Die „seelische Krankheit Friedlosigkeit“ ist der Ausgangspunkt für die psychologische Begründung einer Streitkultur, die auf Dialog und nicht auf Durchsetzung aufbaut. Intimität und intimer Dialog sind Schlüsselbegriffe zur Formulierung eines „Lernmodell Liebe“ , das einerseits die psychische Funktionalität von Streit betont und andererseits die Konfliktlogik paardynamischer Verflechtungen als Anstoß für ein sinnbezogenes dyadisches Lernen voneinander hervorhebt. C. F. v. Weizsäcker’s notion of a „mental illness of peacelessness“ is the starting point for a psychological theory of a „culture of constructive debates“ (...) based on dialogue as well as resonance instead of enforcement. Intimacy and intimate dialogue are keywords for formulating a “paradigm of love” . On the one hand this emphasises the psychological functionality of disagreements and on the other hand it highlights the logic of conflicts in relationships as an impulse for meaningful dyadic learning. (shrink)

Intelligence allows people to understand events and to shape their surrounding environment. This book delves deeper into the theories and applications of intelligence, showing it is a multifaceted concept —defined and explained differently by prestigious experts of various disciplines in their own research. The book provides interdisciplinary connections of intelligence as it relates to a variety of clearly outlined subject areas, and should lead to a deep understanding of the phenomenon as it pertains to practical applications in different domains. Contributors (...) in this volume present results from evolutionary biology, mathematics, artificial intelligence, medicine, psychology, cultural studies, economy, political sciences and philosophy. Individual scientific models are integrated in an interdisciplinary concept of wisdom. This volume will help enhance the common understanding of intelligence for fellow researchers and scientists alike. (shrink)

Women most fully experience the consequences of human reproductive technologies. Men who convene to evaluate such technologies discuss "them": the women who must accept, avoid, or even resist these technologies; the women who consume technologies they did not devise; the women who are the objects of policies made by men. So often the input of women is neither sought nor listened to. The privileged insights and perspectives that women bring to the consideration of technologies in human reproduction are the subject (...) of these volumes, which constitute the revised and edited record of a Workshop on "Ethical Issues in Human Reproduction Technology: Analysis by Women" (EIRTAW), held in June, 1979, at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. Some 80 members of the workshop, 90 percent of them women (from 24 states), represented diverse occupations and personal histories, different races and classes, varied political commitments. They included doctors, nurses, and scientists, lay midwives, consumer advocates, historians, and sociologists, lawyers, policy analysts, and ethicists. Each session, however, made plain that ethics is an everyday concern for women in general, as well as an academic profession for some. (shrink)

Many metaphor theorists argue that our mental experience of time is grounded in our understanding of space, including motion through space. Results from recent experiments – in which people think about motion, which in turn influences their thinking about time – support this position. Still, many questions remain about the nature of the metaphorical connection between time and space. Can the mere suggestion of motion influence how people reason about time, and if so, when and how? Three experiments investigated how (...) thinking about “abstract” motion through sequences of numbers or letters would influence reasoning about time. Our results extend earlier psychological work on the link between time and space by showing that even motion in non-physical domains can influence temporal reasoning. The results provide further evidence that metaphorical understanding is grounded in our everyday physical and conceptual experience. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: The Custom‐Made Child? Women‐Centered Perspectives. Helen B. Holmes, Betty B. Hoskins, Michael Gross, editors.

The Covid-19 pandemic has led to a health crisis of a scale unprecedented in post-war Europe. In response, a large amount of healthcare resources have been redirected to Covid-19 preventive measures, for instance population-wide vaccination campaigns, large-scale SARS-CoV-2 testing, and the large-scale distribution of protective equipment to high-risk groups and hospitals and nursing homes. Despite the importance of these measures in epidemiological and economic terms, health economists and medical ethicists have been relatively silent about the ethical rationales underlying the large-scale (...) allocation of healthcare resources to these measures. The present paper seeks to encourage this debate by demonstrating how the resource allocation to Covid-19 preventive measures can be understood through the paradigm of the Rule of Rescue, without claiming that the Rule of Rescue is the sole rationale of resource allocation in the Covid-19 pandemic. (shrink)

