Over the last half century, United States debates about abortion focused at first on the question whether the fetus is a person with rights and later on whether involuntary conception—for instance, as a consequence of sexual assault—might mitigate a woman’s responsibilities toward the fetus she carries. This article argues that, whatever one’s position on these two questions, a third, morally salient dimension of most US women’s experiences of unwanted pregnancy deserves more attention: both abortion and birth burden women with their (...) inevitable moral failure to fulfill their responsibilities to persons who frequently have de facto last‐resort and unavoidable claims on them. Using Lisa Tessman’s work on moral failure and Pope Francis’s interventions on abortion and mercy, I argue that this moral anguish is not a simple emotional remainder. Structural evil, not necessity, is the primary driver of forced pregnancy choices that injure women and their children both materially and morally. Consequently, whether they abort or carry to term, women with unwanted pregnancies need mercy or forgiveness. But they also need compassionate solidarity: prophetic, active efforts to transform the social structures that make material harm and moral failure, and consequent moral anguish and moral injury, inevitable for many pregnant women. (shrink)

CHILDREN ARE INCONSISTENTLY LABELED MORAL AGENTS IN SOME HIGHLY charged situations and denied that status in others. This essay draws on the writings of Nomy Arpaly, Lisa Tessman, and legal theorists to argue that both children and adults should nearly always be considered moral agents. But agency does not imply autonomy, ability to articulate rational reasons, or legal liability for either adults or children. Rather, all agents are dependent and conditioned. This quality divides them from a strict Augustinian vision in (...) which adults and children are fully and solely responsible for their actions. The subtext of Augustine's Confessions suggests that Augustine's biography can as easily be interpreted according to the present framework as according to his own thematic of concupiscence. (shrink)

Adults typically take pleasure in the physical dimension of caring for children. Confusingly, much recent theology either condemns adults' physical enjoyment of children as exploitive or accepts it without comment. A convincing, unifying theological moral argument is needed to yoke the two instincts systematically. Although this essay acknowledges sexual abuse's harmful effects on children, its focus is the ordering of adult desire and behavior. Beginning from the premise that all human love is erotic—hoping in, if not expecting, pleasurable reciprocity—I draw (...) upon the work of Wendy Farley and Linda Holler to argue that healthy human love for children combines desires for the other with unpossessive delight, attunement, and realistic responsiveness. I examine the documented examples of female abuse of children and the example of male abuse in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita to demonstrate the usefulness of this discussion for an analysis of Western accounts of abuse, and I suggest that the approach may be illuminating in other cultures. (shrink)

ALTHOUGH "CHILD LABOR" IS UNIVERSALLY CONDEMNED, CHILD WORK will be a feature of global life for the foreseeable future because many children without adequate access to the requisites of human dignity must work to gain them. With help from the recent work of John Wall, Mary M. Doyle Roche, Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, and others, the author claims children's right to work in Ethna Regan's sense, as an expression of a "situated universal." Rights on this view are real but contingent. They (...) are means to protect universal human goods and vulnerabilities under attack in particular situations. In this case, a situated right to work protects children's flourishing in a global culture still shaped by liberal and capitalist institutions, even as it criticizes that culture's injustices and exclusions. (shrink)

In a proleptically queer mode, Avery Cardinal Dulles’s Models of the Church argued that the church—a mystery—must bear multiple simultaneously true, dynamic, indispensable, yet inadequate labels. If so, one theological test of our ethics is their ability to sustain ecclesiological multiplicity. The anti-trans* policies of some US dioceses and of the Congregation for Catholic Education (CCE) document “‘Male and Female He Created Them’” embrace Dulles’s institution model to the point of exclusive authoritarian institutionalism, while other CCE documents, embracing open-ended, loving (...) dialogue across difference, favor his communion and community of disciples models without discarding the other dimensions of church. Dulles’s belief in the dynamism and temporality of ecclesiological models is permission to replace the institution model, which is vulnerable to abuse, with a kenotic model drawn from queer theology that installs apophasis and self-criticism as indispensable elements of ecclesiology. Ethics of sexuality and gender must pass this ecclesiological test. (shrink)

