Consecrated women religious have been shown to be at increased risk for uterine and ovarian cancers. The authors critique a proposal by Kara Britt and Roger Short advocating the distribution of a combined oral contraceptive to women religious as a way of reducing this risk. The authors argue that the proposal is seriously flawed: the data it references attenuate its conclusion, the execution protocol is incomplete, and the proposal fails to address the serious health risks of combined oral contraceptives. As (...) a counterproposal, the authors recommend that women religious be taught to monitor their gynecologic health by charting their menstrual and ovulatory cycles. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 12.2 : 235–239. (shrink)

With reference to Wilde’s personal religious struggles, especially the suppression of his long-standing attraction to Roman Catholicism, this essay reads De Profundis, Picture of Dorian Gray, and “Ballad of Reading Gaol” as the author ‘s symbolic working out of his conversion, both spiritually and as a novelist. In the latter sense, the essay draws on the theory of Rene Girard regarding novelistic conversion: the artist’s “disavowal of the mimetic desire that has enslaved him to his models.” Since Christ is in (...) Girardian terms the only model to imitate in safety from envy and violence, Girard’s theory offers insight into Wilde’s views on Christ as individualist and on life as imitation of art. (shrink)

In addition to protecting agents’ autonomy, consent plays a crucial social role: it enables agents to secure partners in valuable interactions that would be prohibitively morally risk otherwise. To do this, consent must be observable: agents must be able to track the facts about whether they have received a consent-based permission. I argue that this morally justifies a consent-practice on which communicating that one consents is sufficient for consent, but also generates robust constraints on what sorts of behaviors can be (...) taken as consent- communicating. (shrink)

The problem of moral disagreement has been presented as an objection to contextualist semantics for ‘ought’, since it is not clear that contextualism can accommodate or give a convincing gloss of such disagreement. I argue that independently of our semantics, disagreements over ‘ought’ in non-cooperative contexts are best understood as indirect metalinguistic disputes, which is easily accommodated by contextualism. If this is correct, then rather than posing a problem for contextualism, the data from moral disagreements provides some reason to adopt (...) a semantics that allows contextual variance in the meanings of ‘ought’. (shrink)

Sometimes speakers within a linguistic community use a term that they do not conceptualize as a slur, but which other members of that community do. Sometimes these speakers are ignorant or naïve, but not always. This article explores a puzzle raised when some speakers stubbornly maintain that a contested term t is not derogatory. Because the semantic content of a term depends on the language, to say that their use of t is semantically derogatory despite their claims and intentions, we (...) must individuate languages in a way that counts them as speaking our language L, assigns t a determinately derogatory content in L, and still accommodates the other features of slurs’ linguistic profile. Given the difficulty of doing this, there is some reason to give a non-semantic analysis of the derogatory aspect of slurs. The author suggests that rather than dismissing the stubborn as semantically incompetent, we would do better to appeal to expected uptake as moral reasons for the stubborn to adjust their linguistic practices. (shrink)

In some cases, there appears to be an asymmetry in the evidential value of statistical and more individualized evidence. For example, while I may accept that Alex is guilty based on eyewitness testimony that is 80% likely to be accurate, it does not seem permissible to do so based on the fact that 80% of a group that Alex is a member of are guilty. In this paper I suggest that rather than reflecting a deep defect in statistical evidence, this (...) asymmetry might arise from a general constraint on rational inquiry. Plausibly the degree of evidential support needed to justify taking a proposition to be true depends on the stakes of error. While relying on statistical evidence plausibly raises the stakes by introducing new kinds of risk to members of the reference class, paradigmatically `individualized' evidence---evidence tracing back to A's voluntary behavior---can lower the stakes. The net result explains the apparent evidential asymmetry without positing a deep difference in the brute justificatory power of different types of evidence. (shrink)

​I evaluate a suggestion, floated by Kimberly Ferzan (this volume), that the twitter hashtag campaign #BelieveWomen is best accommodated by non-reductionist views of testimonial justification. I argue that the issue is ultimately one about the ethical obligation to trust women, rather than a question of what grounds testimonial justification. I also suggest that the hashtag campaign does not simply assert that ‘we should trust women’, but also militates against a pernicious striking-property generic (roughly: ‘women make false sexual assault accusations’), that (...) distorts our evaluation of women’s testimony concerning sexual assault. I conclude #BelieveWomen does not demand that we believe against the evidence, or uncritically, or be more trusting than we have evidential justification to be. Rather, it aims to bring our trust closer to what is merited by the base-rate of reliable testimony from women concerning sexual assault. (shrink)