A deep investigation of proprioceptive processes is necessary to understand the relationship between sensory afferent inputs and motor outcomes. In this work, we investigate whether and how perception of wrist position is influenced by the direction along which the movement occurs. Most previous studies have tested Joint Position Sense through 1 degree of freedom wrist movements, such as flexion/extension or radial/ulnar deviation. However, the wrist joint has 3-DoF and many activities of daily living produce combined movements, requiring at least 2-DoF (...) wrist coordination. For this reason, in this study, target positions involved movement directions that combined wrist flexion or extension with radial or ulnar deviation. The chosen task was a robot-aided Joint Position Matching, in which blindfolded participants actively reproduced a previously passively assumed target joint configuration. The JPM performance of 20 healthy participants was quantified through measures of accuracy and precision, in terms of both perceived target direction and distance along each direction of movement. Twelve different directions of movement were selected and both hands tested. The left and right hand led to comparable results, both target extents and directions were differently perceived according to the target direction on the FE/RUD space. Moreover, during 2-DoF combined movements, subjects’ perception of directions was impaired when compared to 1-DoF target movements. In summary, our results showed that human perception of wrist position on the FE/RUD space is symmetric between hands but not isotropic among movement directions. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: The Custom‐Made Child? Women‐Centered Perspectives. Helen B. Holmes, Betty B. Hoskins, Michael Gross, editors.

The issue of COVID-19 vaccine allocation is still highly controversial on the international as well as on the national level, and policy-makers worldwide struggle in striking a fair balance between different ethical principles of vaccine allocation, in particular maximum benefit, reciprocity, social justice and equal respect. Any political decision that implements these principles comes at a cost in terms of loss of lives and of loss of life years that could potentially have been prevented by a different vaccination strategy. This (...) article illustrates these trade-offs using quantitative analysis and shows how this approach can contribute to providing a rational and transparent grounding of political decisions on COVID-19 vaccine allocation. (shrink)

Before the establishment in the early 1800s of France's Sûreté Nationale and England's Scotland Yard, the detection of crimes was generally regarded as supernatural work, but the rise of modern science allowed mere mortals to systematize and categorize events—and thus to solve crimes. Reducing the amount of crime, however, did not reduce the fear of crime, which actually grew in the late-nineteenth century as the result of globalization and media sensationalism. Literary detectives offered an imaginary cure for an imaginary disease. (...) Sherlock Holmes, the most famous literary detective, retained many of the characteristics that earlier ages had attributed to superhuman “detectives”; a wondrous and a social being, he nonetheless was able to reassure an anxious public that even the most heinous crimes could be solved. His ability to calm the fears of the globalizing Victorian era was an early version of what later became a proliferation of imaginary characters serving similar public functions. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 95, Issue 2, pp 287 - 299 Holm Tetens attempts to define ‘god’ as part of his rational theology. The term ‘god’ is supposed to be defined as ‘the infinite I-subject’. This should be achieved through the customary definition of a singular term by description. However, definitions of this kind have to meet certain formal requirements, which a Rational Theology should adhere to. This paper aims to show that Tetens’ definition faces problems with these requirements since (...) vital arguments are either missing or incomplete in a substantial way. In the process, possible approaches to remedy the outlined problems are hinted at. Overall, this paper raises the question of an alternative interpretation of his definition of god, which is central to the author’s project.Holm Tetens versucht im Rahmen seiner rationalen Theologie, eine Definition Gottes vorzulegen. Die Konstante ‚Gott‘ soll als ‚das unendliche Ich-Subjekt‘ definiert werden. Dies soll nach dem üblichen Schema der Definition einer Individuenkonstante über eine Beschreibung erfolgen. Für derartige Setzungen gibt es jedoch formale Voraussetzungen, die gerade unter dem Anspruch, eine rationale Theologie vorzulegen, eingehalten werden sollten. Nachfolgend soll gezeigt werden, dass Tetens’ Definition unter diesen Voraussetzungen problematisch ist, da erforderliche Argumentationen entweder fehlen oder in einem kritischen Maße unvollständig sind. Dabei werden auch Maßnahmen zur Behebung der aufgezeigten Mängel angedeutet, wie etwa die vom Autor stillschweigend vorausgesetzten Aussagen explizit zu machen. Insgesamt wirft die Untersuchung Fragen nach einer alternativen Deutung der für das Gesamtprojekt zentralen Gottesdefinition auf. (shrink)

