In December 1990, an empirical study assessing hospital ethics committee (HEC) success was completed. Success was measured in terms of the number of interventions undertaken by the committees in four functional areas: education, guidelines development, prospective and retrospective case review. Some commonly quoted success determinants, such as multidisciplinarity, physician chairpersons, and a high institutional status of the chairperson were found not to foster success; the latter two, actually decreased committee success.

In June 1992, a national mail survey was directed to 204 state inpatient psychiatric institutions. This study was implemented following the 1992 Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) requirement that hospitals put in place some means with which to address ethical issues. The goals of the study were: 1. to examine state mental hospital characteristics and their response to the JCAHO requirements; 2. to describe healthcare ethics committee (HEC) composition, function, and role; 3. to study patient and family (...) access to a HEC; and 4. to discover ethical issues most frequently addressed. The survey response rate was 71%. Of the 145 responders, 62 had HECs in place, and 53 were in the process of implementing HECs. There were no differences between JCAHO accredited institutions and non-accredited facilities with regard to having HECs. Physicians accounted for 22% of HEC membership, followed by nurses (15%), and administrators (12%). Twenty-six percent of facilities systematically notified patients about existence of the HEC; 71% of facilities had no patient request for HEC services in the last year. A patient's danger to others, and resuscitation policy were issues most frequently (23%) heard by HECs. (shrink)

Background and aimsFew Polish hospitals have Hospital Ethics Committee (HECs) and the services are not always adequate. In this situation, the role of HECs, in providing, among others, ethical advice on the discontinuation of persistent therapies, may be taken over by other entities. The aim of our research was to investigate, how often and on what issues hospital chaplains are asked for ethical advice in reaching difficult medical decisions.MethodsA survey of 100 Roman Catholic chaplains was conducted, that is, at least (...) 10% of all chaplains currently working in Polish hospitals.ResultsOf the participants, 29% confirmed receiving requests for advice in making a morally difficult medical decision. Receiving this type of request was not conditional on the place of their service, duration of their pastoral mission or HEC membership. The largest group of chaplains (21%) encounter questions concerning the ethical dilemmas associated with discontinuing persistent therapy. Patients and their families most often raise issues related to the methods of birth control, and the medical staff raise the issue of termination of pregnancy—as reported by 9% and 15% of chaplains, respectively. Most of the chaplains asked for help (79%) experience a deficit of specialist knowledge in the area of medicine or ethics.ConclusionsIn order to improve the quality of ethical consultations in Polish hospitals, in addition to further development of HECs, it is postulated to develop a system for bioethical education of chaplains. (shrink)

A growing body of research has demonstrated significant heterogeneity of hospital ethics committee (HEC) size, membership and training requirements, length of appointment, institutional support, clinical and policy roles, and predictors of self identified success. Because these studies have focused on HECs at a single point in time, however, little is known about how the composition of HECs changes over time and what impact these changes have on committee utilization. The current study presents 20 years of data on the evolution (...) of the Massachusetts General Hospital HEC. Between 1993 and 2012, the average number of committee members per year was 38 ± 3 and the average length of membership was 4.8 ± 0.4 years. During that time, the committee performed 934 consults, averaging 47 ± 3 per year. Attendance rates fell from 61.5 to 23.8 % over the study period and were inversely correlated with the total number of members. Between 1993 and 2012, the committee saw substantial growth in the diversity of the professional backgrounds of its members. Multivariate analysis, however, suggests that substantial changes in committee composition did not impact its utilization and that other factors are more likely to explain fluctuations in consultation volume. (shrink)

This qualitative social scientific study explores professional texts of healthcare ethics to understand the ways in which ethical professionalism in medicine and nursing are culturally constructed in Finland. Two books in ethics, published by Finnish national professional organizations—one for nurses and one for physicians—were analyzed with the method of critical discourse analysis. Codes of ethics for each profession were also scrutinized. Analysis of the texts sought to reveal what is taken for granted in the texts as well as to speculate (...) what appeared to be relegated to the margins of the texts or left entirely invisible. Physicians’ ethics was discovered to emphasize objectivity and strong group membership as a basis for ethical professionalism. The discourses identified in the physicians’ ethics guidebook were universal ethics, reductionism, non-subjectivity, and threat. Nursing ethics was discovered to highlight reflectivity as its central focus. This idea of reflectivity was echoed in the identified discourses: local ethics, enlightenment, and moral agency. The analysis exposes a cultural gap between the ethics discourses of medicine and nursing. More work is needed to bridge ethics discourses in Finland in a way that can support healthcare professionals to find common ground and to foster inclusivity in ethical dialogue. Further development of bioethical practices is suggested as a potential way forward. (shrink)

