BackgroundBiobanks are considered to be key infrastructures for research development and have generated a lot of debate about their ethical, legal and social implications. While the focus has been on human genomic research, rapid advances in human microbiome research further complicate the debate.DiscussionWe draw on two cystic fibrosis biobanks in Toronto, Canada, to illustrate our points. The biobanks have been established to facilitate sample and data sharing for research into the link between disease progression and microbial dynamics in the lungs (...) of pediatric and adult patients. We begin by providing an overview of some of the ELSI associated with human microbiome research, particularly on the implications for the broader society. We then discuss ethical considerations regarding the identifiability of samples biobanked for human microbiome research, and examine the issue of return of results and incidental findings. We argue that, for the purposes of research ethics oversight, human microbiome research samples should be treated with the same privacy considerations as human tissues samples. We also suggest that returning individual microbiome-related findings could provide a powerful clinical tool for care management, but highlight the need for a more grounded understanding of contextual factors that may be unique to human microbiome research.ConclusionsWe revisit the ELSI of biobanking and consider the impact that human microbiome research might have. Our discussion focuses on identifiability of human microbiome research samples, and return of research results and incidental findings for clinical management. (shrink)

Build the skills you need to understand and resolve ethical problems! Ethical Dimensions in the Health Professions, 7th Edition provides a solid foundation in ethical theory and concepts, applying these principles to the ethical issues surrounding health care today. It uses a unique, six-step decision-making process as a framework for thinking critically and thoughtfully, with case studies of patients to illustrate ethical topics such as conflict of interest, patient confidentiality, and upholding best practices. Written by Regina F. Doherty, an (...) educator and occupational therapist, this book will help you make caring and effective ethical choices that improve patient care and outcomes. UNIQUE! Ethical decision-making process provides an organizing framework to use in making the best decisions when faced with ethical problems. Patient stories depict real-life situations and demonstrate the ethical decision-making process. Reflection boxes depict important concepts and stimulate critical thinking. Summary boxes highlight the most important information in each section. Coverage of interprofessional team decision-making reflects this important, expanding movement in healthcare nationally and internationally. Questions for thought and discussion encourage students to apply the ethical decision-making process to different situations. NEW! Updated content throughout the book reflects the changes in the growing interprofessional movement. NEW! Expanded content on clinician well-being includes tools for supporting moral resilience and preventing burnout in health professionals. NEW! Updated content addresses the topics of social justice, health disparities, intersectionality, and health outcomes. NEW! Updated national standards and regulations are provided for electronic health communications, data protections, and clinical research. NEW! Coverage of scientific literature is expanded with studies on the effects of compassion on patient outcomes, patient safety, and provider and organizational well-being. NEW! Coverage of ethical issues impacting healthcare and society includes topics such as medical scarcity due to healthcare supply chain shortages and extreme weather events due to climate change. (shrink)