Before the establishment in the early 1800s of France's Sûreté Nationale and England's Scotland Yard, the detection of crimes was generally regarded as supernatural work, but the rise of modern science allowed mere mortals to systematize and categorize events—and thus to solve crimes. Reducing the amount of crime, however, did not reduce the fear of crime, which actually grew in the late-nineteenth century as the result of globalization and media sensationalism. Literary detectives offered an imaginary cure for an imaginary disease. (...) Sherlock Holmes, the most famous literary detective, retained many of the characteristics that earlier ages had attributed to superhuman “detectives”; a wondrous and a social being, he nonetheless was able to reassure an anxious public that even the most heinous crimes could be solved. His ability to calm the fears of the globalizing Victorian era was an early version of what later became a proliferation of imaginary characters serving similar public functions. (shrink)

For three decades Jeremy Holmes has been a leading figure in psychodynamic psychiatry in the UK and across the world. He has played a central role in promoting the ideas of John Bowlby and in developing the clinical applications - psychiatric and psychotherapeutic - of Attachment Theory in working with adults. Drawing on both psychoanalytic and attachment ideas, Holmes has been able to encompass a truly biopsychosocialperspective. As a psychotherapist Holmes brings together psychodynamic, systemic and cognitive models, alert to vital (...) differences, but also keenly sensitive to overlaps and parallels. This volume of selected papers brings together the astonishing range of Holmes' interests and contributions. The various sections in the book cover: An extended interview - covering Holmes' career and philosophy as a psychodynamic psychiatrist 'Juvenilia' - sibling relationships, the psychology of nuclear weapons, and the psychodynamics of surgical intervention. Psychodynamic psychiatry: Integrative and Attachment-Informed A psychotherapy section inwhich he develops his model of psychotherapeutic change 'Heroes' - biographical pieces about the major influences including, John Bowlby, Michael Balint, David Malan, Jonathan Pedder and Charles Rycroft. 'Ephemera' - brief pieces covering such topics as frequency of psychodynamic sessions and fees. Attachments: Psychiatry, Psychotherapy, Psychoanalysis - The Selected Works of Jeremy Holmeswill be essential and illuminating reading for practitioners and students of psychiatry and psychotherapy in all its guises. (shrink)

First Published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Biologists study life in its various physical forms, while philosophers of biology seek answers to questions about the nature, purpose, and impact of this research. What permits us to distinguish between living and nonliving things even though both are made of the same minerals? Is the complex structure of organisms proof that a creative force is working its will in the physical universe, or are existing life-forms the random result of an evolutionary process working itself out over eons of time? (...) What moral and social questions arise regarding modern advances in biotechnology? What is more relevant to human nature: genetics or sociocultural influences? Is Darwinism the death-knell of God? These are just some of the vital questions addressed by a distinguished group of philosophers and scientists which includes: Aristotle, Francisco J. Ayala, , Michael Benton, Tom Bethell, Joe Cain, David Castle, Charles Darwin, Richard Dawkins, Michael Denton, A.G.N. Flew, Stephen Jay Gould, J.B.S. Haldane, John F. Haught, D. W. E. Hone, James W. Kirchner, James Lovelock, Jane Maienschein, Ernst Mayr, Gregory M. Mikkelson, Leslie Orgal, William Paley, the Prince of Wales, Christopher Pynes, Richard A. Richards, Mark Ridley, Holmes Rolston III, Michael Ruse, Lee Silver, Elliott Sober, Kim Sterelny, Derek Turner, and Edward O. Wilson. This second edition contains material on design without selection, testing macroevolutionary claims, recent biotechnological issues, key ecological concerns, the Gaia hypothesis, genetically modified foods, and the so-called intelligent design movement. (shrink)

What is the imaginary of finance ? How did it separate off from any social functionality, to become the dominant institution of contemporary capitalism ? This article examines two performances. The first is by the Australian artist Michael Goldberg : installed for three weeks at a Sydney gallery, he speculated artistically on derivatives of News Corp., the media empire of Richard Murdoch. The second is a project by the ephemera collective, who work on « theory & politics in organization (...) ». Having identified the « arbitrary power » of finance capitalism, some forty participants attempted the creation of another imaginary, through a conference and art event on the rails of the trans-Siberian train. The article borrows from the Lacanian sociology of Karin Knorr Cetina to decribe the « post-social relation » between traders and the « unfolding objects » that coalesce into form on their screens. It then calls upon Félix Guattari’s Schizoanalytic Cartographies to find out how the material and discursive elements of an externalized imaginary can be recombined to form the multiply facetted unfolding mirror where a subjectivty in movement can be reflected. (shrink)

