_Starve and Immolate_ tells the story of leftist political prisoners in Turkey who waged a deadly struggle against the introduction of high security prisons by forging their lives into weapons. Weaving together contemporary and critical political theory with political ethnography, Banu Bargu analyzes the death fast struggle as an exemplary though not exceptional instance of self-destructive practices that are a consequence of, retort to, and refusal of the increasingly biopolitical forms of sovereign power deployed around the globe. Bargu chronicles (...) the experiences, rituals, values, beliefs, ideological self-representations, and contentions of the protestors who fought cellular confinement against the background of the history of Turkish democracy and the treatment of dissent in a country where prisons have become sites of political confrontation. A critical response to Michel Foucault's _Discipline and Punish_, _Starve and Immolate_ centers on new forms of struggle that arise from the asymmetric antagonism between the state and its contestants in the contemporary prison. Bargu ultimately positions the weaponization of life as a bleak, violent, and ambivalent form of insurgent politics that seeks to wrench the power of life and death away from the modern state on corporeal grounds and in increasingly theologized forms. Drawing attention to the existential commitment, sacrificial morality, and militant martyrdom that transforms these struggles into a complex amalgam of resistance, Bargu explores the global ramifications of human weapons' practices of resistance, their possibilities and limitations. (shrink)

The ethical and legal challenges posed by assisted reproduction techniques are both profound and breathtaking, with most societies unable to fully comprehend one technique before another one, even more daring, emerges. The wrongful implantation of embryos in two women undergoing in vitro fertilisation treatments at two separate clinics in the UK seriously vitiates the traditional concept of who is a parent. In one case, a patient’s embryos were wrongly implanted into another woman seeking similar treatment, and in the second, a (...) woman’s eggs were fertilised using sperm from a man other than her husband.In the first mix-up, neither member of the recipient couple was the genetic parent of the child, while in the second case, the recipient mother was the genetic mother and her husband was not the genetic father. The mix-ups resulted in litigation to determine who the rightful parents were. First, I will show in this paper that, although the outcome of the application of English law in both cases was in agreement with the outcome prescribed by basic principles of Islamic law and bioethics, that agreement is based on different reasoning in the two traditions. Next, I will show that the profound ethical implications of reproductive technologies begs for a more pluralistic bioethical discourse than the one-dimensional analysis applied by secular Western societies that currently dominates the enquiry, particularly as most Western societies are more or less multicultural and multireligious. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence is among the fastest developing areas of advanced technology in medicine. The most important qualia of AI which makes it different from other advanced technology products is its ability to improve its original program and decision-making algorithms via deep learning abilities. This difference is the reason that AI technology stands out from the ethical issues of other advanced technology artifacts. The ethical issues of AI technology vary from privacy and confidentiality of personal data to ethical status and value (...) of AI entities in a wide spectrum, depending on their capability of deep learning and scope of the domains in which they operate. Developing ethical norms and guidelines for planning, development, production, and usage of AI technology has become an important issue to overcome these problems. In this respect three outstanding documents have been produced:1. The Montréal Declaration for Responsible Development of Artificial Intelligence2. Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI3. Asilomar Artificial Intelligence PrinciplesIn this study, these three documents will be analyzed with respect to the ethical principles and values they involve, their perspectives for approaching ethical issues, and their prospects for ethical reasoning when one or more of these values and principles are in conflict. Then, the sufficiency of these guidelines for addressing current or prospective ethical issues emerging from the existence of AI technology in medicine will be evaluated. The discussion will be pursued in terms of the ambiguity of interlocutors and efficiency for working out ethical dilemmas occurring in practical life. (shrink)

