(2013). Intractable Difficulties in Caring for People With Sickle Cell Disease. The American Journal of Bioethics: Vol. 13, No. 4, pp. 22-24. doi: 10.1080/15265161.2013.767959.

BackgroundImplementation of recommendations from clinical practice guidelines is essential for evidence based clinical practice. However, the most effective methods of implementation are unclear. We conducted a national, cluster-randomised, blinded implementation trial to determine if midwife or doctor local implementation leaders are more effective in implementing a guideline for use of oral dextrose gel to treat hypoglycaemic babies on postnatal wards. To prevent any conscious or unconscious performance bias both the doctor and midwife local implementation leaders were kept unaware of the (...) trial. This paper reports the ethical dilemmas and practical challenges of ensuring clinicians remained unaware of their involvement in an implementation trial.MethodsWe sought approval from the National Health and Disability Ethics committee to keep clinicians unaware of the trial by waiving the standard requirement for locality approval usually required for each district health board. The ethics committee did not approve a waiver of consent but advised that we approach the chief executive of each district health board to ask for provisional locality approval. Ultimately it was necessary to seek ethics approval for three separate study designs to keep clinicians unaware of the trial.ResultsThe median time for chief executive approval was 16 days and for locality approval was 57 days. We completed 21 different locality approval forms for 27 hospitals.ConclusionsKeeping clinicians unaware of their involvement in a national implementation cluster-randomised trial is feasible. However, despite a national ethics committee, significant logistical challenges were time consuming and delayed trial completion. Co-ordination of the locality approval process would help facilitate multi-centre trials. (shrink)

Evidence-based medicine has been rapidly and widely adopted because it claims to provide a method for determining the safety and efficacy of medical therapies and public health interventions more generally. However, as others have noted, EBM may be riven through with cultural bias, both in the generation of evidence and in its translation. We suggest that technological and scientific advances in medicine accentuate and entrench these cultural biases, to the extent that they may invalidate the evidence we have about disease (...) and its treatment. This creates a significant ethical, epistemological and ontological challenge for medicine. (shrink)

Children dependent on life-prolonging medical technology are often subject to a constant background risk of sudden death or catastrophic complications. Such children can be cared for in hospital, in an intensive care environment with highly trained nurses and doctors able to deliver specialised, life-saving care immediately. However, remaining in hospital, when life expectancy is limited, can considered to be a harm in of itself. Discharge home offers the possibility for an improved quality of life for the child and their family (...) but comes with significant medical risks.When making decisions for children, two ethical models predominate, the promotion of the child’s best interests or the avoidance of harm. However, in some circumstances, particularly for children with life-limiting and/or life-threatening illness, all options may be associated with risk. There are no good options, only potentially harmful choices.In this paper, we explore decisions made by one family in such circumstances. We describe a model adopted from risk management programmes beyond medicine, which offers a potential framework for identifying risks to the child that are morally permissible. Some risks and harms to a child, not ordinarily permitted, may be acceptable when undertaken in the pursuit of a specified desired good, so long as they are as low as reasonably practicable. (shrink)

Individual choice and freedom are repeatedly invoked in contemporary policy debates, including those with a focus on risk behaviors such as smoking and health insurance coverage. The idea of making the right choice with regard to health and well-being has been fortified by the neoliberal discourse of self-reliance, personal autonomy, and responsibility. This neoliberal view, stemming from the conceptualization of freedom of philosopher John Stuart Mill justifying the freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state control, holds that success, (...) good health, and favorable educational outcomes are largely due to individual effort. Correspondingly, so too is failure, including failure of.. (shrink)

Our aim was to employ a critical analytic lens to explicate the role of nursing research in supporting the notion of caring realities. To do this, we used case exemplars to illustrate the infusion of such discourses. The first exemplar examines the fundamental concept of caring: using Florence Nightingale's Notes on Nursing, the case study surfaces caring as originally grounded in ritualized practice and subsequently describes its transmutation, via competing discourses, to a more holistic concept. It is argued that in (...) the many and varied attempts to define the dynamic concept of care, caring has now become paradoxically, a more fragmented concept despite attempts to render it more holistic and inclusive. In the second exemplar, one of the authors draws on her personal experience of the gap between theory and practice, so pronounced that it pushed the author to revisit the concept of evidence‐based practice and nursing education. In our third and final exemplar, we refer to the absence of knowledge and practice generated through natural enquiry and curiosity, an absence which has led to production of corporate led rhetoric. Drawing together the central arguments of the three exemplars, we reflect on the influential role of nursing research in enabling the deconstruction of taken for granted assumptions such as caring, evidence‐based practice and empowerment; assumptions which have been generated by discourses riddled with confusion and alienation from the reality of practice and the natural spirit of professional enquiry. (shrink)