Résumé Comment s’est-il autonomisé de la fonctionnalité sociale pour devenir l’institution dominante du capitalisme contemporain? Cet article examine deux performances. La première est celle de l’artiste australien Michael Goldberg : installé dans une galerie de Sydney pendant trois semaines, il spécule artistiquement sur des produits dérivés de News Corp., l’empire médiatique de Rupert Murdoch. La deuxième est un projet du collectif ephemera — theory & politics in organization : après avoir identifié le « pouvoir arbitraire » du capitalisme financier, (...) environ quarante participants tentent de créer collectivement un autre imaginaire, via une conférence / événement artistique organisée dans le Transsibérien. L’article emprunte à la sociologie lacanienne de Karin Knorr Cetina pour décrire le « rapport postsocial » des courtiers de bourse aux « objets en cours de déroulement » qui prennent forme sur leurs écrans. Il fait ensuite appel aux Cartographies schizoanalytiques de Guattari pour cerner la manière dont les éléments matériels et discursifs d’un imaginaire extériorisé peuvent se recombiner pour créer le miroir déroulant, à multiples facettes, où une subjectivité se réfléchit en mouvement. (shrink)

In this essay I propose an interpretative and explanatory structure for the so-called argumentum ex silento, or argument from silence (henceforth referred to as the AFS). To this end, I explore two examples, namely, Sherlock Holmes’s oft-quoted notice of the “curious incident of the dog in the night-time” from Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story “Silver Blaze,” and the historical question of Paul of Tarsus’s silence on biographical details of the historical Jesus. Through these cases, I conclude that the AFS serves (...) as a dialogical topos best evaluated and understood through the perceived authority of the arguer and the willingness of the audience to accept that authority, due to the “curious” nature of the negative evidence that the argument employed. (shrink)

Résumé Comment s’est-il autonomisé de la fonctionnalité sociale pour devenir l’institution dominante du capitalisme contemporain? Cet article examine deux performances. La première est celle de l’artiste australien Michael Goldberg : installé dans une galerie de Sydney pendant trois semaines, il spécule artistiquement sur des produits dérivés de News Corp., l’empire médiatique de Rupert Murdoch. La deuxième est un projet du collectif ephemera — theory & politics in organization : après avoir identifié le « pouvoir arbitraire » du capitalisme financier, (...) environ quarante participants tentent de créer collectivement un autre imaginaire, via une conférence / événement artistique organisée dans le Transsibérien. L’article emprunte à la sociologie lacanienne de Karin Knorr Cetina pour décrire le « rapport postsocial » des courtiers de bourse aux « objets en cours de déroulement » qui prennent forme sur leurs écrans. Il fait ensuite appel aux Cartographies schizoanalytiques de Guattari pour cerner la manière dont les éléments matériels et discursifs d’un imaginaire extériorisé peuvent se recombiner pour créer le miroir déroulant, à multiples facettes, où une subjectivité se réfléchit en mouvement. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 39.3 (2005) 44-57 [Access article in PDF] Literary Biography: The Cinderella of Literary Studies Michael Benton There are no prizes for guessing who are the two ugly sisters: Criticism, the elder one, dominated literary studies for the first half of the twentieth century; theory, her younger sister, flounced to the fore in the second half. Meanwhile, 'Cinders,' who had been doing the chores (...) for centuries, has been magically transformed in recent times, decked out in new clothes by Richard Holmes, Claire Tomalin, Juliet Barker, Peter Ackroyd et al., and, as the millennium approached, celebrated and admired on all sides. At the start of the new century, literary biography remains in vogue. The bibliography that carries it forward is rolling, and there is no sign of it turning into a pumpkin. Why is Cinderella so popular?One obvious if superficial answer might be that literary biography is where literary people go who find the contemporary preoccupation with theory to be personally undernourishing and critically unenlightening; they would rather stay with the literary works themselves and with the lives, the minds, and the times that produced them. Yet it is not only literary biography that is thriving; life writing in general is the fastest-growing area of mainstream publishing, evidence for which can be seen in Waterstone's flagship store in London's Piccadilly, which devotes its prime ground-floor site to thousands of biographies. This commercial high profile is responding to an evident, if unfocused, need to look at other lives and understand them. Individual reasons for the popularity of biography range from prurient interest and hero worship to a, perhaps unrecognized, search for coherence and purpose in an age that is often disinclined either to accept institutional values or to respect traditional authority. The motives for this search usually include the desire for recognizable success, to which end the invention of a convincing identity is essential. Biographies offer models of how others live, face challenges, and cope with change; they are prime sites for studying ourselves. Curiously, this justification for biography as providing [End Page 44] a model for living was felt most strongly when this literary genre first emerged in the eighteenth century. The difference today is that the model has changed: Biography as a moral exemplum based upon Christian principles has been replaced in today's celebrity culture by the demand for models of success provided by public personalities. Nonetheless, whatever the range of satisfactions readers seek in biography, life writing offers, in one form or another, detailed pictures of widely different ways of living and amid these, perhaps, some clues to how an individual sense of identity might be shaped.Literary biographies (i.e., biographies of writers, not biographies with a particular literary quality) are a significant and, in some respects, a unique subgenre since they purport to offer access to the creative imagination. They have a long and distinguished history from Johnson and Boswell to the present day; they are sometimes written by other novelists (Elizabeth Gaskell on Charlotte Bronte, Peter Ackroyd on Dickens); and autobiographical writing may take the form of poetry (Wordsworth) or fiction (Joyce).1 Furthermore recent writing in this field has increasingly introduced elements of metabiography in books by Adam Sisman2 and Lucasta Miller.3 It is evident, therefore, that literary biography offers a rich and varied area of study that raises issues about the relationships among biography, history, fiction, and poetry that are fundamental to aesthetic education.Yet despite this promise, it has become a truism to declare that biography has failed to establish any theoretical foundations upon which to build. Backscheider quotes Ira Nadel's remark on the absence of "a sustained theoretical discussion of biography incorporating some of the more probing and original speculations about language, structure, and discourse that have dominated post-structuralist thought."4 She goes on to lament the poverty of criticism; the absence of a cultivated readership; the failure to engage even with the practical questions of selection, organization, or presentation; and indicates that readers of biography are too easily... (shrink)