This study sought to determine cardiologists’ degrees of ethical awareness and preferred courses of action for ethical dilemmas frequently encountered in clinical settings. For this evaluation, an online survey was created and sent to cardiologists affiliated with various academic posts in Ankara, Turkey. The survey included ten cases with various ethical considerations selected from our book, “Clinic Ethics with Cases from Cardiology.” Four possible action choices were defined for each case. Participants were asked to choose one or more of these (...) preferences. In addition, a fictional change was made in each case’s context without changing the original ethical issue, and participants were asked whether an attitude different from the first chosen one was preferred. The participation ratio was 49/185 (26%), consent ratio 47/185 (25,4%), and completion ratio 44/185 (23,7%). Nine of the ten scenario changes did not change participants’ preferred action. For most questions, action preferences were concentrated between the two options. Although legal regulations did not reduce ethical dilemmas, they clarified physicians’ action preferences. Similarly, as an obscure moral issue gained prominence, physicians were forced to draw clearer lines in their actions. External factors such as healthcare emergencies can change physicians’ ethical dilemma-solving attitudes. (shrink)

This special issue explores intersections of feminism, postcolonialism, and technoscience. The papers emerged out of a 2014 research seminar on Feminist Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, University of Michigan. Through innovative engagement with rich empirical cases and theoretical trends in postcolonial theory, feminist theory, and STS, the papers trace local and global circulations of technoscience. They illuminate ways in which science and technology are imbricated in circuits of state power and global (...) inequality and in social movements resisting the state and neocolonial orders. The collection foregrounds the importance of feminist postcolonial STS to our understandings of technoscience, especially how power matters for epistemology and justice. (shrink)

Nanotechnology (NT)‐enabled disease‐free life is a form of reconstruction of the human body that promises a paradigm shift toward a new form of human existence in an imaginable life. However, as human reconstruction may be within the limits of the concept of “human enhancement,” it is not clear to what extent “enhanced humans” will be ethically acceptable or desired. This study discusses the ethical implications of NT‐embedded enhanced humans and this new imaginable life. First, ethical concerns arising from the existence (...) of a grey zone of certain dilemmas regarding benefits and possible/unpredicted risks are addressed in terms of the four main principles of bioethics. Then, we focus on the ethical problems in human nano‐enhancement. Finally, we study the methods of analyzing these ethical problems within the framework of principlism to conceive a comprehensive and coherent bioethical understanding. (shrink)

BackgroundThe coronavirus disease (COVID-19) treatment must be based on scientific methods such as clinical trials. Trials involving human subjects and those requiring a risk-benefit analysis may occasionally face challenges owing to the time limitations in the pandemic. MethodologyThis study analyses the WHO's International Clinical Trials Registry Platform and clinicaltrials.gov, where most COVID-19 clinical trials are registered, according to ethical criteria including study design, conflicts of interest, enrollment of healthcare workers, study locations, site-, design-, and participant-related issues. The discussion is based (...) on three aspects: the quality of the information to be produced, the relevance to significant health problems, and the creation or evaluation of interventions, policies, or practices that promote individual or public health. ResultsThere were significant differences between the two platforms regarding the investigational medicinal product (IMP), the comparator, ethics committee/institutional review board approval, plan to share individual participant data, study phase, site, IMP, and design-related issues. Conflict of interest, sponsor information, and management of vulnerable groups were the main areas wherein both platforms lacked sufficient information. ConclusionWith this analysis, we aimed to define a minimum set of ethical criteria for clinical trial platforms to obtain standardization between these two platforms. (shrink)

The meta-problem is 'the problem of explaining why we think that there is a problem of consciousness' (Chalmers, 2018, p. 6). This presupposes that we think there is a problem in the first place. We challenge the breadth of this 'we', arguing that there is already sufficient empirical evidence to cast doubt on the claim. We then add to this body of evidence, presenting the results of a new cross-cultural study extending the work of Sytsma and Machery (2010).

BackgroundThe coronavirus disease (COVID-19) treatment must be based on scientific methods such as clinical trials. Trials involving human subjects and those requiring a risk-benefit analysis may occasionally face challenges owing to the time limitations in the pandemic. MethodologyThis study analyses the WHO's International Clinical Trials Registry Platform and clinicaltrials.gov, where most COVID-19 clinical trials are registered, according to ethical criteria including study design, conflicts of interest, enrollment of healthcare workers, study locations, site-, design-, and participant-related issues. The discussion is based (...) on three aspects: the quality of the information to be produced, the relevance to significant health problems, and the creation or evaluation of interventions, policies, or practices that promote individual or public health. ResultsThere were significant differences between the two platforms regarding the investigational medicinal product (IMP), the comparator, ethics committee/institutional review board approval, plan to share individual participant data, study phase, site, IMP, and design-related issues. Conflict of interest, sponsor information, and management of vulnerable groups were the main areas wherein both platforms lacked sufficient information. ConclusionWith this analysis, we aimed to define a minimum set of ethical criteria for clinical trial platforms to obtain standardization between these two platforms. (shrink)

