Savulescu argues that it may be ethically acceptable for governments to require citizens be vaccinated against COVID-19. He also recommends that governments consider providing monetary or in-kind incentives to citizens to increase vaccination rates. In this response, we argue against mandatory vaccination and vaccine incentivisation, and instead suggest that targeted public health messaging and a greater responsiveness to the concerns of vaccine-hesitant individuals would be the best strategy to address low vaccination rates.

Respect for patient autonomy is a central principle of medical ethics. However, there are important unresolved questions about the characteristics of an autonomous decision, and whether some autonomous preferences should be subject to more scrutiny than others. In this paper, we consider whether _inappropriately adaptive preferences_—preferences that are based on and that may perpetuate social injustice—should be categorised as autonomous in a way that gives them normative authority. Some philosophers have argued that inappropriately adaptive preferences do not have normative authority, (...) because they are only a reflection of a person’s social context and not of their true self. Under this view, medical professionals who refuse to carry out actions which are based on inappropriately adaptive preferences are not in fact violating their patient’s autonomy. However, we argue that it is very difficult to articulate a systematic and principled distinction between normal autonomous preferences and inappropriately adaptive preferences, especially if this distinction needs to be useful for clinicians in real-life situations. This makes it difficult to argue that inappropriately adaptive preferences are straightforwardly non-autonomous. Given this problem, we argue that there are significant theoretical issues with contemporary understandings of autonomy in bioethics. We discuss what this might mean for the practice of medicine and for medical ethics education. (shrink)

Charitable foundations are being called upon to operate in more pen and democratic ways and to involve a more diverse constituency. This unprecedented study details the inner workings of a democratically organized philanthropy, where funding decisions are made by community activists. Susan A. Ostrander spent two years doing intensive field research at the Haymarket People's Fund -- a small, Boston-based foundation. Based on a philosophy of raising and giving away money called "Change, Not Charity," the Fund makes grants to (...) local grassroots social change organizations. The world of social movement funding comes alive with Ostrander's descriptions of grantmaking and policy meetings, donor events, and the day-to-day work of the Fund staff. Within this fascinating behind-the-scenes account, Ostrander argues that the "social relations of philanthropy" are more important and more varied than previously understood. Written at a time when Haymarket was dealing with crisis, this book tells a story of organizational change as the Fund moved from an informal collective to a more formal structure; it is also the story of a struggle to build a multi-race, multi-class, gender-equal organization. Ostrander details these ongoing struggles and addresses the larger issue of how fundraising can itself be a kind of social movement organizing among the progressive people with wealth who continue to be Haymarket's main donors. (shrink)

My strategy is to examine a recent trend in philosophical discussions of responsibility, a trend that tries, but I think ultimately fails, to give an acceptable analysis of the conditions of responsibility. It fails due to what at first appear to be deep and irresolvable metaphysical problems. It is here that I suggest that the condition of sanity comes to the rescue. What at first appears to be an impossible requirement for responsibility---the requirement that the responsible agent have created her- (...) or himself---turns out to be the vastly more mundane and non controversial requirement that the responsible agent must, in a fairly standard sense, be sane. (shrink)

The Rejected Body argues that feminist theorizing has been skewed toward non-disabled experience, and that the knowledge of people with disabilities must be integrated into feminist ethics, discussions of bodily life, and criticism of the cognitive and social authority of medicine. Among the topics it addresses are who should be identified as disabled; whether disability is biomedical, social or both; what causes disability and what could 'cure' it; and whether scientific efforts to eliminate disabling physical conditions are morally justified. Wendell (...) provides a remarkable look at how cultural attitudes towards the body contribute to the stigma of disability and to widespread unwillingness to accept and provide for the body's inevitable weakness. (shrink)

Carazan's dream : Kant's early theory of freedom -- Kant's archimedean moment : remarks in observation concerning the feeling of the beautiful and the sublime -- Rousseau, Count Verri, and the true economy of human nature : lectures on anthropology, 1772-1781 -- The paradox of autonomy -- Moral hesitation in religion within the boundaries of bare reason -- Kant's true politics : Völkerrecht in toward perpetual peace and the metaphysics of morals -- Kant as educator : conflict of the faculties, (...) part one -- Archimedes revisited : honor and history in the conflict of the faculties, part two -- Kant's Jewish problem. (shrink)

Her careful building of positions, her unique approaches to analyzing problems, and her excellent insights make this an important work for feminists, those ...

