Abstract:In this article, postmodernism is presented as posing a challenge to the role of philosophy within bioethics. It is argued that any attempt to develop a postmodern bioethics must respond to arguments concerning power, relational responsibility, and violence. Contemporary work on the topic of relational autonomy and naturalized bioethics is interpreted as engaging with the postmodern challenge. This article proposes that the role of philosophy in bioethics should be not to provide moral guidance but rather to adopt a critical approach (...) to the possible consequences of privileging any position or understanding over others. (shrink)

Jurors customarily do their work with very little by way of instruction from the court, other than about the law. This suggests that they enter the jury room with the relevant cognitive and interactional tools at the ready, drawn from everyday life. This paper focuses on a specific conversational device jurors use to do their work: conditional-contrastive inculpations, whereby the defendant’s actions are compared unfavorably to what a normal, innocent person would have done, with the implication that the discrepancy indicates (...) guilt. We examine the logic, variants, sequential precursors, and immediate consequences of this phenomenon in two real-life American criminal juries deliberating the same charges. This study offers a rare glimpse into the operation of real juries, and specifically the way in which they appropriate a practice from ordinary conversation in order to perform the unordinary work demanded of them by the legal system. (shrink)

This article presents a new framework for unobtrusive observation analytics of knowledge and skills-in-action through continuous collection of data from individuals while they interact with digital assets either as individuals or on problem-solving teams. The framework includes measures of the skill and knowledge areas of collaboration, creativity, personal learning, problem solving, and global sustainability, which are observed during natural production and use of communications, intentional artifacts, and resources in a digital learning space designed for self-directed and team-based learning challenges. The (...) article describes the digital context for data collection and shows some example data and analyses. (shrink)