This case explores the ethical dilemmas faced by Wolfgang Thierse and other board members of the Memorial Foundation for the Murdered Jews of Europe. They must decide whether Degussa AG, a memorial subcontractor, can continue working on the memorial, despite Swiss andGerman media reports that a former subsidiary of Degussa’s, named Degesch, manufactured and supplied the nerve gas that killed Jews and other individuals in the Auschwitz concentration camp. The board’s decision is complicated by negative publicity the memorial has received, (...) by the fact that Degussa has already applied its anti-graffiti coating to some of the pillars that form the memorial’s main design, and by questions of whether the board exercised due diligence when Degussa was originally proposed as a project subcontractor. Students are asked to help Thierse reach a personal decision about Degussa’s continued participation and, in his role as board chair, formulate a discussion strategy for the upcoming, potentially volatile board meeting. (shrink)

This case explores the ethical dilemmas faced by Wolfgang Thierse and other board members of the Memorial Foundation for the Murdered Jews of Europe. They must decide whether Degussa AG, a memorial subcontractor, can continue working on the memorial, despite Swiss andGerman media reports that a former subsidiary of Degussa’s, named Degesch, manufactured and supplied the nerve gas that killed Jews and other individuals in the Auschwitz concentration camp. The board’s decision is complicated by negative publicity the memorial has received, (...) by the fact that Degussa has already applied its anti-graffiti coating to some of the pillars that form the memorial’s main design, and by questions of whether the board exercised due diligence when Degussa was originally proposed as a project subcontractor. Students are asked to help Thierse reach a personal decision about Degussa’s continued participation and, in his role as board chair, formulate a discussion strategy for the upcoming, potentially volatile board meeting. (shrink)

This article briefly traces newer kinship studies at the edges of kinship formations and argues that a feminist, decolonial examination of kinship interrupts cultural relatedness as a capital set of social relations meant to satiate the ache to belong to or progenerate a group. Examining the coordinated relationship between kinning and de-kinning, the author exposes the suffering the social contract fails to register but reinscribes. Central to this analysis is kinship's global colonizing matrix dominated by white-heteronormative ableism that shapes and (...) prices commodified belonging and generation. This global colonizing matrix is the focus of this inquiry, examined through a cursory consideration of the author's lived experience as a transnational and transracial adoptee and racial minority scholar who teaches majority BIPOC students. This account theorizes a specific experience of kinship to broaden the analysis for others to locate their narratives and ongoing contributions to the deformation and reformation of kinship studies. (shrink)

In their daily practices, can doctors be both patient advocates and society's agents in rationing costly care? Doctors disagree among themselves. Some argue that patients stand to benefit if doctors lead the movement for cost‐effective care in hospitals, nursing homes, and patients' homes. For others cost‐cutting at the bedside erodes the foundations of the doctor‐patient relationship and compromises the quality of care.

Lena Horne was the first African-American woman to be signed to a contract to a major Hollywood studio, who did however not know what to do with her. Her >colour< – in her voice as well as her looks – meant that she did not fit into the racial hierarchies of the day and she was largely confined oppressively to the margins. However, she was also able to some degree, and in collaboration with other African-American figures in Hollywood, to use (...) this to give a glimpse of African-American modernism in Hollywood cinema. This is thus a case study of cultural production as struggle. (shrink)

Focusing on the legal cases that have been litigated in the United States, and making references to popular culture, this article considers whether marriages in which one of the partners is transgendered necessarily challenge or necessarily reinforce heterosexual hegemony.

The legal category "mother" operates restrictively and punitively to "domesticate" lesbian existence. Our domestication is the reason that we have difficulty thinking beyond the category "mother." I explore how "mother" is used by both lesbians and nonlesbians within the legal system. In order to ensure lesbian survival on lesbian terms, we must strategize theories that do not preserve the dominant legal paradigm that codifies "mother," even if that category is expanded to include "lesbian mother.".