A popular informal argument suggests that statistics about the preponderance of criminal involvement among particular demographic groups partially justify others in making defensive mistakes against members of the group. One could worry that evidence-relative accounts of moral rights vindicate this argument. After constructing the strongest form of this objection, I offer several replies: most demographic statistics face an unmet challenge from reference class problems, even those that meet it fail to ground non-negligible conditional probabilities, even if they did, they introduce (...) new costs likely to cancel out any justificatory contribution of the statistic, but even if they didn’t, demographic facts are the wrong sort to make a moral difference to agents’ negative rights. I conclude that the popular argument should be rejected, and evidence-relative theories do not have the worrisome implication. (shrink)

Written by a sociologist and a biologist and science historian, this text considers the social aspects of organ transplantation and chronic hemodialysis. Their research, begun in 1968, focused on the experience of research physicians engaged in this work, the "gift- exchange" social dimensions of these practices, and the impact of these technologies on society as a whole. This reprint of the 1978 edition includes a new introduction by the authors. c. Book News Inc.

A regulative norm for permissible defense distinguishes the conditions under which we will hold defenders to be innocent of any wrongdoing from those in which we hold them responsible for assault or manslaughter. The norm must strike a fair balance between defenders' security, on the one hand, and other agents’ legitimate claim to live without fear of suffering mistaken defensive harm, on the other. Since agents must make defensive decisions under high pressure and on only partial information, they will sometimes (...) make mistakes. We have reason to want a norm that considers a mistake permissible when it was highly likely on the evidence that defense was proportionate and necessary to avert a threat. However, adopting an evidentialist norm under non-ideal conditions is treacherous business. I briefly survey empirical data suggesting that the type and extent of bias prevalent in the US renders a straightforward evidentialist norm unjust, and thus since the legal practice in the US relies on such a norm, we must explore avenues for reform. Preferably this will take the form of adopting a modified evidential norm, and I explore some promising options. If this proves impossible, however, then we have to accept a strict regulative norm (which does not consider any mistakes permissible), as the sole just alternative. (shrink)

Rights to do wrong are not necessary even within the framework of interest-based rights aimed at preserving autonomy. Agents can make morally significant choices and develop their moral character without a right to do wrong, so long as we allow that there can be moral variation within the set of actions that an agent is permitted to perform. Agents can also engage in non-trivial self-constitution in choosing between morally indifferent options, so long as there is adequate non-moral variation among the (...) alternatives. The stubborn intuition that individuals have a right to do wrong in some cases can be explained as stemming from a cautionary principle motivated by the asymmetry between the risk of wrongly interfering and that of refraining from interfering. (shrink)

A type of argument occasionally made in metaethics, epistemology and philosophy of science notes that most ordinary uses of some expression fail to satisfy the strictest interpretation of the expression, and concludes that the ordinary assertions are false. This requires there to be a presumption in favour of a strict interpretation of expressions that admit of interpretations at different levels of strictness. We argue that this presumption is unmotivated, and thus the arguments fail.

This paper surveys some philosophical issues with the language surrounding mental illness, but is especially focused on pejoratives relating to mental illness. I argue that though 'crazy' and similar mental illness-based epithets (MI-epithets) are not best understood as slurs, they do function to isolate, exclude, and marginalize members of the targeted group in ways similar to the harmfulness of slurs more generally. While they do not generally express the hate/contempt characteristic of weaponized uses of slurs, MI-epithets perpetuate epistemic injustice by (...) portraying sufferers of mental illness as deserving minimal credibility. After outlining the ways in which these epithets can cause harm, I examine available legal and social remedies, and suggest that the best path going forward is to pursue a reclamation project rather than aiming to censure the use of MI-epithets. (shrink)

There has been recent discussion of a puzzle posed by emotions that are backward looking. Though our emotions commonly diminish over time, how can they diminish fittingly if they are an accurate appraisal of an event that is situated in the past? Agnes Callard (2017) has offered a solution by providing an account of anger in which anger is both backwards looking and resolvable, yet her account depends upon contrition to explain anger’s fitting diminishment. My aim is to explain how (...) anger can fittingly diminish even when there is lack of contrition. I propose a permissivism about fittingness by showing that both anger and compassion are fitting responses to blameworthy behaviour. I argue that anger is rendered fitting because it accurately appraises the behaviour, whereas compassion becomes fitting as a valuational response to what the behaviour reveals about the lived experience of the offender. I then respond to some worries my account raises, and I clarify details of my account to show that it is not unrealistic to the way some of our anger actually does diminish. I end with a proposal that our anger can fittingly diminish through the act of forgiveness when compassion is not a forthcoming affective response. (shrink)

