The central ideas of early object relations theory are heavily inflected with Christian anti-Judaism, particularly as found in the work of Ian Dishart Suttie, now credited as the founder of this tradition. The critique of Freud launched by Suttie repudiates Freudian theory as a “disease” inextricably connected to Freud being a Jew. Suttie’s portrayal of Judaism both conforms to and replicates those theological commitments that privilege a triumphalist, supersessionist Christianity that breaks with Judaism, understood as devoid of love, ethics, and (...) social justice interests. The paper argues that the elements organizing the central concepts that structure Suttie’s Christian prejudice constitute distorting ideological interests that circulate and shape important strands of contemporary object relations theory. Central to the authors discussed is a repudiation of Freud’s theory of unconscious drives on the basis of privileging love and intersubjectivity as the motivators of human psychological development made possible by Jesus and Christianity. The paper demonstrates that contemporary object relations theory remains heavily indebted to Suttie while remaining oblivious to his explicit anti-Judaism. (shrink)

Sigmund Freud argued that religions originate in the unconscious needs, longings and fantasies of human minds. His work has served to highlight how any analysis of religion must explore mental life, both the cognitive and the unconscious. _Freud on Religion_ examines Freud's complex understanding of religious belief and practice. The book brings together contemporary psychoanalytic theory and case material from Freud's clinical practice to illustrate how the operations of the unconscious mind support various forms of religious belief, from mainstream to (...) occult. _Freud on Religion_ offers a new way of understanding Freud's thinking and demonstrates how valuable psychoanalysis is for the study of religion. (shrink)

Psychoanalytic critical theory explores the dynamics of individual identity formation within specific cultural contexts. Freud understood that psychoanalysis is a critical social theory as well as a therapeutic practice. His studies on religion illustrate the depths of society and culture within the mind. Freud was thus able to respond to Romain Rolland's experience of an “oceanic” or mystical feeling in thoroughly explanatory psychoanalytic terms that led him to speculate about pre-Oedipal memories of maternal care. Freud made an important contribution to (...) the psychoanalytic study of religion that remains relevant to contemporary academic studies of religion. (shrink)

At least 177 scales are available to researchers who want to measure religiosity, but questions exist as to exactly what these scales are measuring and in whom they are measuring it. A review of these scales found a lack items designed to measure ethical action in society or the world as a prophetic response to the experience of the divine. Instead, the vast majority of scales focus on internal experiences and beliefs or institutional relationships. A review of scale norm groups (...) found that norm groups often are not fully described, particularly in the area of race/ethnicity, and when they are described, they reveal an over-reliance on convenience samples of college students and an under-representation of racial/ethnic minority groups. Examples of scales with more fully described and more representative norm groups are given, and recommendations are offered for researchers using and developing religiosity scales. (shrink)

This paper presents an overview of the key ethical questions of performing gene editing research on military service members. The recent technological advance in gene editing capabilities provided by CRISPR/Cas9 and their path towards first-in-human trials has reinvigorated the debate on human enhancement for non-medical purposes. Human performance optimization has long been a priority of military research in order to close the gap between the advancement of warfare and the limitations of human actors. In spite of this focus on temporary (...) performance improvement, biomedical enhancement is an extension of these endeavours and the ethical issues of such research should be considered. In this paper, we explore possible applications of CRISPR to military human gene editing research and how it could be specifically applied towards protection of service members against biological or chemical weapons. We analyse three normative areas including risk–benefit analysis, informed consent, and inequality of access as it relates to CRISPR applications for military research to help inform and provide considerations for military institutional review boards and policymakers. (shrink)

Much has changed in maternal-fetal medicine since the early 2000s, when the previous ethical frameworks for fetal therapy trials were established. We applaud Hendriks and colleagues for taking on t...

At least 177 scales are available to researchers who want to measure religiosity, but questions exist as to exactly what these scales are measuring and in whom they are measuring it. A review of these scales found a lack items designed to measure ethical action in society or the world as a prophetic response to the experience of the divine. Instead, the vast majority of scales focus on internal experiences and beliefs or institutional relationships. A review of scale norm groups (...) found that norm groups often are not fully described, particularly in the area of race/ethnicity, and when they are described, they reveal an over-reliance on convenience samples of college students and an under-representation of racial/ethnic minority groups. Examples of scales with more fully described and more representative norm groups are given, and recommendations are offered for researchers using and developing religiosity scales. (shrink)