Empirical data show that members of underrepresented and historically marginalized groups in academia undertake many forms of undervalued or unnoticed labor. While the data help to identify that this labor exists, they do not provide a thick description of what the experience is like, nor do they offer a framework for understanding the different kinds of invisible labor that are being undertaken. We identify and analyze a distinct, undervalued, and invisible labor that the data have left unnamed and unmeasured: ontological (...) labor, the work required to manage one’s identity and body if either or both do not fit into academic structures, norms, and demands. We argue that ontological labor efforts should be understood as a form of labor. We then provide a characterization of ontological labor, detailing the labor as navigating one’s obligations to give and managing entitlements to take. We also highlight the ontological labor that takes place through instances of resistance, such as through complaint or refusals. (shrink)

This paper explores postcolonial pedagogy and the use of oral dialogues as a way to assess college students and cultivate intellectual virtues in philosophy courses. The authors apply the theories of postcolonialism, particularly the emerging work of “poor theory,” to affirm the academic validity of oral dialogues and subaltern philosophy for a pedagogical framework of equity that goes beyond inclusion. Oral dialogues utilize an epistemology of the body in contexts of scarcity to increase student success and retention. The authors offer (...) two case studies that exemplify the promise and complications of oral dialogues. The paper does not argue for the replacement of written philosophical work, but rather, draws attention to the symbiotic relationship between oral and written philosophy. (shrink)

: Focusing on the legal cases that have been litigated in the United States, and making references to popular culture, this article considers whether marriages in which one of the partners is transgendered necessarily challenge or necessarily reinforce heterosexual hegemony.

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic there was widespread concern that healthcare systems would be overwhelmed, and specifically, that there would be insufficient critical care capacity in terms of beds, ventilators or staff to care for patients. In the UK, this was avoided by a threefold approach involving widespread, rapid expansion of critical care capacity, reduction of healthcare demand from non-COVID-19 sources by temporarily pausing much of normal healthcare delivery, and by governmental and societal responses that reduced demand through national lockdown. (...) Despite high-level documents designed to help manage limited critical care capacity, none provided sufficient operational direction to enable use at the bedside in situations requiring triage. We present and describe the development of a structured process for fair allocation of critical care resources in the setting of insufficient capacity. The document combines a wide variety of factors known to impact on outcome from critical illness, integrated with broad-based clinical judgement to enable structured, explicit, transparent decision-making founded on robust ethical principles. It aims to improve communication and allocate resources fairly, while avoiding triage decisions based on a single disease, comorbidity, patient age or degree of frailty. It is designed to support and document decision-making. The document has not been needed to date, nor adopted as hospital policy. However, as the pandemic evolves, the resumption of necessary non-COVID-19 healthcare and economic activity mean capacity issues and the potential need for triage may yet return. The document is presented as a starting point for stakeholder feedback and discussion. (shrink)

SUMMARYContemporary scholars seeking to advance the study of political phenomena identify their inquiry as a ‘science' that attains success through rigorous method. Thus the ‘methodological anarchism' of Paul Feyerabend's philosophy of science might seem an inauspicious place to find a fruitful disciplinary vision. Nonetheless, it echoes a longstanding conception of the ‘science' of politics articulated by Niccolò Machiavelli. Looking to Feyerabend, we propose to surmount the impasse between Machiavelli's account of politics and the demands of modern science and recover his (...) contribution to the scientific study of politics. In doing so, Machiavelli illustrates the potential of a Feyerabendian political science. (shrink)

In this article, I briefly sketch the “right to opacity” that Édouard Glissant details in Poetics of Relation and situate it as an ethical imperative with Simone de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity, contrasting the distinctive contributions of opacity and ambiguity toward ethical-political living. I apply the principles of opacity and ambiguity toward one of Beauvoir’s most political and only co-written works, Pour Djamila Boupacha. I argue that the polyvalent use of the Islamic veil during the Algerian War for Independence reveals (...) the ethical application of opacity and ambiguity. Additionally, the veil clarifies the political stakes of gendered assumptions and racial hierarchy across geographies, positing a false body neutrality that obfuscates the violent global War on Terror. (shrink)