Previous studies support the link of parental acculturation to their children’s academic achievement, identity, and family relations. Prior research also suggests that parental language proficiency is associated with children’s vocabulary knowledge. However, few studies have examined the links of parental acculturation to young children’s oral language abilities. As preschool oral language skills have been shown to predict future academic achievement, it is critical to understand the relations between parental acculturation and bilingual abilities with young immigrant children. Furthermore, few studies have (...) examined the links between parental acculturation and children’s bilingual ability among different immigrant groups who live in the same areas to understand possible similarities and differences. To address these gaps, this study examines these relations in two of the largest and fastest-growing immigrant populations in the United States, Chinese American and Mexican American families. A total of 119 dual language learners enrolled in Head Start programs in Northern California were recruited. DLLs were assessed on oral language measures in both their heritage language and English. Parental interviews were conducted to obtain parental acculturation and language proficiency. Results showed no significant group differences between Chinese American and Mexican American parents on the majority of their acculturation dimensions. Furthermore, there were no significant group differences in the bilingual abilities between Chinese American and Mexican American DLLs. Cluster analysis identified four groups of DLLs based on their bilingual ability: high language ability in both English and HL, low language ability in both, English-dominant, and HL-dominant. Results suggest that parental acculturation levels are more similar than different among the four groups. On average, parents in all four groups had stronger ties to their heritage culture and HL than to the American culture. Results also showed links between parental cultural identities and children’s language dominance. Parents of English-dominant children had significantly higher levels of American identity than the parents of children with high ability in both languages. Implications are discussed. (shrink)

Cooperation in evil or wrongdoing is one of the most perplexing areas in bioethics, both for those working in the field and those seeking their advice. The papers collected in this book are written by philosophers, theologians and lawyers who have studied these problems and / or by those who have faced these problems in their own work in law, healthcare and research, and political campaigning. The volume includes both general treatments of the subject of cooperation and conscientious objection, and (...) more specific treatments of topics such as voting to improve unjust laws, research on fetal / embryonic cells, and care of suicidal patients. The book is offered as a guide to a field which is both of academic interest and of personal concern to those who face cooperation problems in their own life and work. Contributors include: Bishop Donal Murray, Bishop Anthony Fisher OP, Jane Adolphe, Mike Delany, John Finnis, Luke Gormally, Colin Harte, Cathleen Kaveny, Richard Myers, Charlie O'Donnell, Alexander Pruss, Neil Scolding and Helen Watt. (shrink)

Perplexity is an epistemic emotion with deep philosophical significance. In ancient Greek philosophy, it is identified as a catalyst for philosophical progress and personal philosophical transformation. In psychological terms, perplexity is the phenomenological sense of lacking immersion in the world, a state of puzzlement and alienation from one’s everyday surroundings. What could make such an emotion philosophically useful? To answer this question, I examine the role of perplexity in Jane Addams’s political theory and ethics. Addams, a social reformer and (...) American pragmatist philosopher, regarded perplexity as an emotion that arises out of specific situations, such as being part of a social settlement, union actions, or trying to surmount gender expectations. Perplexity allows us cognitive distance from our everyday customary morality and ordinary habits of thinking, and this pushes us to become creative in our philosophical reflection. I contextualize perplexity in Jane Addams’s social reforms, and examine the relevance of her ideas today. (shrink)

Money in Asia : Small Currencies in Social and Political Contexts. Edited by Jane Kate Leonard and Ulrich Theobald. Monies, Markets, and Finance in East Asia, 1600–1900, vol. 6. Leiden: Brill, 2015. Pp. l + 522. €180, $234.