Bioethical dilemmas can emerge in research and clinical settings, from end-of-life decision-making to experimental therapies. The COVID-19 pandemic raised serious ethical challenges for healthcare organizations, highlighting the need to conduct needs assessments of the bioethics infrastructures of healthcare organizations. Clinical ethics committees (CECs) also create equitable policies, train staff on ethics issues, and play a consultative role in resolving the difficulty of complex individual cases. The main objective of this project was to conduct a needs assessment of the bioethics infrastructure (...) within a comprehensive hospital system. A cross-sectional anonymous online survey, including quantitative and qualitative formatted questions. The survey was sent to five key leaders from the organization’s hospitals. Survey questions focused on the composition, structure, function, and effectiveness of their facilities’ bioethics infrastructure and ethics-related training and resources. Positive findings included that most facilities have active CECs with multidisciplinary membership; CECs address critical issues and encourage team members to express clinical ethics concerns. Areas of concern included uncertainty about how CECs function and the process for resolving clinical ethics dilemmas. Most reported no formal orientation process for CEC members, and many said there was no ongoing ethics education process. The authors conclude that if CECs are a critical institutional resource where the practice of medicine and mission intersect, having well-functioning ethics committees with trained and oriented members demonstrates an essential commitment to the mission. The survey revealed that more needs to be done to bolster the bioethics infrastructure of this institution. (shrink)

This survey describes in detail ethics committees (ECs) at acute care hospitals in Upstate New York. It finds that in just two years (1984 and 1985), following the Baby Doe controversy and the Report of the President’s Commission, 40% of urban ECs and 37% of university ECs were formed. One half of rural ECs formed in 1992–1995, following the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) requirement of access to ethics consultation. Generally, ECs are committees of the powerful within (...) the hospital; the administration or the medical staff is the organizational parent of 73% of ECs. These groups appoint 80% of EC chairs and 79% of members; they constitute 45% of the membership. Most EC members (81%) lack even rudimentary formal training in bioethics, yet only 18% of ECs consider member education a major role. Many ECs are rather inactive: 53% meet less than every other month and 61% have fewer than six case consultations in the prior year. On the basis of this survey’s findings, suggestions are offered to improve the credibility of these ubiquitous committees as stewards of bioethics, rather than of the powerful within the hospital. (shrink)

This article critically examines, from the perspective of a Roman Catholic Healthcare ethicist, the second edition of the Core Competencies for Healthcare Ethics Consultation report recently published by the American Society for Humanities and Bioethics. The question is posed: can the competencies identified in the report serve as the core competencies for Roman Catholic ethical consultants and consultation services? I answer in the negative. This incongruence stems from divergent concepts of what it means to do ethics consultation, a divergence that (...) is rooted in each perspective's very different visions of autonomy. Furthermore, because of the constitutive elements of Catholic ethics consultation, such as the Ethical and Religious Directives for Health Care Services, the tradition needed to apply those directives, and the Catholic facility’s membership in the institutional Church, the competencies needed for its practice differ in kind from those identified by the report. While there are many practical points of convergence, the competencies identified by the report should not be adopted uncritically by Catholic healthcare institutions as core competencies for ethical consultation services. (shrink)

Despite having faced severe criticism in the past, mereological approaches to group ontology, which argue that groups are wholes and that groups members are parts, have recently managed a comeback. Authors such as Katherine Ritchie and Paul Sheehy have applied neo-Aristotelian mereology to groups, and Katherine Hawley has defended mereological approaches against the standard objections in the literature. The present paper develops the mereological approaches to group ontology further and proposes an analysis of group membership as parthood plus further (...) restrictions. While all mereological accounts agree that group members are parts of the group, it has become clear that this analysis is insufficient. I discuss three proposals to develop the mereological analysis of group membership and then put forward a combined solution to the puzzle. According to my proposal, the members of a reading group are agents who are part of the group and have been designated to contribute to the group. (shrink)