Conventional wisdom holds that C. S. Lewis was uninterested in politics and public affairs. The conventional wisdom is wrong. As Justin Buckley Dyer and Micah J. Watson show in this groundbreaking work, Lewis was deeply interested in the fundamental truths and falsehoods about human nature and how these conceptions manifest themselves in the contested and turbulent public square. Ranging from the depths of Lewis' philosophical treatments of epistemology and moral pedagogy to practical considerations of morals legislation and responsible citizenship, (...) this book explores the contours of Lewis' multi-faceted Christian engagement with political philosophy generally and the natural-law tradition in particular. Drawing from the full range of Lewis' corpus and situating his thought in relationship to both ancient and modern seminal thinkers, C. S. Lewis on Politics and the Natural Law offers an unprecedented look at politics and political thought from the perspective of one of the twentieth century's most influential writers. (shrink)

This article brings Édouard Glissant's theory of creolization into critical conversation with Luce Irigaray's sexuate difference theory and suggests creolization as a process capable of reconfiguring place and origin. Such a creolized conception, the article suggests, fissures narratives of legitimacy, possession, and lawful order, pseudo-claims utilized to dismiss antiracist protests. The article traces Irigaray's critique of woman as place and origin with her conception of the interval. It examines how Glissant's analysis of the womb-abyss clarifies and strategically obscures racialization as (...) an ongoing lacuna in Western thought. By deploying a rhizomatic network of relayed traces, the essay examines Glissantian notions of chaos, trembling, and detour to articulate sociopolitical movements that reveal and undermine the sexual economy of the neo-Plantation. Both thinkers, the author suggests, bring together place, origin, and movement to construct two radically different but strategically valuable theories that have yet to be put in a sustained, critical conversation. By positioning each theorist within their own framework, discourse, and socio-ethical concerns, the author offers ways that creolization and sexuate difference theory clarify issues contemporary American feminism tends to gesture toward as “intersectional” issues of gender, sex, and race. (shrink)

Although the role played by narratives and particularly by narratives of personal experience in the construction of identity has been widely investigated, the presence and contribution of such narratives in institutional discourse has received comparatively little attention. Our study focuses on two narratives in university lectures, which show that such narratives are a means of textually constructing not only personal but also professional identities. Analysis reveals that the professors position themselves as experts, exploiting the use of pronouns and other referring (...) expressions in addition to self and other evaluation, in order to distance themselves from non-expert others. In doing so, they make little use of the technical terminology often found in representations of professional selves. In offsetting self-aggrandizement with self-mockery, the professors' narratives display an ideological dilemma typical of the expert in current North American culture, which involves see-sawing between expressions of expertise and equality. (shrink)

Extending the dialogue on corporate social performance as descriptive stakeholder management, we examine differences in CSP activity between family and nonfamily firms. We argue that CSP activity can be explained by the firm’s identity orientation toward stakeholders. Specifically, individualistic, relational, or collectivistic identity orientations can describe a firm’s level of CSP activity toward certain stakeholders. Family firms, we suggest, adopt a more relational orientation toward their stakeholders than nonfamily firms, and thus engage in higher levels of CSP. Further, we invoke (...) collectivistic identity orientation to argue that the higher the level of family or founder involvement within a family firm, the greater the level of CSP toward specific stakeholders. Using social performance rating data from 1991 to 2005, we find that family and nonfamily firms demonstrate notable differences in terms of social initiatives and social concerns. We also find that the level of family and founder involvement is related to the type and frequency of a family firm’s social initiatives and social concerns. (shrink)

There has been a considerable amount of literature in the last 70 years claiming that the American founders were steeped in modern thought. This study runs counter to that tradition, arguing that the founders of America were deeply indebted to the classical Christian natural-law tradition for their fundamental theological, moral, and political outlook. Evidence for this thesis is found in case studies of such leading American founders as Thomas Jefferson and James Wilson, the pamphlet debates, the founders' invocation of providence (...) during the revolution, and their understanding of popular sovereignty. The authors go on to reflect on how the founders' political thought contained within it the resources that undermined, in principle, the institution of slavery, and explores the relevance of the founders' political theology for contemporary politics. This timely, important book makes a significant contribution to the scholarly debate over whether the American founding is compatible with traditional Christianity. (shrink)