George Herbert Mead, one of America’s most important and influential philosophers, a founder of pragmatism, social psychology, and symbolic interactionism, was also a keen observer of American culture and early modernism. In the period from the 1870s to 1895, Henry Northrup Castle maintained a correspondence with family members and with Mead—his best friend at Oberlin College and brother-in-law—that reveals many of the intellectual, economic, and cultural forces that shaped American thought in that complex era. Close friends of John Dewey, (...) class='Hi'>Jane Addams, and other leading Chicago Progressives, the author of these often intimate letters comments frankly on pivotal events affecting higher education, developments at Oberlin College, Hawaii, progressivism, and the general angst that many young intellectuals were experiencing in early modern America. The letters, drawn from the Mead-Castle collection at the University of Chicago, were collected and edited by Mead after the tragic death of Henry Castle in a shipping accident in the North Sea. Working with his wife Helen Castle, he privately published fifty copies of the letters to record an important relationship and as an intellectual history of two progressive thinkers at the end of the nineteenth century. American historians, such as Robert Crunden and Gary Cook, have noted the importance of the letters to historians of the late nineteenth century. The letters are made available here using the basic Mead text of 1902. Additional insights into the connection between Mead, John Dewey, Henry and Harriet Castle, and Hawaii’s progressive kindergarten system are provided by the foundation’s executive director Alfred L. Castle. Marvin Krislov, president of Oberlin College, has added additional comments on the importance of the letters to understanding the intellectual relationship that flourished at Oberlin College. Published with the support of the Samuel N. and Mary Castle Foundation. (shrink)

This symposium provides five case studies of the ways that John Dewey's philosophy and practice were influenced by women or "weirdoes" (our choices include F. M. Alexander, Albert Barnes, Helen Bradford Thompson, Elsie Ripley Clapp, and Jane Addams) and presents some conclusions about the value of dialoging across difference for philosophers and other scholars.

Jane Campion’s work regularly revolves around women’s often complex relationship with socio-cultural discourses and their articulation in language, whether in familial and institutional structures or in cultural and creative practice. In this sense, Campion’s filmmaking continues a feminist tradition of exploration regarding female subjectivity, identity and desire as it is represented in language (cinematic or otherwise). In the Cut (2003), adapted from Susanna Moore’s novel of the same name, again places language and the (dis)articulation of the female voice at (...) its heart: the renewal of which is positioned within the film as crucial to women’s survival. In taking its cue from Hélène Cixous’s ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ (1976) and later writings such as ‘Castration or Decapitation?' (1981) and ‘Coming to Writing' (1991), this article frames its discussion of Campion’s interrogation of ‘Woman’s’ attempts at the articulation of the self as an exemplar (in both theme and form) of Cixousian strategies. The article will argue that techniques such as a cinematic écriture feminine, and the appropriation and adaptation of the language of Hollywood genre film, form part of Campion’s feminist inquiry into the discourses and legacies of a phallogocentric patriarchal culture which traditionally delimit Woman as a ‘speaking’ subject. In this way, In the Cut exposes the tensions between what Cixous calls the ‘Absolute Woman’ of culture (the aphonic hysteric) and attempts towards agency, thus challenging phallogocentric representations of women. In using these strategies, Campion’s adaptation creates a polyphonic artefact which not only revises Moore’s novel but also re-visits (in order to reclaim) female articulation; re-writing phallogocentric claims to agency and subjectivity, imagining women's ‘survival’ through language. In this sense, then, adaptation itself can be thought of as a feminist act of subversion. (shrink)

In seeking an answer to the question of what it means for a theory to be fundamental, it is enlightening to ask why the current best theories of physics are not generally believed to be fundamental. This reveals a set of conditions that a theory of physics must satisfy in order to be considered fundamental. Physics aspires to describe ever deeper levels of reality, which may be without end. Ultimately, at any stage we may not be able to tell whether (...) we've reached rock bottom, or even if there is a base level – nevertheless, I draft a checklist to help us identify when to stop digging, in the case where we may have reached a candidate for a final theory. Given that the list is – according to (current) mainstream belief in high-energy physics – complete, and each criterion well-motivated, I argue that a physical theory that satisfies all the criteria can be assumed to be fundamental in the absence of evidence to the contrary (i.e., I argue that the necessary conditions are jointly sufficient for a claim of fundamentality in physics). (shrink)

This is an important book precisely because there is none other quite like it.

