Fetal alcohol spectrum disorders is an umbrella term covering several conditions for which alcohol consumption during pregnancy is taken to play a causal role. The benefit of individuals being identified with a condition within FASD remains controversial. The objective of the present study was to identify ethical aspects and consequences of diagnostics, interventions, and family support in relation to FASD. Ethical aspects relating to diagnostics, interventions, and family support regarding FASD were compiled and discussed, drawing on a series of discussions (...) with experts in the field, published literature, and medical ethicists. Several advantages and disadvantages in regards of obtaining a diagnosis or description of the condition were identified. For instance, it provides an explanation and potential preparedness for not yet encountered difficulties, which may play an essential role in acquiring much needed help and support from health care, school, and the social services. There are no interventions specifically evaluated for FASD conditions, but training programs and family support for conditions with symptoms overlapping with FASD, e.g. ADHD, autism, and intellectual disability, are likely to be relevant. Stigmatization, blame, and guilt are potential downsides. There might also be unfortunate prioritization if individuals with equal needs are treated differently depending on whether or not they meet the criteria for a specific condition. The value for the concerned individuals of obtaining a FASD-related description of their condition – for instance, in terms of wellbeing – is not established. Nor is it established that allocating resources based on whether individuals fulfil FASD-related criteria is justified, compared to allocations directed to the most prominent specific needs. (shrink)

Synthetic biology" is the label of a new technoscientific field with many different facets and agendas. One common aim is to "create life", primarily by using engineering principles to design and modify biological systems for human use. In a wider context, the topic has become one of the big cases in the legitimization processes associated with the political agenda to solve global problems with the aid of (bio-)technological innovation. Conceptual-level and meta-level analyses are needed: we should sort out conceptual ambiguities (...) to agree on what we talk about, and we need to spell out agendas to see the disagreements clearly. The book is based on the interdisciplinary summer school "Analyzing the societal dimensions of synthetic biology", which took place in Berlin in September 2014. The contributions address controversial discussions around the philosophical examination, public perception, moral evaluation and governance of synthetic biology. (shrink)

Synthetic biology is a dynamic, young, ambitious, attractive, and heterogeneous scientific discipline. It is constantly developing and changing, which makes societal evaluation of this emerging new science a challenging task, prone to misunderstandings. Synthetic biology is difficult to capture, and confusion arises not only regarding which part of synthetic biology the discussion is about, but also with respect to the underlying concepts in use. This book offers a useful toolbox to approach this complex and fragmented field. It provides a biological (...) access to the discussion using a 'layer' model that describes the connectivity of synthetic or semisynthetic organisms and cells to the realm of natural organisms derived by evolution. Instead of directly reviewing the field as a whole, firstly our book addresses the characteristic features of synthetic biology that are relevant to the societal discussion. Some of these features apply only to parts of synthetic biology, whereas others are relevant to synthetic biology as a whole. In the next step, these new features are evaluated with respect to the different areas of synthetic biology. Do we have the right words and categories to talk about these new features? In the third step, traditional concepts like "life" and "artificiality" are scrutinized with regard to their discriminatory power. This approach may help to differentiate the discussion on synthetic biology. Lastly our refined view is utilized for societal evaluation. We have investigated the public views and attitudes to synthetic biology. It also includes the analysis of ethical, risk and legal questions, posed by present and future practices of synthetic biology. This book contains the results of an interdisciplinary research project and presents the authors' main findings and recommendations. They are addressed to science, industry, politics and the general public interested in this upcoming field of biotechnology. (shrink)

The Kennedy Institute of Ethics is grateful for the vision, guidance, and dedication on behalf of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal by Robert M. Veatch, PhD, its senior editor and senior research scholar at the KIE. For over twenty years, Bob has steered the journal along its path of success, and its partnership with the Johns Hopkins University Press, to arrive at the place it holds today—truly a "scholarly forum for diverse views on major issues in bioethics." Bob has (...) retired from the editorship effective January 2011 (though thankfully not from the KIE!).We also wish to express our appreciation to Carol M. Spicer, PhD, the journal's editor and hands-on manager of KIEJ. Carol received her doctorate in .. (shrink)