BackgroundThe coronavirus disease (COVID-19) treatment must be based on scientific methods such as clinical trials. Trials involving human subjects and those requiring a risk-benefit analysis may occasionally face challenges owing to the time limitations in the pandemic. MethodologyThis study analyses the WHO's International Clinical Trials Registry Platform and clinicaltrials.gov, where most COVID-19 clinical trials are registered, according to ethical criteria including study design, conflicts of interest, enrollment of healthcare workers, study locations, site-, design-, and participant-related issues. The discussion is based (...) on three aspects: the quality of the information to be produced, the relevance to significant health problems, and the creation or evaluation of interventions, policies, or practices that promote individual or public health. ResultsThere were significant differences between the two platforms regarding the investigational medicinal product (IMP), the comparator, ethics committee/institutional review board approval, plan to share individual participant data, study phase, site, IMP, and design-related issues. Conflict of interest, sponsor information, and management of vulnerable groups were the main areas wherein both platforms lacked sufficient information. ConclusionWith this analysis, we aimed to define a minimum set of ethical criteria for clinical trial platforms to obtain standardization between these two platforms. (shrink)

BackgroundThe coronavirus disease (COVID-19) treatment must be based on scientific methods such as clinical trials. Trials involving human subjects and those requiring a risk-benefit analysis may occasionally face challenges owing to the time limitations in the pandemic. MethodologyThis study analyses the WHO's International Clinical Trials Registry Platform and clinicaltrials.gov, where most COVID-19 clinical trials are registered, according to ethical criteria including study design, conflicts of interest, enrollment of healthcare workers, study locations, site-, design-, and participant-related issues. The discussion is based (...) on three aspects: the quality of the information to be produced, the relevance to significant health problems, and the creation or evaluation of interventions, policies, or practices that promote individual or public health. ResultsThere were significant differences between the two platforms regarding the investigational medicinal product (IMP), the comparator, ethics committee/institutional review board approval, plan to share individual participant data, study phase, site, IMP, and design-related issues. Conflict of interest, sponsor information, and management of vulnerable groups were the main areas wherein both platforms lacked sufficient information. ConclusionWith this analysis, we aimed to define a minimum set of ethical criteria for clinical trial platforms to obtain standardization between these two platforms. (shrink)

Recent technological developments have considerably transformed the supply, storage, and transportation processes of cadavers, creating new and previously unforeseen ethical challenges regarding cadaver usage. In this study, we analyzed two aspects of the cadaver processing system—cadaver supply and its use in research. Thereafter, we highlighted the major ethical concerns underlying these stages and correlated our search results with the ethical principles outlined in the Declaration of Helsinki (DoH), or Helsinki Declaration. To ensure the reliability and continuity of medical progress, human—especially (...) cadaver—research depends on the ethical priorities as outlined in the DoH: respect for autonomy, privacy/confidentiality, risks/burdens/benefits, and the protection of vulnerable groups. According to our ethics analysis, which also corresponds with the ethics guidelines of the Consensus Panel on Research with the Recently Dead, the most ignored values were respect for autonomy and privacy/confidentiality issues. Based on these ethical concerns, we provide recommendations to address these challenges in anatomy research. (shrink)

Corporate social responsibility has generally been recognized as corporate pro-social behavior aimed at remediating social issues external to organizations, while political CSR has acknowledged the political nature of such activity beyond social aims. Despite the growth of this literature, there is still little attention given to gender as the starting point for a conversation on CSR, ethics, and the Global South. Deploying critical insights from feminist work in postcolonial traditions, I outline how MNCs replicate gendered neocolonialist discourses and perpetuate exploitative (...) material dependences between Global North/south through CSR activities. Specifically, I address issues of neocolonial relations, subaltern agency, and ethics in the context of gendered global division of labor through the exemplar of Rana Plaza and its aftermath. In all, I offer new directions for CSR scholarship by attending to the intersections of gender, ethics, and responsibility as they relate to corporate actions in the Global South. (shrink)