: Chronic illness is a major cause of disability, especially in women. Therefore, any adequate feminist understanding of disability must encompass chronic illnesses. I argue that there are important differences between healthy disabled and unhealthy disabled people that are likely to affect such issues as treatment of impairment in disability and feminist politics, accommodation of disability in activism and employment, identification of persons as disabled, disability pride, and prevention and "cure" of disabilities.

Bioethics has paid surprisingly little attention to the special problems faced by women and to feminist analyses of current health care issues other than ...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Secrecy and Autonomy in Lewis CarrollSusan ShererVictorian novels quiver with morbid secrets and threatening discoveries. Unseen rooms, concealed doors, hidden boxes, masked faces, buried letters, all appear (and disappear) with striking regularity in the fiction of Victorian England. So many of these secret spaces contain children, and especially little girls, little girls in hidden spaces. The young Jane Eyre sits behind a curtain in the hidden window seat, escaping (...) the vindictive wrath of John Reed. Repulsed by her angry brother, Maggie Tulliver flees to the house attic, fantasizing that her family will fear that she has died. Little Dorrit withdraws from the common space of the Marshalsea into her private room above the prison, and Little Nell hides behind trees and walls, silently observing clandestine meetings. Finally the seven-year-old Alice falls down a rabbit-hole into a Wonderland, the dreamspace of her own psyche.Of these images, none can be more embedded in our cultural imagination than the child Alice dropping into the subterranean well of Wonderland. Indeed, of the many celebrated scenes in the Alice narratives, the most memorable, most potent, most quoted is Alice’s initial descent to the bottom of the rabbit-hole. The lastingness of this scene seems even greater when we realize that, although neither Carroll in Alice’s Adventures Underground nor Tenniel in the first edition of Wonderland illustrated the moment with a picture, it still became (along with the Mad Hatter’s tea party) one of the signature images of the Alice stories. Why, we must ask, did the Victorians retain, with a powerful tenacity, this vision of a little girl moving through a tight space toward the hidden world of Wonderland?The answer to this question is not—at least not wholly—that the scene simply represents a child’s metaphorical progress through the [End Page 1] birth canal 1 and that this, in turn, symbolizes some kind of rite of passage, a movement towards some deeper knowledge. For then how do we explain Alice’s conspicuous lack of internal development in both stories? Indeed, for a narrative that thematizes motion, Alice’s psychical growth remains disturbingly static. Throughout both narratives, Alice displays little emotional variation, for when she is not frustrated or anxious, she is, for the most part, vapid or expressionless. In fact, one is immediately struck by her coolness and indifference as she drops through the rabbit-hole. 2 Thus, because scene changes in Wonderland and Looking-Glass rarely betoken any emotional or intellectual modulations, Alice’s falling into Wonderland signals no internal transition.But the image does relocate her body and within this fictive world, location is everything. The scene gestures Alice’s departure, her separation, her movement towards an autonomy of which every child dreams when, in play, retreating to a hidden space. A child’s impulse to hide, to create a secret space, is one of the most compelling of all human wishes, the wish for autonomy and autarchy—“to be cut off from the word and yet owner of the world.” 3 Throughout Victorian literature, the fantasy of autonomy sets children dreaming of far-away worlds and hidden gardens. The young Cathy and Heathcliff flee to the isolated moors, filling the open, empty space with dreams of unrestricted freedom. Little Dorrit envisages the locked garden behind the Marshalsea as an alternative world to the foul prison atmosphere. And what are the Brontës’s Angria and Gondol but disconnected, self-governing realms imagined from the standpoint of childhood powerlessness? The image, then, of Alice’s fall begins to fulfill this powerful wish for autonomy, which culminates, finally, in Alice’s self-coronation at the end of Looking-Glass. Yet it is only within the child’s willing imagination that a secret space can encroach so closely upon autonomy, for as we shall see, secrecy and autonomy are irreconcilable not only in the demanding world of realism, but even in the more elastic world of Carrollian fantasy.IAlice’s descent into Wonderland and her entrance into the Looking-Glass kingdom would seem like ripe metaphors for Carroll to explore the thoughts and fantasies of Alice’s psyche. What could be more... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Secrecy and Autonomy in Lewis CarrollSusan ShererVictorian novels quiver with morbid secrets and threatening discoveries. Unseen rooms, concealed doors, hidden boxes, masked faces, buried letters, all appear (and disappear) with striking regularity in the fiction of Victorian England. So many of these secret spaces contain children, and especially little girls, little girls in hidden spaces. The young Jane Eyre sits behind a curtain in the hidden window seat, escaping (...) the vindictive wrath of John Reed. Repulsed by her angry brother, Maggie Tulliver flees to the house attic, fantasizing that her family will fear that she has died. Little Dorrit withdraws from the common space of the Marshalsea into her private room above the prison, and Little Nell hides behind trees and walls, silently observing clandestine meetings. Finally the seven-year-old Alice falls down a rabbit-hole into a Wonderland, the dreamspace of her own psyche.Of these images, none can be more embedded in our cultural imagination than the child Alice dropping into the subterranean well of Wonderland. Indeed, of the many celebrated scenes in the Alice narratives, the most memorable, most potent, most quoted is Alice’s initial descent to the bottom of the rabbit-hole. The lastingness of this scene seems even greater when we realize that, although neither Carroll in Alice’s Adventures Underground nor Tenniel in the first edition of Wonderland illustrated the moment with a picture, it still became (along with the Mad Hatter’s tea party) one of the signature images of the Alice stories. Why, we must ask, did the Victorians retain, with a powerful tenacity, this vision of a little girl moving through a tight space toward the hidden world of Wonderland?The answer to this question is not—at least not wholly—that the scene simply represents a child’s metaphorical progress through the [End Page 1] birth canal 1 and that this, in turn, symbolizes some kind of rite of passage, a movement towards some deeper knowledge. For then how do we explain Alice’s conspicuous lack of internal development in both stories? Indeed, for a narrative that thematizes motion, Alice’s psychical growth remains disturbingly static. Throughout both narratives, Alice displays little emotional variation, for when she is not frustrated or anxious, she is, for the most part, vapid or expressionless. In fact, one is immediately struck by her coolness and indifference as she drops through the rabbit-hole. 2 Thus, because scene changes in Wonderland and Looking-Glass rarely betoken any emotional or intellectual modulations, Alice’s falling into Wonderland signals no internal transition.But the image does relocate her body and within this fictive world, location is everything. The scene gestures Alice’s departure, her separation, her movement towards an autonomy of which every child dreams when, in play, retreating to a hidden space. A child’s impulse to hide, to create a secret space, is one of the most compelling of all human wishes, the wish for autonomy and autarchy—“to be cut off from the word and yet owner of the world.” 3 Throughout Victorian literature, the fantasy of autonomy sets children dreaming of far-away worlds and hidden gardens. The young Cathy and Heathcliff flee to the isolated moors, filling the open, empty space with dreams of unrestricted freedom. Little Dorrit envisages the locked garden behind the Marshalsea as an alternative world to the foul prison atmosphere. And what are the Brontës’s Angria and Gondol but disconnected, self-governing realms imagined from the standpoint of childhood powerlessness? The image, then, of Alice’s fall begins to fulfill this powerful wish for autonomy, which culminates, finally, in Alice’s self-coronation at the end of Looking-Glass. Yet it is only within the child’s willing imagination that a secret space can encroach so closely upon autonomy, for as we shall see, secrecy and autonomy are irreconcilable not only in the demanding world of realism, but even in the more elastic world of Carrollian fantasy.IAlice’s descent into Wonderland and her entrance into the Looking-Glass kingdom would seem like ripe metaphors for Carroll to explore the thoughts and fantasies of Alice’s psyche. What could be more... (shrink)