This book focuses on the significance of the body in contemporary feminist scholarship. Whether the body is treated as biological bedrock or subversive metaphor, it is implicated in the cultural and historical construction of sexual difference as well as asymmetrical power relations. The contributors to this volume examine the role of the body as socially shaped and historically colonized territory and as the focus of individual womenÆs struggles for autonomy and self-determination. They also analyze its centrality to the feminist critique (...) of male-stream science as dualistic, distanced, and decontextualized. While the body has become a "hot item" in contemporary social theory and research, the renewed interest has received a mixed reaction from feminists. The body may be back, but the "new" body theory often proves to be just as disembodied as it ever was. The body revival seems to be less an attempt to re-embody masculinist science than just another expression of the same condition that evoked the feminist critique in the first place: a flight from femininity and everything that is associated with it in Western culture. Drawing on insights from contemporary feminist theories of gender and power, this book offers a timely critical appraisal of the recent "body revival." Embodied Practices not only sets an agenda for research about the body, but for an embodied perspective on the body as well. It will be a valuable and thought-provoking resource for students of womenÆs studies, social theory, cultural studies, and medical sociology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 42.2 (2004) 223-224 [Access article in PDF] Jacqueline Broad. Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. x + 191. Cloth, $55.00. In this impressive study of early Modern Philosophy, Jacqueline Broad analyzes the influence that Cartesianism has had in the development of feminist thought. Her work covers the early modern philosophy of Elisabeth of Bohemia, Margaret Cavendish, (...) Ann Conway, Mary Astell, Damaris Cudworth Masham and Catherine Trotter Cockburn. She points out the paradoxical relationship between current feminist philosophy and the writings of early Modern women. Broad concentrates on the metaphysical issues of mind-body dualism, thinking matter, and the role of reason in knowledge.Recent feminists have argued that even though Cartesianism appears to emphasize an egalitarian concept of reason, it entails a male bias which excludes women from philosophy. Broad covers the work of Genevieve Lloyd, Hilda Smith, Margaret Atherton and other feminists. Her goal is to show that the common Cartesian interpretation of early women's writings obscures the anti-Cartesian and anti-dualist aspects of their thought. Like Lloyd, she argues that historically women were associated with a lesser form of reason following the rise of Cartesianism.The conflict between reason and femininity is noted in the complexity of early Modern thought. Broad argues that even though Elisabeth is remembered as a critic of Descartes, many of her suggestions are not as anti-dualist as some scholars believe. Broad highlights the critical content of Elisabeth's letters to Descartes and discusses her criticisms of dualism and her Cartesian method of discovering truth and certainty. On the basis of her letters she contends that Elisabeth can be regarded as a precursor to feminist philosophers who give an equal role to the body and emotions in their metaphysical and ethical writings.Like Elisabeth, Margaret Cavendish rejects Cartesian dualism. The common thread that runs through early Modern feminist philosophy is the argument that interaction between two unlike substances is inconceivable. Broad argues that like Cavendish, Anne Conway ascribes spiritual characteristics to the body and material properties to the soul. According to Broad, their ontological views amount to a rejection of the stereotypes of femininity.Broad argues that Mary Astell's metaphysical views diverge from the modern Cartesians of her time. Although she is indebted to Descartes, Broad contends that she supports a metaphysical system which avoids some of the gender biases identifiable in Cartesianism. Astell, for example, does not find a life based on reason as a rival to a life concerned with the body; her emphasis on rationality is simply a reaction to the stereotype of women as irrational material beings.Damaris Masham is generally considered a philosophical rival of Astell, but Broad argues that Masham's arguments are focused on the same presuppositions as Astell's. She argues that both philosophers champion women's education, criticize the occasionalism of Norris and believe in interaction between the corporeal and incorporeal worlds. Broad emphasizes the common theological outlook inspired by Cambridge Platonism. Contrary to the interpretation of Ruth Perry, she finds that there is sufficient evidence that Masham was positively inspired by the second part of Astell's Serious Proposal.Broad concludes with an analysis of Catherine Cockburns' metaphysics and moral philosophy. According to Cockburn, women's ignorance is simply the result of being discouraged from rational pursuits. Cockburn's defense of Locke's notion of thinking matter and her rejection of Cartesian notions of substance mark the end of the Cartesian influence on women philosophers in England. [End Page 223]Broad has shown that a reverence for reason and dualistic theories do not necessarily go hand in hand. She points out that early Modern feminist thinkers are not simply handmaidens to the great philosophical masters. As other scholars have argued, one can find unique approaches to substance as well as original moral positions.This text is a significant contribution to the literature on early Modern philosophy. Broad's in depth analysis will not fail to interest scholars in metaphysics, the history of philosophy and moral theory. Kathy... (shrink)

This paper investigates the difficulties of creating economic, social, and environmental values when operating as a hybrid venture. Drawing on hybrid organizing and sustainable business model research, it explores the implications of alternative forms of business model experimented with by farmer owned, fairtrade social enterprise Cafédirect. Responding to changes and challenges in the market and societal environment, Cafédirect has tried multiple business model innovations to deliver on all three forms of value capture, with differing levels of success. This longitudinal case (...) study, therefore, provides a contribution to our understanding of how business models enact hybrid mission, providing a platform for triple-bottom-line value capture. In doing so, we are able to expand on the normative understandings of integrating hybrid objectives, and the complications of multiple types of value capture. (shrink)

The growth of autistic self-advocacy and the neurodiversity movement has brought about new ethical, theoretical and ideological debates within autism theory, research and practice. These debates have had genuine impact within some areas of autism research but their influence is less evident within early intervention research. In this paper, we argue that all autism intervention stakeholders need to understand and actively engage with the views of autistic people and with neurodiversity as a concept and movement. In so doing, intervention researchers (...) and practitioners are required to move away from a normative agenda and pay diligence to environmental goodness-of-fit, autistic developmental trajectories, internal drivers and experiences, and autistic prioritized intervention targets. Autism intervention researchers must respond to these debates by reframing effectiveness, developing tools to measure autistic prioritized outcomes, and forming partnerships with autistic people. There is a pressing need for increased reflection and articulation around how intervention practices align with a neurodiversity framework and greater emphasis within intervention programmes on natural developmental processes, coping strategies, autonomy, and well-being. (shrink)