Can our cultural membership excuse us from responsibility for certain actions? Ought the Aztec priest be held responsible for murder, for instance, or does the fact that his ritual sacrifice is mandated by his culture excuse him from blame? Our intuitions here are mixed; the more distant, historically and geographically, we are from those whose actions are in question, the more likely we are to forgive them their acts, yet it is difficult to pinpoint why this distance should excuse. (...) Up close, historically or geographically, we tend to be less forgiving: few of us excuse the Taliban for what they did to women and homosexuals; and if there is less of an outcry concerning treatment not all that dissimilar in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, this is probably only because these actions are less well publicized. (shrink)

Why do we have obligations to the community to which we happen to belong? For communitarians, membership does more than provide the context for asking this question. In fact, the simple fact of membership goes some way towards justifying our obligations. According to the strong version of the communitarian thesis, membership is the fundamental consideration justifying political obligation; but for the weaker version, membership is one consideration among others and at times may be the less weighty (...) one. John Horton's theory of associative obligations can be read as moving back and forth between strong and weak communitarianism. His communitarianism is strong when he rejects value pluralism, arguing that one consideration, membership, is fundamental. However, Horton also advances claims that are compatible with not only the weak version of the communitarian thesis but also value pluralism. They suggest that, if membership is one reason among others to justify obligations, it is not fundamental as it can be defeated by other considerations. (shrink)

The following paper explores the categorisation of groups. Indeed, there are different ways to distinguish human groups from one another: on the one hand, sociological analyses focus their attention on the distinction between being inside and outside of groups; on the other hand, collective action theories mainly focus on the distinction between collectives and aggregates, based on the kind of action that groups can perform, i.e., joint or not. In this paper, we offer an alternative view by adopting the agent’s (...) perspective and creating a scale based on the importance the agent attributes to his or her membership to different groups. While this perspective seems to lose objectivity as it does not allow the formulation of an unambiguous scale that applies to all individuals, it does allow us to understand the process of identification and the consequent phenomenon whereby very often we act in accordance with other people’s actions, in a collective way, without prior coordination. A practical example based on the so-called “acting white” will be explored in order to test the paper’s proposal. The analysis intends to offer a common ground on the basis of which it would be possible to have further inquiries on the social dimension of self-experience. (shrink)

In recent years, membership has dropped in traditional voluntary associations such as Rotary Clubs, Jaycees, and bowling leagues. At the same time, concern is rising about the growth of paramilitary and hate groups. Scholars have warned that these trends are undermining civic society by creating a dangerous number of isolated, mistrustful individuals and organized, antisocial renegades. In this provocative book, however, Nancy Rosenblum takes a new, less narrowly political approach to the study of groups. And she reaches more optimistic (...) conclusions about the state of civil society. Rosenblum argues that we should judge associations not only by what they do for civic virtue, but also by what they do for individual members. She shows that groups of all kinds--among them religious groups, corporations, homeowner associations, secret societies, racial and cultural identity groups, prayer groups, and even paramilitary groups--fill deep psychological and moral needs. And she contends that the failure to recognize this has contributed to an alarmist view of their social impact. For example, she argues that, although extremist groups have obvious antisocial aims, they constrain individuals who would be even more dangerous as maladjusted loners. And she examines the rapid growth of small "support groups"--which are usually dismissed as politically irrelevant--and shows that the moral support people find in such places as prayer groups and self-help groups helps to cultivate the social trust some scholars say is disappearing. Rosenblum concludes that, for practical and principled reasons, American democracy should permit expansive freedom of association, illustrating her case with discussion of specific cases in law. Rosenblum recognizes, however, that freedom has a price. She reminds us that some groups have oppressive and even criminal tendencies, and she explores what liberal democracy should do to ensure that individuals also have freedom within associations and freedom to exit. Throughout, Rosenblum writes eloquently and with a powerful moral voice, drawing on law, practical politics, and psychology to produce an original political theory of the moral uses of pluralism. The book adds remarkable depth and subtlety to one of the leading subjects in contemporary social and political debate. (shrink)