Susan Sherwin ist eine kanadische Philosophin und Wegbereiterin der feministischen Ethik. Bis zu ihrer Emeritierung war sie lange Zeit Professorin an der Dalhousie University in Halifax, Kanada. In ihrem Text „Foundations, Frameworks, Lenses: The Role of Theories in Bioethics“ von 1999 plädiert sie für eine kritische Reflexion gängiger Metaphern in der Bioethik.

Every action, touch, utterance, and look, every listening, taste, smell, and feel is a living question; but it is no ordinary propositional one-by-one question, rather it is a plenisentient sensing and probing non-propositional enquiry about how our world is, in its present continuous sense, and in relation to how we anticipate its becoming. I will take this assumption as my first premise and, by using the notion of enkinaesthesia, I will explore the ways in which an agent’s affectively-saturated co-engagement with (...) its world establishes patterns of co-articulation of meaning within the anticipatory affective dynamics and the experiential entanglement necessary for expedient action and adaptation. In advancing this thesis I will reject the minimalist notions of embodiment by amplifying and extending the claims made by the most radical of the embodied mind theories. Crucially, I will offer a new wave of embodiment theory which has at its core the radical extension of sensorimotor affect into the life and being of other agents where their experience is for us both direct and immediate. This I will present as an immanent intercorporeality. (shrink)