Since its inception, the concept of `intersectionality' — the interaction of multiple identities and experiences of exclusion and subordination — has been heralded as one of the most important contributions to feminist scholarship. Despite its popularity, there has been considerable confusion concerning what the concept actually means and how it can or should be applied in feminist inquiry. In this article, I look at the phenomenon of intersectionality's spectacular success within contemporary feminist scholarship, as well as the uncertainties and confusion (...) which it has generated. Drawing upon insights from the sociology of science, I shall show how and why intersectionality could become a feminist success story. I shall argue that, paradoxically, it is precisely the concept's alleged weaknesses — its ambiguity and open-endedness — that were the secrets to its success and, more generally, make it a good feminist theory. (shrink)

Revision of author's thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oxford, 2012 under title Moral theological method in the theological ethics of Martin Luther and Arthur Rich, with particular reference to their economic ethics.

Employee attributions and emotional reactions to unethical behavior of top leaders in an organization recently involved in a highly publicized ethics scandal were examined. Participants (n = 76) from a large southern California government agency completed an ethical climate assessment. Secondary data analysis was performed on the written commentary to an open-ended question seeking employees' perceptions of the ethical climate. Employees attributed the organization's poor ethical leadership to a number of causes, including: lack of moral reasoning, breaches of trust, hypocrisy, (...) and poor ethical behavior role modeling. Emotional reactions to corruption included cynicism, optimism, pessimism, paranoia and fear, and were targeted at top leaders, organizational practices (i.e., the old boy network, nepotism, and cronyism) and ethics interventions. Implications for leadership training and other organizational ethics interventions are discussed. (shrink)

There is a fear of death that persistently eludes adequate explanation by contemporary philosophers of death. The reason for this is their focus on mortal harm issues, such as why death is bad for the person who dies. Claims regarding the fear of death are assumed to be contingent on the resolution of questions about the badness of death. In practice, however, consensus on some mortal harm issues has not resulted in comparable clarity on mortal fear. I contend we cannot (...) do justice to fear of death unless we detach it from theories about the badness of death, including the overwhelmingly-popular deprivation theory. The case for this involves disambiguation of certain aspects of mortal harm, a broad conception of what is involved in accounting for an emotion, and close attention to the nature of the fear in question. The source of fear of death is our departure from a context in which self-directed emotions have coherent application; our attitudes become ‘unmoored,’ in Samuel Scheffler’s phrase. While this does not result in a fear that is sui generis, it does demand that we remove the object of fear from the realm of well-being in order to make sense of it. (shrink)

Many businesses, including professional sport teams, are designing and engaging in socially responsible initiatives which benefit stakeholders as well as the businesses themselves. Gaining insight into stakeholders' expectations regarding corporations' corporate social responsibility initiatives through dialogue is important as the way a business is viewed and evaluated by stakeholders underlies subsequent interactions. Based on semi-structured interviews with 42 diverse stakeholders involved in a professional sport team's CSR initiative we found that stakeholders' expectations of the team's involvement in the community related (...) to social and institutional norms, values, and benefits. The team also appeared to be meeting stakeholder expectations about being socially responsible in the community. This study provides new insights into a firm's CSR expectations through engaging in stakeholder management and interaction. Future research directions and practical suggestions are offered for organizations attempting to understand and meet stakeholders' expectations in the area of CSR. (shrink)

"This book does serve a very useful purpose in returning power to the centre of the feminist stage. . . . This book makes clear the ways in which the machinations of power are more subtle, widespread, and multiform than it sometimes appears. Further, the clarity of presentation means that it is also a text that can usefully be included on student bibliographies." --Women's Philosophy Review "The Gender of Power, which announces itself in the first line of its Preface as (...) a scholarly treatment of the 'battle of the sexes,' is a fine contribution to this promising dialogue of understanding." --The Journal of Men's Studies "This well-edited book addresses the problem of gender in theories of power directly, incisively, and succinctly. It is as joyfully free of jargon and prolixity, as it is of dogma and flag-waving.". (shrink)