In his Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism, Paul Crowther argued that art and aesthetic experiences have the capacity to humanize. In Art and Embodiment he develops this theme in much greater depth, arguing that art can bridge the gap between philosophy's traditional striving for generality and completeness, and the concreteness and contingency of humanity's basic relation to the world. As the key element in his theory, he proposes an ecological definition of art. His strategy involves first mapping out and analyzing (...) the logical boundaries and ontological structures of the aesthetic domain. He then considers key concepts from this analysis in the light of a tradition in Continental philosophy (notably the work of Kant, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Hegel) which--by virtue of the philosophical significance that it assigns to art--significantly anticipates the ecological conception. On this basis, Crowther is able to give a full formulation of his ecological definition. Art, in making sensible or imaginative material into symbolic form, harmonizes and conserves what is unique and what is general in human experience. The aesthetic domain answers basic needs intrinsic to self-consciousness itself, and art is the highest realization of such needs. In the creation and reception of art the embodied subject is fully at home with his or her environment. (shrink)

The first sustained phenomenological approach to modern art, taking a new approach and drawing upon an unsual selection of thinkers.

This is done by exploring some of his other ideas concerning how critical comparisons inform our cultivation of taste, and art's relation to genius.

Watching, looking at, and listening to, are all things that perceiving agents actively do. Though the occurrence of these activities appears to entail perception of elements of the agent's environment, perception is not something that can be actively done by agents. This raises the question how perceptual activity and perception are related to one another. This chapter, through reflecting on a discussion of listening offered by Brian O'Shaughnessy, argues that listening to material particulars ought to be understood as the agential (...) maintenance of aural awareness of those particulars, with the aim of knowing what sounds they are making. He goes on to explore some of the consequences of these claims about listening for exercises of perceptual agency involving the other sensory modalities. (shrink)

This article aims to develop new conceptions of the psychosocial dynamics that drive the re-romanticization of domestic femininity in current financialized capitalism. Feminist scholars have described this heightened cultivation of mothering as a reparative move in response to irreconcilable tensions between cultural ideals of the ‘balancing mother’ and ‘lean-in femininity’. This article adds a materialist-psychosocial lens to these conceptions, to enhance understanding of what drives this craving for domestic femininity. Drawing on a free-association narrative interview study with couples in the (...) financial elite in the comparatively gender-egalitarian Norwegian context, I describe a specific emotional mechanism that resists democratization of gender in this specific group. The interviews reveal a felt need to cultivate ‘the human side of things’ at safe distance from the competitiveness of ‘hard-core finance’. The Nordic earner–carer model with its entwinement of care and professional pursuits, cultivated by the more self-fulfilment-oriented parts of the professional middle-class appears not only unwanted but threatening. In my analysis, I retrieve and develop a psychoanalytically inspired historical-materialist feminism, one that perceives of the gendered division of work as a split in modes of focusing human energy. I suggest that the resurgent cultivation of domestic femininity is nurtured by a self-energizing antagonism between competitive and relational practices. I further argue that the cultivation of domestic femininity in these financial couples points to a potential antagonism between the democratization of love and the specific anxiety-driven competitiveness to which this financial-elite group may be particularly susceptible. (shrink)

"It is well to remind ourselves, from time to time, that "Ethics" is but another word for "righteousness," that for which many men and women of every generation have hungered and thirsted, and without which life becomes meaningless. Certain forms of personal righteousness have become to a majority of the community almost automatic. But we all know that each generation has its own test, the contemporaneous and current standard by which alone it can adequately judge of its own moral achievements. (...) To attain individual morality in an age demanding social morality, to pride one's self on the results of personal effort when the time demands social adjustment, is utterly to fail to apprehend the situation. This book is a study of various types and groups who are being impelled by the newer conception of Democracy to an acceptance of social obligations involving in each instance a new line of conduct."--. (shrink)

The term “value of life” can refer to life’s intrinsic dignity: something nonincremental and time-unaffected in contrast to the fluctuating, incremental “value” of our lives, as they are longer or shorter and more or less flourishing. Human beings are equal in their basic moral importance: the moral indignities we condemn in the treatment of e.g. those with dementia reflect the ongoing human dignity that is being violated. Indignities licensed by the person in advance remain indignities, as when people might volunteer (...) their living, unconscious bodies for surrogacy or training in amputation techniques. Respect for someone’s dignity is significantly impacted by a failure to value that person’s very existence, whatever genuine respect and good will is shown by wanting the person’s life to go well. Valuing and respecting life is not, however, vitalism: there can be good and compelling reasons for eschewing some means of prolonging life. (shrink)