Dans la genese de sa constitution, la philosophie n'a pu faire l'economie d'une confrontation avec la musique qui fournissait aux anciens Grecs les schemes fondamentaux de la culture. De cette confrontation Platon est le temoin. Scindant la musique, il privilegie l'Harmonique, qui en est la partie theorique, sans toutefois lui reconnaitre la titre de science supreme. Correlativement, il condamne comme dysharmonie, tumulte fracassant et perturbateur de l'ordre cosmique, l'harmonie chromaticiste dont il s'emploie, non sans paradoxe, a decrire le detail. Par (...) cette lecture en filigrane des Dialogues de Platon, l'auteur se propose de reconstruire la pensee qui procede de l'harmonie chromaticiste et de montrer son importance dans l'elaboration de la philosophie fondatrice. Au carrefour des disciplines du savoir antique, ce livre s'adresse non seulement aux philosophes, mais aussi a tous ceux qui, musiciens ou stylisticiens, s'interessent a la forme musicale. (shrink)

At the end of his attack on my use of the psychoanalytic model for the interpretation of literature, Heller raises the question concerning what the task of the literary critic is or ought to be. His own "sketch of the Kleistean theme's historical ancestry and its later development," he says, seeks to deepen and enrich the reader's appreciation of Kleist's literary art, the artistry of his phrasing, the persuasiveness of his incidents, the conclusiveness of his examples." By implication he suggests (...) that my method does not have this end—that is, appreciation—for its goal. In this he is partially right. "Appreciation" in Heller's sense is not as directly a goal for me. But does Heller's method of intellectual history and literary relation meet his own criteria of deepening and enriching the reader's appreciation of Kleist? In his capsule treatment of Great Thinkers of the Western World from Plato to Marx, we learn that many writers besides Kleist treated Kleist's theme of man's fall from unconscious grace. What exactly does this tell us about Kleist's treatment of it? How does it deepen the reader's appreciation of Kleist's literary art, the artistry of his phrasing, the persuasiveness of his incidents? It doesn't. It isn't even about Kleist. Although Heller tells us that it is the "thought" and "imagery" which "make for the great distinction of the essay" , his evidence for this consists, in the case of the former, in his tracing the history of the essay's thought and, in the case of the latter, in his statements that Kleist's use of the puppet as the exemplar of the unselfconscious graceful being is "unusual" and "novel" and that his bear story, though it may lack "in immediate plausibility," "gains in making Kleist's point" and is "a memorable exemplar" of the "art of grotesque inventions that are capable of floating for quite a while above and between the comic and the serious before landing with scintillating effect in one domain or the other" . Margret Schaefer is a lecturer in the department of psychiatry at Northwestern University Medical School. She responds here to Erich Heller's "The Dismantling of a Marionette Theater; or, Psychology and the Misinterpretation of Literature" , in which he discussed her article, "Kleist's 'About the Puppet Theater,". (shrink)

Now that pornography is on the Internet, its political and social functions have changed. So contends Margret Grebowicz in this imperative philosophical analysis of Internet porn. The production and consumption of Internet porn, in her account, are a symptom of the obsession with self-exposure in today's social networking media, which is, in turn, a symptom of the modern democratic construction of the governable subject as both transparent and communicative. In this first feminist critique to privilege the effects of pornography's (...) Internet distribution rather than what it depicts, Grebowicz examines porn-sharing communities and the politics of putting women's sexual pleasure on display as part of the larger democratic project. Arguing against this project, she shows that sexual pleasure is not a human right. Unlikely convergences between thinkers like Catherine MacKinnon, Jean Baudrillard, Judith Butler, and Jean-François Lyotard allow her to formulate a theory of the relationships between sex, speech, and power that stands as an alternative to such cyber-libertarian mottos as "freedom of speech" and "sexual freedom.". (shrink)

This fresh portrait of Varenius presents a young German scholar, whose books on Japan, the first one from a European perspective, and on General Geography were written and published in Amsterdam and led to establishing geography as a science.

Feminist theorist and philosopher Donna Haraway has substantially impacted thought on science, cyberculture, the environment, animals, and social relations. This long-overdue volume explores her influence on feminist theory and philosophy, paying particular attention to her more recent work on companion species, rather than her "Manifesto for Cyborgs." Margret Grebowicz and Helen Merrick argue that the ongoing fascination with, and re-production of, the cyborg has overshadowed Haraway's extensive body of work in ways that run counter to her own transdisciplinary practices. (...) Sparked by their own personal "adventures" with Haraway's work, the authors offer readings of her texts framed by a series of theoretical and political perspectives: feminist materialism, standpoint epistemology, radical democratic theory, queer theory, and even science fiction. They situate Haraway's critical storytelling and "risky reading" practices as forms of feminist methodology and recognize her passionate engagement with "naturecultures" as the theoretical core driving her work. Chapters situate Haraway as critic, theorist, biologist, feminist, historian, and humorist, exploring the full range of her identities and reflecting her commitment to embodying all of these modes simultaneously. (shrink)

(2009). I like you, I like you not: Understanding the formation of context-dependent automatic attitudes. Cognition & Emotion: Vol. 23, No. 6, pp. 1118-1152.

