Abstract

Unlike our last couple of issues, the essays in this issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal are on dramatically different topics with no unifying theme. What unifies them instead is that they take up difficult issues in practical ethics that philosophers have traditionally examined abstractly, by planting them in their real-world, embodied context marked by social and material struggles and power inequalities. In his ground-breaking and richly textured paper, “The Role of Doctors in Hunger Strikes,” Yechiel Michael Barilan takes up the painful and challenging issue of when force-feeding hunger-striking prisoners in order to save their lives is ethically appropriate. To the extent that...