This paper considers Kamp and Partee's account of graded membership within a conceptual spaces framework and puts the account to the test in the domain of colors. Three experiments are reported that are meant to determine, on the one hand, the regions in color space where the typical instances of blue and green are located and, on the other hand, the degrees of blueness/greenness of various shades in the blue–green region as judged by human observers. From the locations of (...) the typical blue and typical green regions in conjunction with Kamp and Partee's account follow degrees of blueness/greenness for the color shades we are interested in. These predicted degrees are compared with the judged degrees, as obtained in the experiments. The results of the comparison support the account of graded membership at issue. (shrink)

Political membership refers to the condition of being a member of a particular political community. It is a relational concept by virtue of the fact that it presupposes a political relation shared by several individuals. Thus, a simple way to think about political membership is in terms of the rights and duties common to all full members of a specific community that it enforces. Those privileges and obligations are commonly delimited by political boundaries which regulate the relations among (...) members and aliens. (Published: 27 February 2012) Citation: Ethics & Global Politics, Vol. 5 , No. 1, 2012, pp. 57-69. DOI: 10.3402/egp.v5i1.14926. (shrink)

Efforts to professionalize the field of bioethics have led to the development of the Healthcare Ethics Consultant-Certified (HEC-C) Program intended to credential practicing healthcare ethics consultants (HCECs). Our team of professional ethicists participated in the inaugural process to support the professionalization efforts and inform our views on the value of this credential from the perspective of ethics consultants. In this paper, we explore the history that has led to this certification process, and evaluate the ability of the HEC-C Program to (...) meet the goals it has set forth for HCECs. We describe the benefits and weaknesses of the program and offer constructive feedback on how the process might be strengthened, as well as share our team’s experience in preparing for the exam. (shrink)

A decade after the fall of Communism in Europe, the Czech Republic'smembership in the European Union is still a matter of a relatively shortwaiting period of 4 years. Not so the imagination of this membership andthe creation of a political concept created to promote this goal: thespecific Central European policy initiated by Thomas G. Masaryk andrevitalized by Václav Havel. Despite the deep differences in thepolitical thought and philosophical orientations of both Presidents, notto mention the historic rupture of 41 years (...) of Totalitarianism, theirperceptions of Europe as an Imagined Community are identical. (shrink)

According to the hypothesis of extended cognition (HEC, hereafter), human cognitive processing extends beyond the boundary of the human organism.1 As I understand HEC, it is a claim in the..

Infamously, Rawls assumed a democratic society to be “a complete and closed social system,” in that “entry into it is only by birth and exit from it is only by death.” Since the beginning of the present millennium, however, debates about the ethical issues related to immigration have been prominent. In this context, these methodological departure points seem long outdated, if not simply biased. This paper will rework Rawls’s theory of migration for application to the case of provisional immigrants by (...) reworking its theoretical underpinnings. I will argue that once his assumptions are adjusted, Rawlsian notions of ‘stability’ in conjunction with his idea of a ‘society understood as a fair system of cooperation’ justify inclusive membership regimes. In other words, Rawlsian domestic justice requires inclusive membership regimes for provisional immigrants. (shrink)

In the literature on refugeehood in political theory, there has been a recent turn towards what have been called “state system legitimacy” views. These views derive an account of states’ obligations to refugees from a broader picture of the conditions for international legitimacy. This paper seeks to develop the state system legitimacy view of refugeehood by subjecting the most developed version of it—the account developed by David Owen—to critical scrutiny. We diagnose an ambiguity in Owen’s theory of refugeehood, in the (...) concept of political membership, and unpack the implications of this ambiguity for state system legitimacy views. First, we reconstruct the key aspects of Owen’s account of refugeehood and show how it represents an advance over competing theories. Then we discuss the methodological underpinnings of Owen’s account, showing the constraints and opportunities faced by state system legitimacy views. Next, we raise some problems for the conceptual distinctions that Owen develops between different types of refugee protection: asylum, sanctuary, and refuge. The underlying feature that leads to these problems is an ambiguity in the concept of political membership, which is at the core of Owen’s view of refugeehood. Finally, we distinguish two interpretations of political membership in the institution of refugeehood and chart out some possible ways forward for state system legitimacy views. The critique developed here is a sympathetic one, aimed at the further development of state system legitimacy views. (shrink)