I argue that taxation for redistributive purposes is a property rights violation, responding to arguments (due to Nagel, Murphy, Sunstein, and Holmes) claiming that individuals lack ownership of their pretax incomes.

In his article "Can the East Help the West to Value Nature?" Holmes Rolston, III, wrote that Eastern religious insights would need considerable reformulation in order for us to answer affirmatively the question posed in his title. The present article, while arguing that such an assessment is unduly harsh, goes on to evaluate critically the various Asian ideas of nature, arguing that their ethical consequences are no worse than those of the postmodern concept of nature endorsed by Rolston, Callicott, and (...) others. (shrink)

Work by Sales and Lavin has suggested that it is possible to improve the moral and ethical thinking of psychologists. In particular, moral and ethical thinking by psychologists could be improved if psychologists learned to use defensible moral metrics. The usefulness of formal training in ethics and morality, with the implicit condemnation of the moral metrics that might be taught in such training, has been challenged by writers such as Justice Holmes. He has alleged that professionals learn how to behave (...) in their professional roles by practicing them. A variety of problems are noted with Holmes' view. Further, psychologists cannot rely on expert advice from Institutional Review Boards or Ethics Committees, even if they wished to do so. Institutional Review Boards, and by implication Ethics Committees, have serious deficiencies. However, psychologists can make considerable progress in their moral and ethical thinking, if they distinguish ethics from morality and also notice the similarities between moral thinking and scientific thinking and theorizing. A controversy over the recovered-memory therapy is employed to illustrate some of these distinctions and similarities. The argument continues by developing two moral metrics. The first begins with ethics and culminates in moral appraisal. The second makes moral appraisal an earlier step than ethical appraisal. With these metrics described, it is then noted that a popular metric in psychology, that of Koocher and Keith-Spiegel, is inadequate. It is then shown that the two moral metrics earlier described are reasonably believed to be adequate. The adequacy of one of them is directly illustrated with an example involving the question of whether persons with serious mental illnesses should be allowed to enter into contracts that would relax the criteria for their involuntary hospitalization and treatment. It is concluded that teachable, intellectually defensible moral metrics are possible, and that their use would improve the moral and ethical thinking of psychologists. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reading BiographyMichael Benton (bio)Biographer, Biography, and the ReaderBiography is a hybrid. It is history crossed with narrative. The biographer has to present the available facts of the life yet shape their arbitrariness, untidiness, and incompleteness into an engaging whole. The readerly appeal lies in the prospect both of gaining documentary information, scrupulously researched and plausibly interpreted, and of experiencing the aesthetic pleasure of reading a well-made work of art (...) with a continuous life story and a satisfying closure. "In the family of literature," one of its most respected practitioners asserts, "biography seems to be the product of a strange coupling between old-fashioned history and the traditional novel."1 The invitation of biography is thus a dualistic one; the aesthetic experience it offers stems from the twofoldness of its nature and from the stance that this imposes upon the reader. Literary biographies of poets and novelists offer a particularly fruitful area of study since their subjects have a special concern for aesthetic experience and the biographers' main interest lies in the relationship between the life and the works. Though much of what follows has a wider application, the focus of this article is on biographies of writers. By triangulating the roles of the biographer, the biographee within the biographical text, and the reader we can conceptualize the elements that make up the invitation of the genre.First, the biographer. Richard