The 2016 American presidential campaign raised awareness of structural evil among segments of the population whose privilege has protected this knowledge, both making them self-conscious of their vulnerability as persons and revealing the role that the liberal narrative of progress has played in establishing and perpetuating structural evil. This moment of opportunity to shift both the political and the theological narrative demands liberal conversion: overcoming the temptations of anger, denial, and paralysis to embrace solidarity in vulnerability and power. An early (...) liberationist narrative that embraces utopian praxis rather than utopian ideology is both more theologically honest and more effective than the liberal narrative of progress. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Erotic Attunement: Parenthood and the Ethics of Sensuality between Unequals by Cristina L. H. TrainaSandra Sullivan-DunbarErotic Attunement: Parenthood and the Ethics of Sensuality between Unequals CRISTINA L. H. TRAINA Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011, 363 pp. $55.00In this ambitious and broadly interdisciplinary work, Cristina Traina begins from an experience that evades contemporary discussion: maternal sensual pleasure in the care of infants and (...) young children. As Traina notes, this experience puts two contemporary dogmas on a “collision course”: the widely accepted norm that sexual pleasure is intrinsically good and the widely accepted norm that sexual pleasure between unequals is intrinsically exploitative. As with other feminist turns toward neglected experience, this one calls for a recalibration of ethical models—in this case, a more complex and nuanced sexual ethic.Traina challenges readers to broaden notions of sexuality beyond androcentric models focused primarily on particular acts and on genital release. Such models are deeply graven in the Christian tradition and reinforced through reductive cultural appropriations of Freudian thought. But all human relations are embodied and involve desire, argues Traina, and are thus in some sense erotic, though most do not involve genital sexuality. Likewise, her readers are challenged to recognize the pervasiveness of relations of inequality in human life, when most Christian sexual ethics limit themselves to relations between equals, or at least understand a sexual ethic to aim at equality and mutuality.The book engages psychological resources demonstrating the human need for appropriate touch as well as the profound damage done by abusive touch. The need is so universal and foundational that Traina casts it as a human right; yet offering such touch appropriately is a subtle and challenging moral task beset with danger and the potential for self-deception.Traina diagnoses the sexual abuser as a fragmented self, one unable to perceive the concrete reality, needs, and experiences of her victim and bent on the doomed project of creating a whole self by appropriating and objectifying the other. Thus, at the heart of her ethic of sensuality between unequals is the notion of “attunement.” The attuned caregiver can acknowledge and fully experience inclinations, joys, and pains with a contemplative and compassionate awareness that allows considered and appropriate responses. The attuned care-giver lives with “unending, acknowledged desire” (177), a desire that glories in the goodness of the child in her care and, in so doing, creatively elicits subjectivity from her rather than manipulating her to meet the needs of the caregiver. [End Page 240]This ethical vision is developed in dialogue with a number of resources from Christian and secular sources. Traina helpfully nuances a Thomistic account of the virtue of temperance as a guideline for appropriate touch. She also develops revisionist accounts of Augustinian desire offered by Wendy Farley and Linda Holler. I found myself wondering whether some more traditional interpretations of Augustine might serve Traina’s project as well as or better than these revisionist understandings, which emphasize desire as a permanent state rather than directed toward final rest in God.Likewise, Traina works her way through the plethora of recent eros theologies, drawing in particular on recent interpretations of Plato’s Symposium that stress the creativity of eros in bringing to birth goodness and beauty as well as its potential for enabling a degree of other-regard. It seems to this reader that a contemporary ethic of sexuality between unequals calls for greater other-regard than the most generous interpretation of Plato’s ladder of love can suggest. However, Plato’s caution about the profound difficulty of directing eros toward the true good resonates with the difficulty of achieving the “erotic attunement” described by Traina.In any case, quibbles about the resources and interpretations that Traina mines to support her ethic do not lessen the originality, power, and importance of this book, which extends beyond sexual ethics to reframe questions about embodiment, (in)equality, and moral agency in profound and necessary ways.Sandra Sullivan-DunbarLoyola University, ChicagoCopyright © 2014 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Currently living people cannot be said to be wronged because of the wrongless emissons of greenhouse gases by past people. According to the usual subjunctive-historical understanding of harm, currently living people cannot be said to be harmed by the impact of greenhouse emissions on their well-being. By relying on a subjunctive-threshold notion of harm we can justify conclusions about both the present generation’s duties not to violate the rights of future generations, and the present generation’s duties to compensate currently living (...) people for the harms inflicted upon them through the lasting impact of wrongless past harms. This interpretation supports a forward-looking understanding of the grounds of our relating to wrongless past harms. The significance of past harms lies in their consequences for the well-being of currently living and future people. The subjunctive-threshold notion of harm lends support to a standard of minimal, general, and universal justice. Those actors who are in a position to fulfill its requirements are under a duty to do so. Especially the rich and powerful countries ought to counteract the harmful impact of past greenhouse emissions. (shrink)