Drawing on constructionist theory, this study examines how the media portrayed five public reporting events initiated by the Fair Labor Association (FLA), considering whether the coverage encourages or discourages companies from undertaking a reporting initiative as part of their ethical management. Media coverage was limited but generally favorable across all five events. Coverage frequently included claims made by FLA spokespersons and provided basic facts about the organization and its activities. Extensive detail about labor violations found by monitors was often included. (...) Additional media coverage centered around themes of public reporting and transparency, an assessment of the FLA’s work, brand accountability and responsibility of corporations with regard to working conditions and labor standards, and specifics about the factory monitoring and partnering with factories and NGOs that is necessary to achieve change. Counter-claims brought question to the FLA’s efforts. Explanations about why the social condition exists were fairly limited, and thus, provided little insight into how the problems might be resolved. We discuss managerial implications regarding public reporting initiatives and media coverage, particularly regarding the countering effects of positive coverage and diminishing news stories. (shrink)

Domestic violence is a growing societal concern that often spills over into the workplace. However, employers are not recognizing the spillover of domestic violence as a workplace issue. This is problematic considering the serious financial, legal, and ethical consequences for organizations. We analyzed six cases involving domestic violence that were litigated under specific legal bases: Violence Against Women Act, discrimination laws including Title VII, Family and Medical Leave Act, Americans with Disabilities Act, Social Security Disability, Occupational Safety and Health Act, (...) and associated state and municipal ordinances. We chose cases that illustrate the problems of companies meeting the legal standards but not necessarily reaching ethical expectations. Our approach is congruent with the perspective that both legal and ethical analyses should be used in organizational decision making. We suggest for future research the analysis of additional litigated cases, other ethical perspectives, and additional sources of data. In addition, we suggest that companies who are striving for corporate social responsibility should integrate the ethical treatment of domestic violence victims. (shrink)

Discharge planning for vulnerable infants and children is a collaborative, inter-disciplinary, decision-making activity that is grounded in the ethical complexities of clinical practice. Although it is a psychosocial intervention that frequently causes moral distress for professionals and has the potential to inflict harm on children and their families, the process has received little attention from ethicists. An ongoing study of the transition of technology-dependent children from hospital to home suggests that the ethical issues embedded in the discharge-planning process may be (...) concealed by dominant cultural values, institutional policies, clinical standards, historical precedents, and legal regulations. (shrink)

An oversize volume celebrates the National Ranching Heritage Center, a museum and historical park located on the northern edge of the Texas Tech University campus in Lubbock, established to preserve the history of ranching, pioneer life, and the development of the livestock industry in North America.

Several standard conditions of adequacy for confirmation are considered and a conclusion of B. Skyrms regarding the converse-consequence condition is shown to be mistaken. Widely accepted conditions such as the entailment condition and the special consequence condition are shown to be open to counterexample, and confusion about these conditions is traced to confusion about the difference between two kinds of confirmation concepts--concepts of firmness and concepts of increase in firmness. The importance of concepts of the latter sort is stressed. Finally, (...) some suggestions are offered relating to the notion of selective confirmation. (shrink)

UK blood services, supported by the Health Protection Agency/Health Protection Scotland, carried out an exercise over the summer of 2005 to notify 110 donors whose blood was transfused to three recipients who later developed vCJD. These donors were to be informed that they were now considered 'at risk of vCJD for public health purposes'. The notification began on 20 July 2005 and was completed (barring follow-up) at the end of the first week of October 2005. Apart from two donors who (...) had died, contact was attempted with all donors, including four who were not currently registered with a GP. The lessons learnt about the conduct of such notification have been reviewed. The limited ad hoc feedback available suggests the process and content of this notification was acceptable to donors and their GPs. (shrink)

Ayn Rand argued that “selfish” is the correct designation for a person living according to the Objectivist ethics and that selfishness is a virtue. The accuracy of this claim is examined along with the meaning of “selfish,” the wider implications for the Objectivist ethics, and ethics in general. Alternatives to the term are suggested.

Marine ecosystems are under increasing pressure from human activity, yet successful management relies on knowledge. The evidence-based policy (EBP) approach has been promoted on the grounds that it provides greater transparency and consistency by relying on ‘high quality’ information. However, EBP also creates epistemic responsibilities. Decision-making where limited or no empirical evidence exists, such as is often the case in marine systems, creates epistemic obligations for new information acquisition. We argue that philosophical approaches can inform the science-policy interface. Using marine (...) biosecurity examples, we specifically examine the epistemic challenges in the acquisition and acceptance of evidence to inform policy, discussing epistemic due care and biases in consideration of evidence. (shrink)

The contributors explore the life, thought, and works of Aelred, 12th-century Cistercian abbot of Rievaulx Abbey, his sermons, spirituality, and histories and highlight their principal themes.