Organizational membership seems to be linked to a more participatory and informed political culture, to foster electoral participation, and to promote positive feelings toward democracy. More recently, the social capital and associative democracy debates have introduced new arguments about the positive effects of associational involvement. However, little attention has been paid to the problems of measuring associational involvement and to their consequences for our theories. This article discusses the various problems of validity and reliability of our measurements of associational (...) membership. It is shown that different questionnaire formats produce substantially different results. The article also addresses the issue of measurement errors and emphasizes the problems they introduce when doing cross-national comparisons. (shrink)

The recent resurgence of Sacks’ work on membership categorization has highlighted the growing analytic interest in how members’ social category orientations operate at multiple levels of interactional work. One of the outcomes of this, highlighted in Stokoe’s discussion, is the re-emergence of the question of whether membership categorization analysis has been, is, or can be an approach in its own right. In this brief discussion I consider the emergence of ‘MCA’ as an approach to the study of social-knowledge-in-action, (...) the relationship between MCA and contemporary directions in conversation analysis, and finally the future of MCA as it continues to develop. (shrink)

The HSA constitution stipulates that "any person maybe admitted to membership by the Council, subject to confirmation by the Society et the next meeting and shall continue a member so long as he pays dues as determined in the by-laws." Annual dues for students are three dollars, for all others, five dollars. Application for membership should include name, position, institution and address, and should be submitted, with payment of dues, to Professor Donald P. Verene, Treasurer, HSA, Department of (...) Philosophy, Northern Illinois University, Dekalb, Illinois 60115. (shrink)

This paper addresses theoretical problems arising from the vagueness of language terms, and intuitions of the vagueness of the concepts to which they refer. It is argued that the central intuitions of prototype theory are sufficient to account for both typicality phenomena and psychological intuitions about degrees of membership in vaguely defined classes. The first section explains the importance of the relation between degrees of membership and typicality (or goodness of example) in conceptual categorization. The second and third (...) section address arguments advanced by Osherson and Smith (1997), and Kamp and Partee (1995), that the two notions of degree of membership and typicality must relate to fundamentally different aspects of conceptual representations. A version of prototype theory—the Threshold Model—is proposed to counter these arguments and three possible solutions to the problems of logical selfcontradiction and tautology for vague categorizations are outlined. In the final section graded membership is related to the social construction of conceptual boundaries maintained through language use. (shrink)

It is increasingly acknowledged that animals have an intrinsic moral status, in part due to the influential work of many moral philosophers. However, surprisingly little has been written by philosophers on whether animals are owed social membership and the rights that attach to membership in society. In this paper, I explore why the idea of social membership matters, particularly in relation to domesticated animals, and how it can guide legal and political reforms. Focusing on social membership (...) identifies neglected avenues for transformative change, and offers new ways of challenging the deeply-embedded ‘human use typologies' that currently govern our relations to domesticated animals. It also raises fascinating philosophical questions about the definition of ‘society' and the role of an ethics of membership. Ultimately, we will need to develop a new philosophy of interspecies society. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 3, March 2020, Page 35-37.

The world’s elderly population is growing, and in Chile they represent 16.2% of the total population. In Chile, old age is marked by retirement, with a dramatic decrease in income that brings precariousness. Older adults are economically, socially, and psychologically vulnerable populations. This condition increases their likelihood of disengaging from their usual social environment, facilitating their isolation, sadness, and discomfort. From the perspective of social identity, well-being can be explained by two principles: social groups’ importance for health and people’s psychological (...) identification with those groups. This study analyzes the relationships between belonging to the neighborhood and extra-neighborhood groups and neighborhood social identification with WB. Urban or rural location and gender are measured, and the sample is 1,475 older Chilean adults of both sexes. The results show that the majority are not members of social groups, and the remaining 48% are members of one or two groups or organizations. Only 4.47% belong to three groups or organizations. Those who belong to groups obtain higher scores, emotional–mental WB, and positive emotions than older adults who do not belong to any organization. Urban and rural older adults have the same level of WB. Membership in close social organizations or distant ones causes different WB associations. Membership in neighborhood councils reduces gender differences in self-assessment of health. This result supports the idea that participation in heterogeneous groups with a shared sense of belonging to the neighborhood is associated with higher WB and lower perceived loneliness. Social identification with the neighborhood, rather than belonging to the group, had the most widespread impact on WB and health indicators. The variable social identification with the neighborhood was consistently associated with indicators of hedonic WB. (shrink)