This article examines gay men’s efforts to break into the exclusive traditional fraternity institution by adopting the hegemonic model on their own terms. The authors examined to what extent members of a national gay fraternity, Delta Lambda Phi challenged or modified the entrenched fraternity culture that was hostile to homosexuals and whether they resisted or reproduced hegemonic masculinity in their efforts to redefine the meaning of college fraternities. This research examines gay fraternities in relation to two dimensions of hegemonic masculinity. (...) The authors explore how members of gay fraternities negotiated their stigmatized status among other men—that is, within the internal dimension of hegemonic masculinity. They explore the external dimension of hegemonic masculinity by analyzing how gay brothers, as men, related to all women. The authors further examine the connection between these two hegemonic dimensions and provide evidence showing how these two dimensions are coupled or disjointed. (shrink)

In 1986, philosopher-bioethicist Samuel Gorovitz published an essay entitled “Baiting Bioethics,” in which he reported on various criticisms of bioethics that were “in print, or voiced in and around … the field” at that time, and set forth his assessment of their legitimacy. He gave detailed attention to what he judged to be the particularly fierce and “irresponsible attacks” on “the moral integrity” and soundness of bioethics contained in two papers: “Getting Ethics” by philosopher William Bennett and “Medical Morality Is (...) Not Bioethics,” coauthored by us. Gorovitz attributed some of the criticisms that bioethics was eliciting to the fact that this new, rapidly rising, and increasingly visible field had brought “scholars and practitioners together who otherwise would have little exposure to one another's disciplines. Their interactions are mutually enriching at times,” he declared, “but mutually baffling and even infuriating at other times.” In this latter regard, he suggested that “perhaps” Fox and Swazey's characterization of bioethics in the article he dissected “reflects a general revulsion at endeavors they see as inadequately like the social sciences or insufficiently respectful of them.” He went on to say that despite his objections to our “complaints” about bioethics—especially to our claim that “autonomy [had] been an unduly emphasized value” in the field—he had “a lingering sense” that there might be “a grain of truth” in them. Gorovitz ended his essay with an affirmation about the “benefit” that bioethics can derive from “responsible” and even from “irresponsible” criticism. “The unexamined discipline invites the philosopher's critical scrutiny no less than the unexamined life,” he aphoristically concluded. a. (shrink)

This essay considers the social effects of the strategy of "speaking out" about sexual violence to transform rape culture. I articulate the paradox that women's identification as victims in the public sphere reinscribes the gendered norms that enable the victimization of women. I suggest we create a more diversified public narrative of sexual violence and sexuality within the context of the movement against sexual violence in order to deconstruct masculinist power in feminine victimization.

This article investigates discourses of Sweden’s success in gender mainstreaming. Using the theoretical concept of myth, discourse analysis is performed on different categories of texts. The aim is to analyse how this discourse of success is constructed and to increase the understanding of its components. The themes identified in the reading include adaptation, integration, volume and initiatives. In conclusion, it is argued that a conflation of gender mainstreaming with gender equality has been a vital part of the construction of Sweden (...) as the best case of gender mainstreaming. (shrink)

This article analyzes U.S. court cases involving reproductive technologies in terms of their implications for reproductive choice, mothers' versus fathers' rights, definitions and evaluations of parenting, and the nuclear family structure. The analysis reveals that the courts have tended not to recognize how social conditions shape women's reproductive choices, to promote fathers' rights more than mothers' rights, to ignore the social relationships that constitute childbearing and child rearing and value men's over women's biological contribution to these processes, to reflect certain (...) assumptions about the proper roles of mothers and fathers, and to privilege the nuclear family. The implications of developing reproductive technology policy for an understanding of the relationships among gender, reproductive technologies, and the state are considered, and recommendations for the equitable regulation of these technologies are offered. (shrink)

In Spoils of War, a diverse group of distinguished contributors suggest that acts of aggression resulting from the racism and sexism inherent in social institutions can be viewed as a sort of "war," experienced daily by women of color.

They have watched, as insiders, the first fumbling attempts to transplant kidneys, then hearts, then live‐donated lobes of liver and lung. Now the two sociologists most closely identified with organ transplantation have concluded that they must leave the field.

Book reviewed in this article: The Puzzle People: Memoirs of a Transplant Surgeon. By Thomas E. Starzl.

“Bioethics is not just Bioethics.” This is the aphoristic way in which I have recurrently expressed my historical and social perspective on the significance of bioethics, whose import I regard as extending beyond the emergence, development, and establishment of an intellectual field that is primarily concerned with advances in biology and medicine, their relationship to illness and health, and their ethical concomitants. In my view, although they are expressed through the medium of medicine, some of the value and belief questions (...) with which bioethics has been preoccupied since its inception are connected with broad and deep moral issues that are integral to what the illustrious French sociologist Émile Durkheim... (shrink)