We examine the perceived importance of three organizational preconditions theorized to be critical for ethics program effectiveness. In addition, we examine the importance of ethical leadership and congruence between formal ethics codes and informal ethical norms in influencing employee perceptions. Participants from a large southern California government agency completed a survey on the perceived effectiveness of the organization’s ethics program. Results suggest that employee perceptions of organizational preconditions, ethical leadership and informal ethical norms were related to perceptions of ethics program (...) effectiveness. Based on these findings, organizations should evaluate the presence of essential preconditions and take steps to ensure that leaders model espoused organizational values to foster perceptions of effective ethics programs. (shrink)

Engaging in self-narrative is often touted as a powerful antidote to the bad effects of illness. However, there are various examples of what may broadly be termed “aversion” to illness narrative. I group these into three kinds: aversion to certain types of illness narrative; aversion to illness narrative as a whole; and aversion to illness narrative as an essentially therapeutic endeavor. These aversions can throw into doubt the advantages claimed for the illness narrator, including the key benefits of repair to (...) the damage illness does to identity and life-trajectory. Underlying these alleged benefits are two key presuppositions: that it is the whole of one’s life that is narratively unified, and that one’s identity is inextricably bound up with narrative. By letting go of these assumptions, illness narrative advocates can respond to the challenges of narrative aversions. (shrink)

Animals are used in biomedical research to study disease, develop new medicines, and test them for safety. As the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics’ review Normalising the Unthinkable acknowledges, many great strides in medicine have involved animals. However, their contribution has not always been positive. Decades of attempts to develop treatments for diseases including asthma, cancer, stroke, and Alzheimer’s using animals have failed to translate to humans, leaving patients with inadequate treatments or without treatments at all. As Normalising the Unthinkable (...) points out, we have to confront the fact that animal research may have hindered progress, at least in some respects. For example, animal tests have been shown to have very little ability to predict the safety of medicines for human patients. A dramatic illustration of this failing is TGN1412, which almost killed 6 clinical trial volunteers in 2006, after crab-eating macaques showed the drug to be safe, even at massive doses. This failing contributes to adverse drug reactions, which are now one of the world’s leading causes of death, killing hundreds of thousands of people every year and hospitalizing millions. A revolution in science and technology has produced a new generation of more relevant and predictive tools, which could be used to create safer medicines more quickly and at less cost: a win-win situation that should be supported by everyone. The obstacle preventing this from happening is governments’ continued insistence on animal testing. Yet the evidence is clear that reliance on animals as surrogate humans puts patients at risk, can delay medical progress, and can cause effective treatments to be wrongly discarded. There is a compelling case to be made that animal research is an ethical issue for humans as well as for animals. (shrink)

This paper explores how fair trade social enterprises manage paradoxes in stakeholder-oriented governance models. We use narrative accounts from board members, at governance events and board documents to report an exploratory study of paradoxes in three FTSEs which are partly farmer-owned. Having synthesized the key social enterprise governance literature and framed it alongside the broader paradox theory, we used narratives to explore how tensions are articulated, how they can be applied within an adapted paradox framework, and how governance actors seek (...) to mitigate paradoxes. The paper contributes to current debates in social enterprise scholarship concerning hybridity :455–476, 2010; in Institutional logics in action, Part B, 2012), hybrid organizing :397–441, 2014) and operational tensions :407–442, 2013) by illustrating empirically how the central social/enterprise paradox manifests in FTSEs governance arrangements. We build on the paradox categories proposed by Lüscher and Lewis :221–240, 2008) and adapted in Smith et al. :407–442, 2013) by developing a recursive model of legitimacy-seeking governance processes, conceptualizing how boards seek to mitigate, but not necessarily resolve, paradoxes. (shrink)

This provocative work provides a radical reassessment of the emergence and nature of Christian sexual morality, the dominant moral paradigm in Western society since late antiquity. While many scholars, including Michel Foucault, have found the basis of early Christian sexual restrictions in Greek ethics and political philosophy, Kathy L. Gaca demonstrates on compelling new grounds that it is misguided to regard Greek ethics and political theory—with their proposed reforms of eroticism, the family, and civic order—as the foundation of Christian (...) sexual austerity. Rather, in this thoroughly informed and wide-ranging study, Gaca shows that early Christian goals to eradicate fornication were derived from the sexual rules and poetic norms of the Septuagint, or Greek Bible, and that early Christian writers adapted these rules and norms in ways that reveal fascinating insights into the distinctive and largely non-philosophical character of Christian sexual morality. Writing with an authoritative command of both Greek philosophy and early Christian writings, Gaca investigates Plato, the Stoics, the Pythagoreans, Philo of Alexandria, the apostle Paul, and the patristic Christians Clement of Alexandria, Tatian, and Epiphanes, freshly elucidating their ideas on sexual reform with precision, depth, and originality. Early Christian writers, she demonstrates, transformed all that they borrowed from Greek ethics and political philosophy to launch innovative programs against fornication that were inimical to Greek cultural mores, popular and philosophical alike. The Septuagint's mandate to worship the Lord alone among all gods led to a Christian program to revolutionize Gentile sexual practices, only for early Christians to find this virtually impossible to carry out without going to extremes of sexual renunciation. Knowledgeable and wide-ranging, this work of intellectual history and ethics cogently demonstrates why early Christian sexual restrictions took such repressive ascetic forms, and casts sobering light on what Christian sexual morality has meant for religious pluralism in Western culture, especially among women as its bearers. (shrink)