The authors of the three essays featured in this focus challenge assumptions that are central to the official Catholic teachings on sexual ethics. Elizabeth Antus and Megan McCabe do so by taking on topics that have not received much attention from the magisterium. Cristina Traina urges us to think differently about the way we usually frame the moral issue of abortion. Although they address different moral problems, I argue in this introduction that they highlight common themes—social sin, interruption, (...) and solidarity—share methodological commitments to using empirical data and to valuing human experiences, and push us to imagine a sexual ethic grounded in a just vision of human sexual flourishing. (shrink)

Here, an epidemiological model considering pro and anti-vaccination groups is proposed and analyzed. In this model, susceptible individuals can migrate between these two groups due to the influence of false and true news about safety and efficacy of vaccines. From this model, written as a set of three ordinary differential equations, analytical expressions for the disease-free steady state, the endemic steady state, and the basic reproduction number are derived. It is analytically shown that low vaccination rate and no influx to (...) the pro-vaccination group have similar impacts on the long-term amount of infected individuals. Numerical simulations are performed with parameter values of the COVID-19 pandemic to illustrate the analytical results. The possible relevance of this work is discussed from a public health perspective. (shrink)

Context: Second-order cybernetics and its implications have been understood within the cybernetics community for some time. These implications are important for understanding the structure of scientific endeavor, and for researchers in other fields to see the reflexive nature of scientific research. This article is about the role of context in the creation and exploration of our experience. Problem: The purpose of this article is to point out the fundamental nature of the circularity in cybernetics and in scientific work in general. (...) I give a point of view on the nature of objective knowledge by placing it in the context of reflexivity and eigenform. Method: The approach to the topic is based on logical analysis of the nature of circularity. Mathematics and cybernetics are both fundamentally concerned with the structure of distinctions, but there can be no definition of a distinction without circularity, since such a definition would itself be a distinction. The article proceeds by explicating the structure of reflexive domains D where the transformations of the domain are in one-to-one correspondence with the domain itself. Results: I show that every element of a reflexive domain has a fixed point. This means that eigenforms arise naturally in reflexive domains. Furthermore, a reflexive domain is itself an eigenform (at a higher level. This supports the context of a second-order science that would study domains of science as part of a larger cybernetic landscape. Implications: The value of the article is in its concise reformulation of the scientific endeavor as a search for eigenforms in reflexive domains. This new view of science is promising in that it includes the former worlds of apparent objectivity and it embraces those newer worlds of science where the theories and theorists become active participants in the ongoing process of creating knowledge. Constructivist content: I argue that the perspective of reflexive domains constitutes a new way to think about the practice of science, with observers deeply imbedded, and objectivity understood as the mutual search for eigenforms. (shrink)

The relationship between the United Kingdom and the United States seems to embody most fully the type of the ‘special relationship’ today. It is a relationship founded ultimately on biological kinship, structured by mutual economic and strategic interests and cemented by a sense of political and ‘spiritual’ affinity. At least the broad contours of such contemporary ‘special relationships’ are sufficiently clear. This is far from being the case with those of the Archaic and Classical Greek world, for two main reasons. (...) First, and more decisively, our sources for the history of that world – literary, epigraphical, archaeological – are normally scrappy, discontinuous and variously slanted. Second, and only in part because of the nature of the evidence, the workings of all ancient Greek interstate relationships, whether ‘special’ or not, are in principle controversial. For in the absence of governments and parties in the modern sense it is frequently impossible to explain confidently a particular foreign policy decision taken by a Greek state. A fortiori it is in principle even more difficult to describe and account for ‘special’ relationships between states that apparently transcended purely immediate, local and narrowly self-interested considerations. (shrink)