In recent decades, we have witnessed the emergence of new forms of warfare, which are characterized by asymmetry, irregularity and the cybernetization of weaponry. Waged from a distance, these wars have created the impression of decorporealization and low risk, at least for one of the contending parties. In contrast, the same asymmetric conflicts have been sites in which the human body has been utilized as a novel and lethal weapon. Although much scholarly attention has been paid to suicide attackers who (...) have become symbolic figures of this new warfare, this article draws attention to their inverse figure: human shields. The human shield risks life not to destroy and terrorize others but to resist organized violence and protect others. This article explores the figure of the human shield, situating it within the context of global moral spectatorship, international humanitarian law and biopolitical warfare. Arguing that the human shield is both a symptom and the immanent critique of the present, one that exposes its multiple contradictions, this article makes a case for the importance of the figure of the human shield for contemporary politics. (shrink)

:This essay provides a reading of Steve McQueen's critically acclaimed movie Hunger, which tells the story of the hunger strike of Bobby Sands in light of contemporary hunger strikes around the world and especially in Guantánamo. The central concern of the essay is to read Hunger together with Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, showing how both works problematize the sacrificial subjectivity of enlightenment, its instrumental rationality, and sovereign temporality, while advancing a devastating critique of Western civilization. I argue that (...) Hunger situates the high-security prison within the self-destructive tendency of enlightenment and depicts how self-sacrificial resistance emerges as a response to sovereign domination. Interpreting the figure of Bobby Sands as the reversal of Odysseus in the encounter with the Sirens, I explore how insurgent sacrifice interrupts the dialectic of enlightenment and points to a new configuration of subjectivity and time. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 1, Page 13-15, January 2012.

The well-known perception of war-hungry Muslims who had the Qur’an on the one hand and sword on the other offering a choice of either accepting Islam or losing one’s head has easily been created in the literature by the Orientalist scholars. Today the stress on the Jihad controversy by mass media in Europe and America is important and needs to be corrected. That jihad has usually been translated by the Western media as “holy war” is a greatly misunderstood principle in (...) Islam. There is no term in Arabic which means, “holy war”. War is not “holy” in Islam. I would like to divide this study into two parts: In the first part, the issue of conquest and its religious, ideological and theoretical references will be dealt with in reference to basic Islamic sources and the previous Islamic state’s practices. In particular, what are the limits of warfare and the position of civilians in the wars and wartimes according to the Islamic law will be looked for. In the second part, as a typical Islamic state, to what extend Ottoman conquests in the Balkans followed and practiced the legal way that opened up by Islamic law will be analyzed according to the available chronicles. (shrink)

this article makes the case that the rationale of open science and responsible innovation will help to build public planetary goods: the necessity of this rationale is illustrated on the COViD-19 case.

This essay takes a synthetic and critical approach to the scattered pieces of art criticism and aesthetic theory authored by Louis Althusser. Connecting these texts to his larger philosophical and political project, we argue that these reflections make an independent contribution to its worth and that they offer different perspectives on lingering theoretical problems. We piece together the insights that form the core of the Althusserian approach to aesthetics and show how these are formulated (in connection with the work of (...) Pierre Macherey as well as the dominant controversies of the time) and trace how their formulations take shape in relation to the work of different authors and artists. In addition to helping us better understand his overall project, Althusser’s aesthetic theory is, we argue, a powerful and original contribution to Marxist aesthetics. Specifically, it points us to the idea that we need to take aesthetic production seriously as a practice with its own specificity - one that has its own logics of determination, rituals of production, circulation, and consumption, one that commands effects that need to be theorized on their own terms. (shrink)