Holmes characterizes the process he experiences with two keywords: it is a "pursuit" and it is a "haunting." They are two sides of the same phenomenon. The pursuit is a "tracking of the physical trail of someone's path through the past, a following of footsteps," an effort "to write about the pursuit of that fleeting figure in such a way as to bring it alive in the present."2 The haunting occurs when this revivification succeeds and the biographee is brought imaginatively alive. Then the biographer turns from pursuer to pursued. While the subject does not take [End Page 77] him over, as it might in some Gothic fantasy, it does exercise the power of the past upon the present and haunt the biographer's imagination. Holmes goes on to explain the two main elements as "closely entwined strands":The first is the gathering of factual materials, the assembling in chronological order of a man's "journey" through the world—the actions, the words, the recorded thoughts, the places and faces through which he moved: the "life and letters." The second is the creation of a fictional or imaginary relationship between the biographer and his subject; not merely a "point of view" or an "interpretation," but a continuous living dialogue between the two... It is fictional, imaginary, because of course the subject cannot really, literally, talk back; but the biographer must come to act and think of his subject as if he can.3Not every biographer would necessarily subscribe to this particular description, but there is ample evidence in the recent spate of books about the genre4 that the biographer's capacity for imaginative empathy is continuously interacting with the verifiable historical data. The present operates upon the past in other ways, too. Earlier biographers who are more or less contemporary with their subjects (for example, Boswell, Forster, Mrs. Gaskell)5 stand in different relationships with them and the available data about them compared with present-day biographers who may inherit a whole bibliography of "lives" laid down in stratified layers on top of the life they are trying to recover. The modern reader, like the modern biographer, has to be a literary archaeologist. Dickens's "lives," for example, are constructed on a bedrock of his friend Forster's biography and on the novelist's own writings, neither of which subsequent biographers can afford to ignore. Later "lives" also have to be sifted through: our inherited Dickens is compounded from a series of accounts from, among a host of others, the Victorian memoirs of his daughter6 and his reading manager,7 via Edwardian enthusiasts8 and 1930s revelations about Dickens's private life,9 to those of modern academics and writers in our own time.10 In such cases, bringing the subject... (shrink)

Environmental studies is a highly interdisciplinary field of inquiry, involving philosophers, ecologists, biologists, sociologists, activists, historians and professionals in public and private environmental organizations. It comes with no surprise, then, that the follow-up to Nelson and Callicott’s original anthology The Great Wilderness Debate (1998) features essays from authors in a broad array of disciplines. While there is considerable overlap between the two volumes, this new version offers forty-one essays, five of which are new additions, organized into four sections. What constitutes (...) wilderness? Is wilderness real or social constructed? What kinds of values are served—recreational, aesthetic, scientific, or others—by protecting wild areas? While many commentators trace these questions back to an exchange in the 1990s between two environmental ethicists, J. Baird Callicott and Holmes Rolston III, the debate over the wilderness idea actually has older roots. At least in the U.S. context, it travels back in time to the earliest part of the twentieth-century, when the American public, politicians and ecologists were pressed to justify why wilderness areas should be set aside in a new National Park system. Since then, the fundamental question fuelling the ‘Great Wilderness Debate’ is whether what is being preserved is actually wilderness. Is there such a thing or place as wilderness, that is, a quintessentially non-human or wild setting untainted by human influence? If so, why do we believe such areas deserve protection? (shrink)