Background Diversity in Institutional Review Board (IRB) membership is important for both intrinsic and instrumental reasons, including fairness, promoting trust, improving decision quality, and responding to systemic racism. Yet U.S. IRBs remain racially and ethnically homogeneous, even as gender diversity has improved. Little is known about IRB chairpersons’ perspectives on membership diversity and barriers to increasing it, as well as current institutional efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) within IRB membership.Methods We surveyed IRB chairpersons leading (...) U.S. boards registered with the Office for Human Research Protections. Here, we focus exclusively on responses from a subset of 388 chairpersons of IRBs at universities and academic medical centers (AMCs).Results Board chairs were predominantly white and evenly split between men and women. Only about half reported that their boards had at least one member who is Black or African American (51%), Asian (56%), or Hispanic (48%), with 85% of university/AMC boards comprised entirely (15%) or mostly (70%) of white members. Most IRB chairpersons (64%) reported satisfaction with the current diversity of their membership. Participants largely agreed that considering diversity in the selection of IRB members is important (91%), including to improve the quality of IRB deliberation (80%), with an emphasis on racial/ethnic (85%) and gender diversity (74%). Most participants (80%) reported some type of active DEI effort regarding board membership at their university/AMC and just over half (57%) expressed satisfaction with these efforts.Conclusions Our national survey found that although university/AMC IRB chairpersons report valuing diversity in board membership, it may be lacking in key areas. Going forward, it will be important to specify clear reasons for diversity in the IRB context, as well to establish targets for acceptable levels of board diversity and to match DEI efforts to those targets. (shrink)

Mark Rowlands gives a compelling argument that, if John Rawls's contractarianism is consistently applied, and Rawls's premises fully explained, then we have powerful reasons to believe that representatives behind the Veil of Ignorance should be blind to species membership in the same way that they are blind to economic status and natural talent.1I argue that even if we suppose this to be correct, these agents would not choose the two principles of justice, but instead ones that more closely resemble (...) utilitarian principles. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the REC and its political context to clarify the process of ethical review. The examples initially considered are taken from a Research Ethics Review editorial to develop the social explanation of the membership and function of a research ethics committee. It is suggested that the management and administration of medical matters are not always best understood solely in medical terms. The conclusion of the paper is that the larger political relationships determine the membership and (...) function of the research ethics committee. The REC is defined as the political mechanism for formally socializing medical research and its lay members as similarly socializing the REC. (shrink)

Rosenblum argues that we should judge associations not only by what they do for civic virtue, but also by what they do for individual members.

This qualitative study examines the relevance of self-determination theory to explain retention and attrition in community supported agriculture (CSA). Using a focus group study of CSA members, we examined whether belonging to a CSA supports basic psychological needs for autonomy, competency and relatedness. We found that it did for continuing members. However, for those who did not renew, membership reduced their sense of autonomy, competency, and relatedness. For continuing members, the intensity of their involvement did not affect their needs (...) satisfaction, though it did influence how those needs were met. Continuing CSA members were also intrinsically motivated and internalized extrinsic motivations. (shrink)

How the diversity of membership of research ethics committees is arrived at has, to date, largely been fairly arbitrary. However, a tool to help determine one's moral preference is now available and it is introduced here as, arguably, having the potential to assist with ensuring a more meaningful diversity amongst an ethics committee's membership. The tool is seen to be easily applied – but, it is argued, may be conceived on at least two false premises. Firstly, despite different (...) theories of ethics, none can be proved to give the ‘right’ answer other than in its own terms. Secondly, if there is an ethical hierarchy, as the model suggests, then ethical diversity must become redundant for the possibility of achieving ethical excellence. (shrink)

In this paper I take issue with the doctrine that organisms belong of their very essence to the natural kinds (or biological taxa, if these are not kinds) to which they belong. This view holds that any human essentially belongs to the species Homo sapiens, any feline essentially belongs to the cat family, and so on. I survey the various competing views in biological systematics. These offer different explanations for what it is that makes a member of one species, family, (...) etc. a member of that taxon. Unfortunately, none of them offers an explanation that is compatible with the essentialism in question. (shrink)