We contest two claims: (1) that language, understood as the processing of abstract symbolic forms, is an instrument of cognition and rational thought, and (2) that conventional notions of turn-taking, exchange structure, and move analysis, are satisfactory as a basis for theorizing communication between living, feeling agents. We offer an enkinaesthetic theory describing the reciprocal affective neuro-muscular dynamical flows and tensions of co- agential dialogical sense-making relations. This “enkinaesthetic dialogue” is characterised by a preconceptual experientially recursive temporal dynamics forming the (...) deep extended melodies of relationships in time. An understanding of how those relationships work, when we understand and are ourselves understood, when communication falters and conflict arises, will depend on a grasp of our enkinaesthetic intersubjectivity. (shrink)

The legal environment -- Regulation of nursing practice -- Nurses in legal actions -- Standards of care -- Defenses to negligence or malpractice -- Prevention of malpractice -- Nurses as witnesses -- Professional liability insurance -- Accepting or refusing an assignment/patient abandonment -- Delegation to unlicensed assistive personnel -- Patients' rights and responsibilities -- Confidential communication -- Competency and guardianship -- Informed consent -- Refusal of treatment -- Pain control -- Patient teaching and health counseling -- Medication administration -- Clients (...) with AIDS and HIV testing -- Abusive situations -- Reproductive services -- Restraints -- Emergency psychiatric admissions -- Organ and tissue donation and transplantation -- Discharge against medical advice -- The medical record and documentation standards -- Electronic health information and communications -- Interdependent nursing functions: verbal orders and telenursing -- Event reporting and compliance -- Quality and safety in nursing practice -- Forensic issues -- Employer and employee rights -- Contracts -- Corporate liability -- Employment contracts and unionization -- Employment status liability -- Staffing issues and floating -- Americans with Disabilities Act -- Employees with AIDS/HIV infection and exposure to bloodborne pathogens -- Impaired nurses -- Sexual harassment in the workplace -- Violence in the workplace -- Intentional torts -- Environmental health and safety -- Ethical decision making -- Professional boundaries and patient relationships -- Moral courage and patient advocacy -- Social media and online professionalism -- Reporting illegal, unethical, or unsafe conduct -- Maternal versus fetal rights -- Futility of care -- Advance directives and end-of-life decisions -- Assisted suicide. (shrink)

Reproductive tourism is the travelling by candidate service recipients from one institution, jurisdiction, or country where treatment is not available to another institution, jurisdiction, or country where they can obtain the kind of medically assisted reproduction they desire. The more widespread this phenomenon, the louder the call for international measures to stop these movements. Three possible solutions are discussed: internal moral pluralism, coerced conformity, and international harmonisation. The position is defended that allowing reproductive tourism is a form of tolerance that (...) prevents the frontal clash between the majority who imposes its view and the minority who claim to have a moral right to some medical service. Reproductive tourism is moral pluralism realised by moving across legal borders. As such, this pragmatic solution presupposes legal diversity. (shrink)