If feminists argue for the irreducibility of the social dimensions of science, then they ought to embrace the idea that feminist and non-feminist scientists are not in collaboration, but in fact defend different interests. Instead, however, contemporary feminist science studies literature argues that feminist research improves particular, existing scientific enterprises, both epistemically (truer claims) and politically (more democratic methodologies and applications). I argue that the concepts of empirical success and democracy at work in this literature from Longino (1994) and Harding (...) (1996), to Longino (2002), Gilbert and Rader (2001), and Keller (2001) are not sufficiently critical, and fail to do justice to the truly revolutionary work done by feminist scientists. I offer the beginnings of an epistemology of dissensus (as opposed to consensus), using the work of Haraway (1978), Lyotard (1984), and Ziarek (2001). How would such an epistemology relate to feminist discussions of the possibility of democratic, responsible knowledge? (shrink)

_The National Park to Come_ examines the sense of "the national" that our national parks construct and the kind of citizen they produce in the process. Who is the visitor in these spaces? Who is the national and who the foreigner? To whose children is the ostensibly unpeopled wilderness of the future owed? At what cost, and to whom? Grebowicz explores how such politicized modes of being-in-nature are maintained on the emotional level, shaping our basic sense of coherence, futurity, collectivity, (...) and having a life. Wilderness-as-spectacle, she argues, functions as a form of social relation even as we imagine the true experience of nature to be solitary and apolitical. The book's most pressing concern is the relationship between the foreigner and the future in the democratization of wilderness. For the questions explored here, contends Grebowicz, are precisely those that will shape the future of our entire park system. (shrink)

Examines Lyotard’s writings in light of contemporary feminist theory.

Why “do” philosophy, if not to contribute to social consciousness , to develop ideas for change, to articulate the desperations of the present and the possibilities of futures which will help people, however loosely we define “people”? This is one of the most popular objections to philosophy: that it is not practical, and therefore not really politically useful. And in today’s philosophical arena, this argument is directed specifically against postmodern philosophies. However, there is another sense of the word “postmodern,” which (...) we often forget when talking about postmodernism. Lyotard wants us to think about that which resists institutionalization, homogenization, academic taxonomies, economies, and genealogies. The postmodern is the moment of ideological instability and confusion, of radical undermining of foundations and transgressing of boundaries. It is just another name for thought. In this essay, I attempt to describe a sort of postmodern praxis in terms of the Lyotardian notion of thought, discussing the work of Simone de Beauvoir, Hardt and Negri, and June Jordan. (shrink)

: Grebowicz argues from the perspective of Jean-François Lyotard's critique of deliberative democracy that the project of democratizing knowledge may bring us closer to terror than to justice. The successful formulation of a critical standpoint requires that we figure the political as itself a contested site, and incorporate this into our theorizing about the role of dissent in the production of knowledges. This essay contrasts Lyotard's notion of the differend with Chantal Mouffe's agonistic model.

_The National Park to Come_ examines the sense of "the national" that our national parks construct and the kind of citizen they produce in the process. Who is the visitor in these spaces? Who is the national and who the foreigner? To whose children is the ostensibly unpeopled wilderness of the future owed? At what cost, and to whom? Grebowicz explores how such politicized modes of being-in-nature are maintained on the emotional level, shaping our basic sense of coherence, futurity, collectivity, (...) and having a life. Wilderness-as-spectacle, she argues, functions as a form of social relation even as we imagine the true experience of nature to be solitary and apolitical. The book's most pressing concern is the relationship between the foreigner and the future in the democratization of wilderness. For the questions explored here, contends Grebowicz, are precisely those that will shape the future of our entire park system. (shrink)

Both Husserl and Popper share the sentiment that philosophy should model itself after something called "science," despite their differing attitudes toward the Galilean tradition. I begin by describing their respective approaches to the problem of objectivity by examining their accounts of the origins of science in Husserl's Vienna Lecture and Popper's Conjectures and Refutations. Each of them explicitly takes up the problem of objectivity in The Origin of Geometry and Epistemology Without a Knowing Subject, respectively, and it is here that (...) they develop their notions of the role played by subjectivity in science. I argue that Popper suffers from a commitment to subjectivism even in the course of renouncing the subject as irrelevant for science. Husserl, on the other hand, sees in the possibility of crisis the need to reinstate subjectivist concerns in order for any discourse to be capable of saying something about the world. Husserl thus proposes a scientism which takes account of the fact that the world is, first and foremost, experienced by subjects. I contend that Popper can ultimately be held to the same position, and thus be forced to qualify his strong dismissal of subjectivity. (shrink)