Reveals how we can each reconnect to collective intelligence and return our world to wholeness, balance, and sanity • Explains how collective intelligence manifests in flocks of birds, instantaneous knowing in indigenous peoples, and the power of sacred places • Offers ways for us to reconnect to the infinite source of wisdom that fuels collective intelligence and underscores the importance of ceremony, pilgrimage, and initiation • Draws on recent findings in New Paradigm science, traditional teachings from indigenous groups from North, (...) South, and Central America and Siberia, as well as sacred geometry, deep ecology, and expanded states of consciousness For our ancestors, collective intelligence was a normal part of life. We see it today as the mysterious force that enables flocks of birds, swarms of bees, and schools of fish to function together in perfect synchrony, communicating and cooperating at some undetectable level. At its most subtle, it’s an instantaneous knowing, shared by members of a group, of the wisest course of action that will benefit all. As Dery Dyer reveals, collective intelligence still resides within each of us, and it is the key to restoring balance and harmony to our world. She shows how it occurs spontaneously when individuals who share a need and a purpose instinctively “self-organize” into a group and function with no leader or central authority. Such groups exhibit abilities much greater than what any of their members possess individually--or what can be replicated with artificial intelligence. Dyer explains, due to an unquestioning dependence on technology, modern humanity has forgotten how to connect with collective intelligence and fallen into collective stupidity, otherwise known as mob mind or groupthink, which is now endangering the interconnected web of life on Earth. Drawing on recent findings in New Paradigm science, traditional teachings from indigenous groups, as well as sacred geometry, deep ecology, and expanded states of consciousness, the author shows how the ability to think and act collectively for the highest good is hardwired in all living beings. She explains how to release ourselves from enslavement by technology and use it more wisely toward the betterment of all life. Underscoring the vital importance of ceremony, pilgrimage, and initiation, she offers ways for us to reconnect to the infinite source of wisdom that fuels collective intelligence and which manifests everywhere in the natural world. Revealing that once we relearn how to hear the Earth, we can heal the Earth, Dyer shows how each of us has a vital role to play in restoring our world to wholeness. (shrink)

The clinical application of the concept of patient autonomy has centered on the ability to deliberate and make treatment decisions (decisional autonomy) to the virtual exclusion of the capacity to execute the treatment plan (executive autonomy). However, the one-component concept of autonomy is problematic in the context of multiple chronic conditions. Adherence to complex treatments commonly breaks down when patients have functional, educational, and cognitive barriers that impair their capacity to plan, sequence, and carry out tasks associated with chronic care. (...) The purpose of this article is to call for a two-component re-conceptualization of autonomy and to argue that the clinical assessment of capacity for patients with chronic conditions should be expanded to include both autonomous decision-making and autonomous execution of the agreed-upon treatment plan. We explain how the concept of autonomy should be expanded to include both decisional and executive autonomy, describe the biopsychosocial correlates of the two-component concept of autonomy, and recommend diagnostic and treatment strategies to support patients with deficits in executive autonomy. (shrink)

This case is designed to help students analyze decision making from various ethical perspectives and to use stakeholder analysis. The case perspective is that of the CEO of Degussa AG, a multispecialty chemical company, headquartered in Düsseldorf, Germany. Degussa is considering whether to submit a bid to supply its anti-graffiti coating, Protectosil ® , for a new Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Europe being planned for Berlin. Degussa’s ethical dilemma is that a former Degussa subsidiary, Degesch, manufactured and supplied (...) the Zyklon B nerve gas used by the Nazis to kill Jews in the concentration camps during World War II. Although Degussa has made attempts both to acknowledge and to atone for its war-time Nazi collaboration, public disclosure of its bid has the potential to engulf Degussa in controversy when activists and Jewish leaders learn of it. Students are asked to evaluate the bid’s benefits and costs to Degussa’s stakeholders, to consider the relevance of a company’s historical legacy to contemporary decision making, and to explore how German corporate history during and after the Holocaust has parallels to human rights issues in other countries. (shrink)