Contact Logics provide a natural framework for representing and reasoning about regions in several areas of computer science. In this paper, we focus our attention on reasoning methods for Contact Logics and address the satisfiability problem and the unifiability problem. Firstly, we give sound and complete tableaux-based decision procedures in Contact Logics and we obtain new results about the decidability/complexity of the satisfiability problem in these logics. Secondly, we address the computability of the unifiability problem in Contact Logics and we (...) obtain new results about the unification type of the unifiability problem in these logics. (shrink)

ABSTRACT A recent issue of the journal Design and Culture included Lucy Kimbell's interview of object-oriented ontology philosopher Graham Harman. The invitation was premised on Harman's ability to counter the contemporary focus on user-centered design with an object orientation. Harman's appearance in the world of design discourse presents a paradox. To ask what object-oriented ontology that explicitly rejects anthropocentrism can offer user-centered and decidedly anthropocentric design practice seems to miss the point of an object orientation. An answer to the paradox (...) may reside in Ian Bogost's account of the metaphorism of object-oriented ontology. This essay explores Bogost's Alien Phenomenology, or What It's like to Be a Thing, which uses Harman's metaphor of black noise as “the background noise of peripheral objects,” and considers the design implications of Bogost's call to amplify black noise and linger in the speculative fiction of things, such as roasted green chile peppers, udon noodles, and pound cake. (shrink)

This paper proposes a series of theoretical considerations on the performing styles used in contemporary theatre, according to the relationship the actor establishes with the audience. If Diderot was the first to question frontal relationship, and asked the performer to ignore the spectator, this programme will only be accomplished one hundred years later, with the emergence of the director. Later on, theoreticians such as Meyerhold, Vakhtangov or Copeau will ask for a partial return to performing facing the audience, as a (...) sign of the return to the theatrical tradition dominated by the exigencies of the stage and not by those of the truth. With Piscator and Brecht theatre rediscovered frontality, as a sign of the wish to engage the auditorium as an active partner of dialogue. The author discusses several avatars that this new frontality acquires in presentday theatre. (shrink)

Public discussions of ethical issues related to the biotechnology industry tend to treat "biotechnology" as a single, undifferentiated technology. Similarly, the pros and cons associated with this entire sector tend to get lumped together, such that individuals and groups often situate themselves as either "pro-" or "anti-" biotechnology as a whole. But different biotechnologies and their particular application context pose very different challenges for ethical corporate decision-making. Even within a single product category, different specialty products can pose strikingly different ethical (...) challenges. In this paper, we focus on the single over-arching category of "genetic testing" and compare tests for disease susceptibility and drug response. We highlight the diversity of ethical challenges - grouped under the broad categories of "truth in advertising" and "protecting intellectual property" - raised by the commercialization and marketing of these technologies. By examining social and technical differences between genetic tests, and the associated corporate ethics challenges posed by their commercialization, our intent is to contribute to the nascent business ethics literature examining issues raised by the development and marketing of genetic tests. (shrink)

In this article, we consider a recent trend whereby private equity available from venture capital firms is being deployed toward mission-driven initiatives in the form of impact investing. Acting as hybrid organizations, these impact investors aim to achieve financial results while also targeting companies and funds to achieve social impact. However, potential mission drift in these VCs, which we define as a decoupling between the investments made and intended aims, might become detrimental to the simultaneous financial and social goals of (...) such firms. Based on a content analysis of mission statements, we assess mission drift and the hybridization level of VC impact investors by examining their missions and their investment practices through the criteria of social and financial logic. After examining eight impact-oriented VC investors and their investments in 164 companies, we find mission drift manifest as a disparity between the means and ends in half of the VC impact investors in our sample. We discuss these findings and make suggestions for further studies. (shrink)

Abstract:This article posits Feminist Science and Technology Studies (FSTS) as a vital tool for bridging postcolonial and decolonial thought. First, FSTS forms a bridge by providing tools for reading epistemic imperialism and scientific racism as shared conditions of possibility for disparate colonizations. Second, by foregrounding the necessary links between epistemic and material violence, FSTS helps undo the theory/praxis binary that sometimes undergirds their analytic opposition. The authors argue that the careful study of science as a set of ideas, practices, and (...) attendant institutions is vital in order to better recognize and intervene in shifting modes of colonial conquest and governance. (shrink)