Introduction: the use and abuse of Thomas Paine in the transatlantic world / Sam Edwards and Marcus Morris -- Part I. The image and idea(s) of Paine: origins, use and reuse -- The image of Tom: Paine in print and portraiture / W.A. Speck -- "I am made to say what I never wrote": deism, spiritualism and ventriloquizing Paine, c.1790s-1850s / Patrick W. Hughes -- All Paine: the American mind and the creation of the League of Nations and the U.N. (...) / Michael Holm -- The distortion of Thomas Paine's philosophy of government / Gary Berton -- Part II. Discovering and using Paine's radicalism -- "Revolutions are the order of the day": Atlantic fragments of Thomas Paine, c.1819-1832 / Matteo Battistini -- Posthumous Paine in the United Kingdom, 1809-1832: Jacobin or loyalist cult? / Matthew Roberts -- "The neglect of Paine seems particularly strange at the present political juncture": explaining British socialists' relationship to Paine, c. 1884-1914 / Marcus Morris -- Citizens of the world: Paine and the political prisoners transported to Australia / Tony Moore -- Part III. Remembering and remaking Paine -- Common sense on the Lower East Side: Thomas Paine and the era of immigration, c.1900-1950 / Louis Mazzari -- "A monument in every city?": Thomas Paine in memoriam / Theodore Marotta -- "He came from America didn't he?": the Thetford Statue controversy and the problem of Paine in transatlantic memory, c.1909-1970 / Sam Edwards -- Afterword: the struggle for Paine's memory and the making of American democracy / Harvey J. Kaye. (shrink)

In this article we provide an in-depth description of a new model of informed consent called ‘meta consent’ and consider its practical implementation. We explore justifications for preferring meta consent over alternative models of consent as a solution to the problem of secondary use of health data for research. We finally argue that meta consent strikes an appropriate balance between enabling valuable research and protecting the individual.

Non-therapeutic circumcision violates boys’ right to bodily integrity as well as to self-determination. There is neither any verifiable medical advantage connected with the intervention nor is it painless nor without significant risks. Possible negative consequences for the psychosexual development of circumcised boys (due to substantial loss of highly erogenous tissue) have not yet been sufficiently explored, but appear to ensue in a significant number of cases. According to standard legal criteria, these considerations would normally entail that the operation be deemed (...) an ‘impermissible risk’—neither justifiable on grounds of parental rights nor of religious liberty: as with any other freedom right, these end where another person's body begins. Nevertheless, after a resounding decision by a Cologne district court that non-therapeutic circumcision constitutes bodily assault, the German legislature responded by enacting a new statute expressly designed to permit male circumcision even outside of medical settings. We first criticise the normative foundations upon which such a legal concession seems to rest, and then analyse two major flaws in the new German law which we consider emblematic of the difficulty that any legal attempt to protect medically irrelevant genital cutting is bound to face. (shrink)

This article introduces the notion of ‘routinisation’ into discussions of informed consent. It is argued that the routinisation of informed consent poses a threat to the protection of the personal autonomy of a patient through the negotiation of informed consent. On the basis of a large survey, we provide evidence of the routinisation of informed consent in various types of interaction on the internet; among these, the routinisation of consent to the exchange of health related information. We also provide evidence (...) that the extent of the routinisation of informed consent is dependent on the character of the information exchanged, and we uncover a range of causes of routinisation. Finally, the article discusses possible ways of countering the problem of routinisation of informed consent. (shrink)

In a recent article in the Journal of Medical Ethics, Neil Manson sets out to show that the meta-consent model of informed consent is not the solution to perennial debate on the ethics of biobank participation. In this response, we shall argue that Manson’s considerations on the costs of a meta-consent model are incomplete and therefore misleading; his view that a model of broad consent passes a threshold of moral acceptability rests on an analogy that misconstrues how biobank research is (...) actually conducted and a model of meta-consent is more in tune with the nature of biobank research and enables autonomous choice. (shrink)

“Bodily autonomy” has received significant attention in bioethics, medical ethics, and medical law in terms of the general inviolability of a patient’s bodily sovereignty and the rights of patients to make choices (e.g., reproductive choices) that concern their own body. However, the role of the body in terms of how it can or does contribute to a patient’s capacity for, or exercises of their autonomy in clinical decision-making situations has not been explicitly addressed. The approach to autonomy in this paper (...) is aligned with traditional theories that conceive autonomy in terms of an individual’s capacities for, and exercises of rational reflection. However, at the same time, this paper extends these accounts by arguing that autonomy is, in part, embodied. Specifically, by drawing on phenomenological conceptions of the experience of autonomy, we argue that, in principle, the body is a necessary component of the capacity for autonomy. Secondly, through the presentation of two different cases, we highlight ways in which a patient’s body can contribute to the autonomy of treatment choices. Ultimately, we hope to encourage others to explore additional conditions under which a concept of embodied autonomy should be employed in medical decision making, how its underlying principles might be operationalised in clinical situations, and its consequences for approaches to patient autonomy in healthcare practice, policy, and law. (shrink)