I am interested in fear of non-existence, which is often discussed in terms of fear one’s own death, or as it is sometimes called, fear of death as such. This form of fear has been denied by some philosophers. Cognitive theories of the emotions have particular trouble in dealing with it, granting it a status that is simultaneously paradigmatic yet anomalous with respect to fear in general. My paper documents these matters, and considers a number of responses. I provide examples (...) from philosophy and literature of fear of non-existence, and distinguish it from other death-related fears. I then look at the success that cognitive theories of the emotions have had in dealing with other “problematic” fears, such as phobias, and examine how the solutions here fail to apply to fear of non-existence. The problem lies with the perceptual-centred model of fear that is typically called upon. Against this I recommend a retreat to a belief-centred model for fear of non-existence. I argue that there are other fears that are better explained by a belief-centred rather a perceptual-based approach. This reinforces the plausibility of the belief-centred model, and goes some way to alleviating the anomalous and problematic status of the fear of non-existence. (shrink)

What remains as an ongoing project, Weeks contends, is creating a theory of the constitution of subjects to account for the processes of social construction. This book presents one such account.

This is a case study investigating the growth of fair trade pioneer, Cafédirect. We explore the growth of the company and develop strategic insights on how Cafédirect has attained its prominent position in the UK mainstream coffee industry based on its ethical positioning. We explore the marketing, networks and communications channels of the brand which have led to rapid growth from niche player to a mainstream brand. However, the company is experiencing a slow down in its meteoric rise and we (...) question whether it is possible for the company to regain its former momentum with its current marketing strategy. (shrink)

Arguments about the discursive shaping of our inner lives explain the shaping powers of normalising forces on individual and collective social action, but, I argue here, do not adequately account for the actions of those who choose to follow alternative ways of being. Meta- Reality brings into this picture those aspects of being that are ‘beyond language’, and theorises human consciousness as stratified. I argue that it provides a fuller theoretical explanation for the motivations of five contemporary British visual artists. (...) Drawing on a discourse analysis, I explore why these artists go against the current stream of consumerist and work norms in order to find the time to make art. I summarise and compare Rose’s theory of a multiple interior self formed through our active participation in specific social processes with Bhaskar’s theory of individual uniqueness at a level of consciousness that also connects us to all others. (shrink)

This article discusses two views associated with narrative conceptions of the self. The first view asserts that our whole life is reasonably regarded as a single unit of meaning. A prominent strand of the philosophical narrative account of the self is the representative of this view. The second view—which has currency beyond the confines of the philosophical narrative account—is that the meaning of a life story is dependent on what happens at the end of it. The article argues that the (...) connection between these two views is more tentative than often supposed: philosophical narrativists that see life as a single unit of value and meaning nonetheless provide grounds for arguing that the end of life is not the best and may be a particularly bad time to approach and intervene in the matter of how well one's life as a whole has gone. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Good Days, Bad Days: The Self in Chronic Illness and Time. By Kathy Charmaz.

When Philip Sidney defends poetry by defending the methods used by poets and lawyers alike, he relies on the traditional association between fiction and legal procedure--an association that begins with Aristotle. In this study Kathy Eden offers a new understanding of this tradition, from its origins in Aristotle's Poetics and De Anima, through its development in the psychological and rhetorical theory of late antiquity and the Middle Ages, to its culmination in the literary theory of the Renaissance. Originally published (...) in 1986. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

Judith Butler's Kritik der ethischen Gewalt represents a significant refinement of her position on the relationship between the construction of the subject and her social subjection. While Butler's earlier texts reflect a somewhat restricted notion of agency, her Adorno Lectures formulate a notion of agency that extends beyond mere resistance. This essay traces the development of Butler's account of agency and evaluates it in light of feminist projects of social transformation.