Constructing Race on the Borders of Europe investigates the visual imagery (in painting, photography, prints, film, and design) of race construction primarily in Scandinavia and the empires of Austro-Hungary, Germany, and Russia at a time when the disciplines of ethnography and anthropology were expanding and publications on race were debating competing theories of biological, geographic, linguistic, and cultural determinants. These regions, while on the periphery of continental Europe, largely marginalized in the scholarship of nineteenth-century art history, and ignored by Edward (...) Said (Orientalism 1978), have been central locations for theorizing white identity and for containing diverse ethnic populations that have generated substantive ethnographic study and regional conflicts since the eighteenth century. This anthology explores art that engaged with ethnography and anthropology to shape visual representations of subordinate ethnic populations and material cultures, both indigenous (Roma, Sámi, Inuit, and Celts) and migrant or colonial (Muslims and Blacks), chiefly between 1850 and 1930, but extending into the early twenty-first century. The essays in this book contribute to postcolonial research by documenting colonial-style treatment of minority groups and by seeking to qualify binary systems through explorations of anomalies, complexities, and contradictions that emerge when seen from the perspective of the fine and applied arts. This book presents a range of different artistic voices that responded to ethnographic and anthropological information by producing images or objects that adopted, altered, or critiqued that information. The authors seek to uncover instances of connections and variability, to establish the fabricated nature of ethnic identity, and to challenge the certainties of racial categorization. (shrink)

Modern American nursing has an extensive ethical heritage literature that extends from the 1870s to 1965 when the American Nurses Association issued a policy paper that called for moving nursing education out of hospital diploma programs and into colleges and universities. One consequence of this move was the dispersion of nursing libraries and the loss of nursing ethics textbooks, as they were largely not brought over into the college libraries. In addition to approximately 100 nursing ethics textbooks, the nursing ethics (...) heritage literature also includes hundreds of journal articles that are often made less accessible in modern databases that concentrate on the past 20 or 30 years. A second consequence of nursing’s movement into colleges and universities is that ethics was no longer taught by nursing faculty, but becomes separated and placed as a discrete ethics course in departments of philosophy or theology. These courses were medically identified and rarely incorporated authentic nursing content. This shift in nursing education occurs contemporaneously with the rise of the field of bioethics. Bioethics is rapidly embraced by nursing, and as it develops within nursing, it fails to incorporate the rich ethical heritage, history, and literature of nursing prior to the development of the field of bioethics. This creates a radical disjunction in nursing’s ethics; a failure to more adequately explore the moral identity of nursing; the development of an ethics with a lack of fit with nursing’s ethical history, literature, and theory; a neglect of nursing’s ideal of service; a diminution of the scope and richness of nursing ethics as social ethics; and a loss of nursing ethical heritage of social justice activism and education. We must reclaim nursing’s rich and capacious ethics heritage literature; the history of nursing ethics matters profoundly. (shrink)

In this introduction, we address some of the complexities associated with the emergence of medicine’s bodies, not least as a means to ‘working with the body’ rather than simply producing a critique of medicine. We provide a brief review of some of the recent discussions on how to conceive of medicine and its bodies, noting the increasing attention now given to medicine as a technology or series of technologies active in constituting a multiplicity of entities – bodies, diseases, experimental objects, (...) the individualization of responsibility for health and even the precarity of life. We contrast what feminist theorists in the tradition of Judith Butler have referred to as the question of matter, and Science and Technology Studies with its focus on practice and the nature of emergence. As such we address tensions that exist in analyses of the ontological status of ‘the body’ – human and non-human – as it is enacted in the work of the laboratory, the randomized controlled trial, public health policy and, indeed, the market that is so frequently entangled with these spaces. In keeping with the recent turns toward ontology and affect, we suggest that we can regard medicine as concerned with the contraction and reconfiguration of the body’s capacities to affect and be affected, in order to allow for the subsequent proliferation of affects that, according to Bruno Latour, marks corporeal life. Treating both contraction and proliferation circumspectly, we focus on the patterns of affects wrought in particular by the abstractions of medicine that are described in the contributions to this special issue. Drawing on the work of A.N. Whitehead, we note how abstractions such as ‘medical evidence’, the ‘healthy human body’ or the ‘animal model’ are at once realized and undercut, mediated and resisted through the situated practices that eventuate medicine’s bodies. Along the way, we touch on the implications of this sort of perspective for addressing the distribution of agency and formulations of the ethical and the political in the medical eventuations of bodies. (shrink)

United States law recognizes adult reproductive liberty and many states view surrogacy services through that lens. During the COVID-19 pandemic in March, 2020, New York State enacted the Child–Pare...

The paper makes a strong plea for the health care system itself to strive for better health. It argues that a growing weakness of the health care system is high level psychological stress. This, in turn, is caused by the overuse of memory-linked analytical process thinking in managing the affairs of health care organizations. The author strongly recommends a shift towards a greater use of natural flow thinking which is more supple, spontaneous, creative and stress free. She argues for this (...) shift on the basis of several years of personal engagement with and learning of flow thinking practices in different parts of the world, including India. (shrink)