Why are visual artworks experienced as having intrinsic significance or normative depth? Why are some works of art better able to manifest this significance than others? In his latest book Paul Crowther argues that we can answer these questions only if we have a full analytic definition of visual art. Crowther's approach focuses on the pictorial image, broadly construed to include abstract work and recent conceptually-based idioms. The significance of art depends, however, essentially on the transhistorical nature of (...) the pictorial image, the way in which its illuminative power is extended through historical transformation of the relevant artistic medium. Crowther argues against fashionable forms of cultural relativism, while at the same time showing why it is important that an appreciation of the history of art is integral to aesthetic judgment. (shrink)

The Emergence of Word-Meaning in Early China makes an innovative contribution to studies of language by historicizing the Chinese notion that words have "meaning" (content independent of instances of use). Rather than presuming that the concept of word-meaning had always existed, Jane Geaney explains how and why it arose in China. To account for why a normative term (yi, "duty, morality, appropriateness") came to be used for "meanings" found in dictionaries, Geaney examines interrelated patterns of word usage threading through (...) and across a wide range of genres. These patterns show that by the first millennium, as textual production exploded—and as radically different writing forms (in Buddhist sutras) were encountered—yi already functioned as an externally accessible "model" for semantic interpretation of texts and sayings. The book has far-reaching implications. Because the idea of word-meaning is fundamental to theorizing, the book illuminates not only semantic ideas and the normativity of language in Early China, but also aspects of early Chinese philosophy and intellectual history. As the internet supplants one form of media (print), thereby reducing knowledge to vast digital databases, so too, this book explains, two thousand years ago a culture that prized oral and visual balance became an "empire of the text.". (shrink)

This chapter considers the ways in which whiteness as a skin color and ideology becomes a dominant level that sets the background against which all things, people and relations appear. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, it takes up a series of films by Bruce Nauman and Marlon Riggs to consider ways in which this level is phenomenally challenged providing insights into the embodiment of racialization.

Renowned as the chief challenger of traditional views of morality, man's freedom, and religion from 1650-1750, Benedict de Spinoza (1632-77) spread alarm and ...

In _Vibrant Matter_ the political theorist Jane Bennett, renowned for her work on nature, ethics, and affect, shifts her focus from the human experience of things to things themselves. Bennett argues that political theory needs to do a better job of recognizing the active participation of nonhuman forces in events. Toward that end, she theorizes a “vital materiality” that runs through and across bodies, both human and nonhuman. Bennett explores how political analyses of public events might change were we (...) to acknowledge that agency always emerges as the_ _effect of ad hoc configurations of human and nonhuman forces. She suggests that recognizing that agency is distributed this way, and is not solely the province of humans, might spur the cultivation of a more responsible, ecologically sound politics: a politics less devoted to blaming and condemning individuals than to discerning the web of forces affecting situations and events. Bennett examines the political and theoretical implications of vital materialism through extended discussions of commonplace things and physical phenomena including stem cells, fish oils, electricity, metal, and trash. She reflects on the vital power of material formations such as landfills, which generate lively streams of chemicals, and omega-3 fatty acids, which can transform brain chemistry and mood. Along the way, she engages with the concepts and claims of Spinoza, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Darwin, Adorno, and Deleuze, disclosing a long history of thinking about vibrant matter in Western philosophy, including attempts by Kant, Bergson, and the embryologist Hans Driesch to name the “vital force” inherent in material forms. Bennett concludes by sketching the contours of a “green materialist” ecophilosophy. (shrink)

In recent years, calls have been made to address the relative dearth of qualitative sociological investigation into the sensory dimensions of embodiment, including within physical cultures. This article contributes to a small, innovative and developing literature utilizing sociological phenomenology to examine sensuous embodiment. Drawing upon data from three research projects, here we explore some of the ‘sensuousities’ of ‘intense embodiment’ experiences as a distance-running-woman and a boxing-woman, respectively. Our analysis addresses the relatively unexplored haptic senses, particularly the ‘touch’ of heat. (...) Heat has been argued to constitute a specific sensory mode, a trans-boundary sense. Our findings suggest that ‘lived’ heat, in our own physical-cultural experiences, has highly proprioceptive elements and is experienced as both a form of touch and as a distinct perceptual mode, dependent upon context. Our analysis coheres around two key themes that emerged as salient: (1) warming up, and (2) thermoregulation, which in lived experience were encountered as strongly interwoven. (shrink)

