...) framework has previously been articulated. The goals of our framework are twofold: to support the transformation to a learning health care system and to help ensure that learning activities carried out within such a system are conducted in an ethically acceptable fashion. (shrink)

Calls are increasing for American health care to be organized as a learning health care system, defined by the Institute of Medicine as a health care system “in which knowledge generation is so embedded into the core of the practice of medicine that it is a natural outgrowth and product of the healthcare delivery process and leads to continual improvement in care.” We applaud this conception, and in this paper, we put forward a new ethics framework for it. No such (...) framework has previously been articulated. The goals of our framework are twofold: to support the transformation to a learning health care system and to help ensure that learning activities carried out within such a system are conducted in an ethically acceptable fashion. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Ethical Issues in Social Research. Edited by Tom L. Beauchamp, Ruth R. Faden, R. Jay Wallace, Jr., and LeRoy Walters. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982. xii + 436 pp. $25.00 (hardcover); $8.95 (paper). Ethics of Human Subject Research. Edited by Allan J. Kimmel, Jr. San Francisco: Jossey‐Bass, 1981. 106 pp. $6.95 (paper). Social Research Ethics. Edited by Martin Bulmer. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1982. xiv + 284 pp. $39.50 (hardcover); $14.50 (paper). The (...) Ethics of Social Research: Field‐work, Regulation and Publication. Edited by Joan E. Sieber. New York: Springer‐Verlag, 1982. x + 187 pp. $23.50 (hardcover). The Ethics of Social Research: Surveys and Experiments. Edited by Joan E. Sieber. New York: Springer‐Verlag, 1982. xii + 249 pp. $23.50 (hardcover). (shrink)

Introduction to a special issue of The Acorn guest edited by Sanjay Lal: In this issue of The Acorn, Lal defends the thesis of his book-length argument that a democratic state should exercise a more engaged interest in religious education and practice, the better to ensure a more perfect union between religion and democracy. Acorn reviewer Gail Presbey looks at Sarah Azaransky’s book about This Worldwide Struggle that revisits connections between Black struggle in the US and nonviolent resistance in India. (...) Azaransky’s work pays special attention to Bayard Rustin. In his book, Gandhi After 9/11, Douglas Allen labors to free Gandhian philosophy from dogmas and absolutes, sometimes in keeping with Gandhi’s own flexibility, other times challenging the inflexibility or myopia of the Mahatma. In an author-meets-critics session, Karsten Struhl and Sanjay Lal take up Allen’s project in a robust dialogue. -/- In an article on “Revolutionary Nondualism,” Sanjay Lal apprehends a vital philosophical kinship between Stoic philosophy and Gandhi that allows Lal to apply Nussbaum’s critique of the Stoics to Gandhi for the purpose of showing how Gandhi might respond. In “Techno-Satyagraha,” Michael Allen presents a Gandhi-inspired, anti-dogmatic approach to political economy that is responsive to technological innovations. In “Why Pacifist Leadership Overcomes the Over-Demandingness Objection,” Federico Germán Abal defends a special case: whereas many people may lapse from pacifism without failing to be good, it is not over-demanding to expect more rigorous moral behavior from pacifist leadership. In a review of Judith Butler's book The Force of Nonviolence, Will Barnes discusses Butler's view that nonviolence is a demand for an equality of grieveability. And considering the book War and Health: The Medical Consequences of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, edited by Catherine Lutz and Andrea Mazzarino, Acorn reviewer Tom Hastings presents the case that a syndemics approach to the past two decades would explore how disease has been aggravated by social, environmental, or economic factors such as the post-9/11 wars. (shrink)

Tyler conducted a longitudinal study of 1,575 Chicago inhabitants to determine why people obey the law. His findings show that the law is obeyed primarily because people believe in respecting legitimate authority, not because they fear punishment. The author concludes that lawmakers and law enforcers would do much better to make legal systems worthy of respect than to try to instill fear of punishment.

Described by Jeffrey Masson as 'the single best introduction to animal rights ever written,' this new book by Tom Regan dispels the negative image of animal rights advocates perpetrated by the mass media, unmasks the fraudulent rhetoric of 'humane treatment' favored by animal exploiters, and explains why existing laws function to legitimize institutional cruelty.

Metaphysics-first approaches dominate the current literature in the epistemology of modality. According to metaphysics-firsters, metaphysical theses have an important role in the justification of modal epistemologies. For example, the thesis that essentialist truths constitute the metaphysical grounds of modal truths is meant to have an important role in the justification of essentialist modal epistemologies. In this article, we argue against this approach. We first pick up some of the groundwork on behalf of the metaphysics-firsters and explicitly spell out potential arguments (...) for their view. However, despite some initial plausibility, these arguments are ultimately found wanting. We conclude that the metaphysics-first approach lacks motivation and puts far too stringent demands upon modal epistemologists. (shrink)

In an influential paper, L. A. Paul argues that one cannot rationally decide whether to have children. In particular, she argues that such a decision is intractable for standard decision theory. Paul's central argument in this paper rests on the claim that becoming a parent is ``epistemically transformative''---prior to becoming a parent, it is impossible to know what being a parent is like. Paul argues that because parenting is epistemically transformative, one cannot estimate the values of the various outcomes of (...) a decision whether to become a parent. In response, we argue that it is possible to estimate the value of epistemically transformative experiences. Therefore, there is no special difficulty involved in deciding whether to undergo epistemically transformative experiences. Insofar as major life decisions do pose a challenge to decision theory, we suggest that this is because they often involve separate, familiar problems. (shrink)

Why is there female under-representation among philosophy majors? We survey the hypotheses that have been proposed so far, grouping similar hypotheses together. We then propose a chronological taxonomy that distinguishes hypotheses according to the stage in undergraduates’ careers at which the hypotheses predict an increase in female under-representation. We then survey the empirical evidence for and against various hypotheses. We end by suggesting future avenues for research.

The work of 6th century Indian logician Dharmakirti is explored in detail in series of twelve articles analyzing deviant logic, subject failure, andther important aspects of the Indo-Tibetan Buddhist logical tradition.riginal.