In this paper, I take a critical look at Sartorio’s book Causation and Free Will (2016). Sartorio offers a rich defence of an actual-sequence view of freedom, which pays close attention to issues in the philosophy of causation and how they relate to freedom. I argue that although this focus on causation is illuminating, Sartorio’s project nevertheless runs into some serious difficulties. Perhaps most worrying amongst them is whether the agent-based reason-sensitivity account, offered by Sartorio, is consistent with Frankfurt-style cases (...) – the very cases which are provided as the sole reason to endorse an actual-sequence view of freedom. I suggest that given that powers and causation are so intimately bound together, the debate is skewed somewhat by thinking of these as rivals. (shrink)

_A portion of the revenue from this book’s sales will be donated to Doctors Without Borders to assist the humanitarian work of nurses, doctors, and other health care providers in the fight against COVID-19 and beyond._ _Concepts and Cases in Nursing Ethics_ is an introduction to contemporary ethical issues in health care, designed especially for Canadian audiences. The book is organized around six key concepts: beneficence, autonomy, truth-telling, confidentiality, justice, and integrity. Each of these concepts is explained and discussed with (...) reference to professional and legal norms. The discussion is then supplemented by case studies that exemplify the relevant concepts and show how each applies in health care and nursing practice. This new fourth edition includes an added chapter on end-of-life issues, and it is revised throughout to reflect the latest developments on topics such as global health ethics, cultural competence, social media, and palliative sedation, as well as ethical issues relating to COVID-19. (shrink)

Sexual violence of various forms, be it sexual harassment or sexual abuse, perpetrated by male professors against their female students has gained societal visibility through media broadcasts. This article tells the tale of the 2013 recruitment to the University of Iceland of a former political party leader, minister and ambassador. He was publicly called out in 2012 for his alleged sexual offences, perpetrated some years earlier. The story is told from two different viewpoints: from that of the media and from (...) the article author’s own standpoint as assistant professor in gender studies with co-responsibility for his de-recruitment. In the media story, opinion leaders from the political, judicial and media spheres take centre stage. The author thus utilizes the concepts patriarchal homosociality and influencers. Based on the findings from the media analyses, the author lays out her defence and justification, using embodiment as the core of her argument. She draws on black feminist knowledge validation processes, more specifically, the ethic of caring and personal accountability. Furthermore, she explores affective feminist pedagogy, i.e. connecting mind and body through self-actualization. By contrasting the two accounts, that of the media and her own feminist standpoint, the author sheds light on the role that influencers play in preserving patriarchal power and the status quo against ‘fire-raising feminists’ in academia and society at large. (shrink)

Concepts and Cases in Nursing Ethics maps the ethical landscape of contemporary nursing. The book is the product of a collaboration between philosopher-ethicist Michael Yeo, nurse-ethicist Anne Moorhouse, and six representatives of various areas of professional nursing. It thus combines philosophical and ethical analysis with nursing knowledge and experience in a manner that is both understandable and relevant. The book is organized around six main concepts in nursing ethics: beneficence, autonomy, confidentiality, truth-telling, justice, and integrity. A chapter is devoted to (...) the elucidation of each of these concepts. In each chapter, historical background and conceptual analysis are supplemented by case studies that exemplify issues and show how the concept applies in nursing practice. In this new edition, the materials in each chapter have been updated to reflect recent developments in nursing and more generally in health care. In addition, a totally new chapter on ethical theory has been added. Complete with bibliographies and study questions for further analysis of cases, this book is ideally suited for textbook use. It will help both practitioners and students to deal better with the clinical problems and issues that are encountered in the field. However, it's simple prose and clear exposition of complex issues will make Concepts and Cases in Nursing Ethics attractive to anyone concerned about health care. (shrink)

This long-awaited two-volume set constitutes the definitive presentation of the system of classifying moral judgment built up by Lawrence Kohlberg and his associates over a period of twenty years. Researchers in child development and education around the world, many of whom have worked with interim versions of the system, indeed, all those seriously interested in understanding the problem of moral judgment, will find it an indispensable resource. Volume I reviews Kohlberg's stage theory, and the by-now large body of research on (...) the significance and utility of his moral stages. Issues of reliability and validity are addressed. The volume ends with detailed instructions for using the forms in Volume 2. Volume 2, in a specially-designed, user-friendly format, includes three alternative functionally-equivalent forms of the scoring system. (shrink)

This book, based on the Round Table on Bioethics and Women held at UNESCO during the Fourth Session of the International Bioethics Committee (IBC), presents the ...