Firms and industries increasingly subscribe to voluntary codes of conduct. These self-regulatory governance systems can be effective in establishing a more sustainable and inclusive global economy. However, these codes can also be largely symbolic, reactive measures to quell public criticism. Cross-sector alliances (between for-profit and nonprofit actors) present a learning platform for infusing participants with greater incentives to be socially responsible. They can provide multinationals new capabilities that allow them to more closely ally social responsibility with economic performance. This paper (...) examines learning facilitators in cross-sector alliances that enrich corporate understanding of stakeholder concerns. It suggests that these organizational learning experiments can translate into globally responsible practices and processes that improve the content and effectiveness of voluntary corporate codes. (shrink)

The Aesthetics of Design offers the first full treatment of design in the field of philosophical aesthetics, challenging the discipline to broaden its scope to include the quotidian objects and experiences of our everyday lives and concerns ...

This paper considers the analogies and disanalogies between a certain sort of argument designed to oppose scepticism about free will and a certain sort of argument designed to oppose scepticism about the external world. In the case of free will, I offer the ancient Lazy Argument and an argument of my own, which I call the Agency Argument, as examples of the relevant genre; and in the case of the external world, I consider Moore’s alleged proof of an external world. (...) I draw attention to analogies and disanalogies between the arguments offered in each case in order to suggest that although the Agency Argument shares with its Moorean relative the unfortunate property of being dialectically ineffective against some of those it is mainly hoping to convince, it will not be dialectically ineffective against all of them. It is also argued that the Agency Argument is less vulnerable than Moore’s proof to worries about its justificatory structure. (shrink)

_Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing_ is a poetic, insightful, and ultimately moving exploration of 'the strange science of writing.' In a magnetic, irresistible narrative, Cixous reflects on the writing process and explores three distinct areas essential for 'great' writing: _The School of the Dead_--the notion that something or someone must die in order for good writing to be born; _The School of Dreams_--the crucial role dreams play in literary inspiration and output; and _The School of Roots_--the importance of (...) depth in the 'nether realms' in all aspects of writing. Cixous's love of language and passion for the written word is evident on every page. Her emotive style draws heavily on the writers she most admires: the Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector, the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, the Austrian novelists Ingeborg Bachmann and Thomas Bernhard, Dostoyevsky and, most of all, Kafka. (shrink)

This essay argues that shifts in patronage for the postwar behavioral and social sciences were linked intimately to both intellectual and institutional changes. This broad argument comprises two subarguments: first, that there were in fact two distinct, successive patronage systems for postwar social science—not one, as is commonly assumed; and, second, that the first postwar patronage system played a major role in enabling a series of behavioral revolutions and interdisciplinary syntheses across the social sciences, while the second postwar patronage system (...) encouraged the development of specialized concepts, techniques, and technologies within the disciplines. The essay also suggests that the widespread concern among social scientists in the 1970s and 1980s that their fields were fragmenting was at least in part an unintended consequence of the rise of the second system. (shrink)

According to the theory of contextual integrity (CI), privacy norms prescribe information flows with reference to five parameters — sender, recipient, subject, information type, and transmission principle. Because privacy is grasped contextually (e.g., health, education, civic life, etc.), the values of these parameters range over contextually meaningful ontologies — of information types (or topics) and actors (subjects, senders, and recipients), in contextually defined capacities. As an alternative to predominant approaches to privacy, which were ineffective against novel information practices enabled by (...) IT, CI was able both to pinpoint sources of disruption and provide grounds for either accepting or rejecting them. Mounting challenges from a burgeoning array of networked, sensor-enabled devices (IoT) and data-ravenous machine learning systems, similar in form though magnified in scope, call for renewed attention to theory. This Article introduces the metaphor of a data (food) chain to capture the nature of these challenges. With motion up the chain, where data of higher order is inferred from lower-order data, the crucial question is whether privacy norms governing lower-order data are sufficient for the inferred higher-order data. While CI has a response to this question, a greater challenge comes from data primitives, such as digital impulses of mouse clicks, motion detectors, and bare GPS coordinates, because they appear to have no meaning. Absent a semantics, they escape CI’s privacy norms entirely. (shrink)