The use of algorithms to support prediction-based decision-making is becoming commonplace in a range of domains including health, criminal justice, education, social services, lending, and hiring. An assumption governing such decisions is that there is a property Y such that individual a should be allocated resource R by decision-maker D if a is Y. When there is uncertainty about whether a is Y, algorithms may provide valuable decision support by accurately predicting whether a is Y on the basis of known (...) features of a. Based on recent work on statistical evidence in epistemology this article presents an argument against relying exclusively on algorithmic predictions to allocate resources when they provide purely statistical evidence that a is Y. The article then responds to the objection that any evidence that will increase the proportion of correct decisions should be accepted as the basis for allocations regardless of its epistemic deficiency. Finally, some important practical aspects of the conclusion are considered. (shrink)

The increased use of information technology in every day health care creates vast amounts of stored health data that can be used for research. The secondary research use of routinely collected data raises questions about appropriate consent mechanisms for such use. One option is meta consent where individuals state their own consent preferences in relation to future use of their data, e.g. whether they want the data to be accessible to researchers under conditions of specific consent, broad consent, blanket consent (...) or not at all. This study investigates whether meta consent preferences can be successfully elicited by a smartphone application in the adult Danish population. A smartphone app was developed for the elicitation of meta consent preferences. An invitation to use the app was distributed to a stratified, representative sample of the Danish adult population. The meta consent choices, the use of the app, user experience data, and demographic data were logged and analysed statistically using IBM SPSS version 20. Of 1000 potential respondents 221 used the app. One hundred eighty-eight of the respondents were female and 103 male. The age range was 19 to 79 years with an average of 51 years. Most users indicate 1) that they find the choices they are asked to make easy to understand, 2) that the application is easy to use, and 3) that this kind of choice should be offered to people. It is possible to collect meta consent preferences in the general, adult population using a smartphone app. (shrink)

The question that this paper tries to answer is Q: “Can good academic bioethics be done without commitment to moral theory?” It is argued that the answer to Q is an unequivocal “Yes” for most of what we could call “critical bioethics,” that is, the kind of bioethics work that primarily criticizes positions or arguments already in the literature or put forward by policymakers. The answer is also “Yes” for much of empirical bioethics. The second part of the paper then (...) provides an analysis of Q in relation to “constructive bioethics,” that is, bioethics work aimed at providing an argument for a particular position. In this part, it is argued that a number of the approaches or methods used that initially look like they involve no commitment to moral theory, nevertheless, involve such a commitment. This is shown to be the case for reflective equilibrium, mid-level theory, the use of theory fragments, and argument by analogy. (shrink)

This paper develops a general approach to how society should compensate for losses that individuals incur due to public health interventions aimed at controlling the spread of infectious diseases. The paper falls in three parts. The first part provides an initial introduction to the issues and briefly outlines five different kinds of public health interventions that will be used as test cases. They are all directed at individuals and aimed at controlling the spread of infectious diseases (1) isolation, (2) quarantine, (...) (3) recommended voluntary social distancing, (4) changes in health care provision for asymptomatic carriers of multi-resistant microorganisms, and (5) vaccination. The interventions will be briefly described including the various risks, burdens and harms individuals who are subject to these interventions may incur. The second part briefly surveys current compensation mechanisms as far as any exist and argue that even where they exist they are clearly insufficient and do not provide adequate compensation. The third part will then develop a general framework for compensation for losses incurred due to public health interventions in the infectious disease context. This is the major analytical and constructive part of the paper. It first analyses pragmatic and ethical arguments supporting the existence of an obligation on the part of the state to compensate for such losses, and then considers whether this obligation can be defeated by (1) resource considerations, or (2) issues relating to personal responsibility. (shrink)

In an analysis of artificially intelligent systems for medical diagnostics and treatment planning we argue that patients should be able to exercise a right to withdraw from AI diagnostics and treatment planning for reasons related to (1) the physician’s role in the patients’ formation of and acting on personal preferences and values, (2) the bias and opacity problem of AI systems, and (3) rational concerns about the future societal effects of introducing AI systems in the health care sector.