Central to the social membership model of animal rights is the claim that relations with nonhuman animals should be reorganized such that domesticated animals are recognized as members of our shared societies. Though some elements of the membership model remain contested, the core of the membership model is that domesticated animals have a claim on, and a direct entitlement to, the benefits of cooperative relations. For many political theorists, however, distributive justice considerations apply only to a certain (...) kind of cooperative relationship. The community of justice recipients is thought to be limited by what Brian Berkey calls the Contribution/Capacity Basis of Entitlement. Accordingly, justice considerations apply to a scheme of cooperation and a conception of justice “entail[s] direct entitlements only for those who are contributors, or, alternatively, those who at least possess the capacities that are necessary to be capable of contributing to such a scheme”. This thesis – referred to as ‘contributionism’ – has typically been utilized to exclude nonhuman animals from justice considerations. The paper argues that contributionism is not fundamentally at odds with justice for domesticated animals, and conversely that contributionism remains a useful conceptual tool for explaining resource sharing with these nonhuman animals. (shrink)

In this paper, we demonstrate how the collaborative and sequential unfolding of a story ties into the constitution of a membership categorization device which we have glossed as ‘us and them’. The data come from a focus group activity where first and second generation immigrants to Denmark have been asked to discuss their situation in Denmark. Using Ethnomethodological Conversation and Membership Categorization Analysis, we present one story which involves a story-teller and his family and an elderly Danish couple (...) living in the same block of flats. In the telling of the story, co-participants align and affiliate, and disalign and disaffiliate, at sequentially relevant junctions. We will argue that not only do such phenomena indicate listenership and possible agreement to the moral of the story in its telling, but also to the morally implicative categorical work involved in the story’s telling. (shrink)

During the course of this article, we examine the use of membership categorisation practices by a high-profile celebrity public social media account that has been understood to generate interest, attention and controversy across the UK media ecology. We utilise a data set of harvested tweets gathered from a high-profile public ‘celebrity antagonist’ in order to systematically identify types of antagonistic formulation that have generated different levels of interest within the social media community and beyond. Drawing from classic ethnomethodological studies (...) of banner headlines and other means of generating public interest and ‘making sense’, we respecify high-profile antagonistic tweets as category formulations that exhibit particular and regular membership category features that are reflexively bound to potential antagonistic readings, interest and controversy. In conclusion, we consider how such formulations may be understood to represent resources that constitute ignition points within antagonistic flows of communication and information that can be metaphorically understood as ‘digital wildfires’. (shrink)

Public health involves the use of power to change institutions and redistribute resources and deliberately to shape individual thought and behavior. This requires normative legitimation and demands ethical critique. This article explores concepts that are vital to public health ethics, but have been relatively neglected. These are membership, solidarity and the concept of place. The article argues that the practice of public health should recognize the equal rights of membership in communities of health justice. Public health should also (...) rely on a sense of obligation and mutual aid in a world of shared vulnerability and reciprocal recognition. Finally, public health achieves its goals not merely—and perhaps not most fundamentally—through information and altering the logical ratiocination of individuals or groups, but rather through the reformation of sense and sensibility. (shrink)

It has seemed natural to model phenomena related to vagueness in terms of graded membership. However, so far no satisfactory answer has been given to the question of what graded membership is nor has any attempt been made to describe in detail a procedure for determining degrees of membership. We seek to remedy these lacunae by building on recent work on typicality and graded membership in cognitive science and combining some of the results obtained there with (...) a version of the conceptual spaces framework. (shrink)

This study, based on three years of research and over 40 hours of videotaped interaction in psychiatry, investigates the issue of insanity ascription/exoneration in psychiatric interviews. Following Sacks's model of membership categorization analysis, this article analyzes the discursive resources that psychiatrists may draw on to achieve some conclusion regarding their patients' psychopathological status. As it turns out, psychiatrists' invocation of patients' putative membership categories plays a crucial role in the achievement of such a conclusion. I examine some fragments (...) of psychiatric intake interviews and subsequent psychiatric interviews. The analysis shows that the process that may lead to insanity ascription/exoneration in psychiatric interviews basically involves the use of mundane, commonsense reasoning. (shrink)