Only human beings have a rich conceptual repertoire with concepts like tort, entropy, Abelian group, mannerism, icon and deconstruction. How have humans constructed these concepts? And once they have been constructed by adults, how do children acquire them? While primarily focusing on the second question, in The Origin of Concepts , Susan Carey shows that the answers to both overlap substantially. Carey begins by characterizing the innate starting point for conceptual development, namely systems of core cognition. Representations of core (...) cognition are the output of dedicated input analyzers, as with perceptual representations, but these core representations differ from perceptual representations in having more abstract contents and richer functional roles. Carey argues that the key to understanding cognitive development lies in recognizing conceptual discontinuities in which new representational systems emerge that have more expressive power than core cognition and are also incommensurate with core cognition and other earlier representational systems. Finally, Carey fleshes out Quinian bootstrapping, a learning mechanism that has been repeatedly sketched in the literature on the history and philosophy of science. She demonstrates that Quinian bootstrapping is a major mechanism in the construction of new representational resources over the course of childrens cognitive development. Carey shows how developmental cognitive science resolves aspects of long-standing philosophical debates about the existence, nature, content, and format of innate knowledge. She also shows that understanding the processes of conceptual development in children illuminates the historical process by which concepts are constructed, and transforms the way we think about philosophical problems about the nature of concepts and the relations between language and thought. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Emergent Spacetime, the Megastructure Problem, and the Metaphysics of the SelfSusan Schneider (bio)The aim of this article is to introduce new thoughts on some pressing topics relating to my book, Artificial You, ranging from the fundamental nature of reality to quantum theory and emergence in large language models (LLM) like GPT-4. Since Artificial You was published, the innovations in the domain of AI chatbots like GPT-4 have been rapid-fire, (...) and at times dizzying. The thoughtful discussion in this symposium offers an important opportunity for cross-cultural engagement on these issues and more. I am grateful for the opportunity to learn from the insights of these authors and editors. [End Page 314]The order of my comments will be as follows: in the context of considering Christian Coseru's intriguing response (section 1), I begin by discussing the nature of the self, which I use as a springboard into larger, vexing issues about the nature of fundamental reality, given work on emergent spacetime (ES) (section 2). I offer a "Prototime Interpretation" of quantum mechanics in which spacetime emerges from a prototemporal arena, and use this idea to explore the nature of the self and mind.Using the assumption of ES, I devise an approach to metaphysically fundamental objects (which I call "quantum objects") based on quantum entanglement and the bundle theory of substance. I illustrate how the self or mind, insofar as it is a substance that supervenes on quantum objects, could be partly or fully determined by the properties of the quantum objects on which it supervenes. Intriguingly, this would mean that the self or mind is not located in any singular point in space at a given time. I also explain how the Prototime Interpretation of quantum mechanics is compatible with change and causation at the fundamental level.In section 3 I turn to Inês Hipólito's interesting article, discussing the import of not underestimating AI autonomy in light of the increasingly sophisticated large-language models (LLMs).1 I raise the "AI Megastructure Problem," a new problem of AI control arising in the context of the incipient AGI systems that are now populating the AI ecosystem. The problem, which arose from a collaboration with Kyle Kilian, considers the possibility of emergent properties from the interaction of the LLMs and other AI's in the AI ecosystem (Schneider and Kilian 2023). Then, turning to Noam Cook's intriguing discussion of Japanese philosophy, I consider the pressing issue of testing for machine consciousness, devising a modified version of my AI consciousness test (ACT), originally developed with astrophysicist Edwin Turner. I add an "interpretability component" to the ACT to deal with the case of LLMs (section 4).I. Patternism and the Biological Process ViewChristian Coseru's intriguing piece focuses on the chapters on personal identity in Artificial You, proposing that when it comes to the nature of the self, one should adopt "a biologically informed process-ontology perspective on personal identity," which "means recognizing that organic identity is different in kind: it is an identity of form rather than of matter."His position is akin to the patternist views that I argue against in Artificial You in the sense that it embraces the idea that form, rather than the particular matter that comprises one's brain and body, is key to one's survival over time. But there are important differences as well. For transhumanists tend to believe that the self can survive radical changes in one's substrate, transitioning from thinking with a biological brain to computing with a network of microchips, for instance. Coseru departs from this, writing: [End Page 315]As organisms, persons endure by undergoing constant change on a fundamentally cellular level, including the change in the neural pathways that realize the cognitive processes of thinking and expressing these very thoughts right now.Furthermore:[I]f persons are processes rather than things, then they cannot be cognitively enhanced by augmenting, replacing or transferring their functioning parts (e.g., brain cells).I will call this position the "Biological Process View" (BPV). I have several questions about it. First, how does this position solve one of the key problems I raised for... (shrink)

In this article I present an argument for the necessary co-articulation of meaning within our felt enkinaesthetic engagement with our world. The argument will be developed through a series of stages, the first of which will be an elaboration of the notion of articulation of and through the body. This will be followed by an examination of enkinaesthetic experiential entanglement and the role it plays in rendering our world meaningful and our actions values-realising. At this stage I will begin to (...) extend Husserl’s notion of intentional transgression to the enkinaesthetic sphere of lived experience, and in support of this claim I will examine the theoretical and practical work of osteopathic manual listening [Gens & Roche 2014] and the ‘felt sense’ in focusing [Gendlin] which makes possible a shift from a somatic articulation to a semantic, and potentially conceptual, one. Throughout, my position will be compatible with Merleau-Ponty’s claim that “Whenever I try to understand myself, the whole fabric of the perceptible world comes too, and with it comes the others who are caught in it.” [Merleau-Ponty 1964a, p.15]. (shrink)

In this important book, Susan Hurley sheds new light on consciousness by examining its relationships to action from various angles. She assesses the role of agency in the unity of a conscious perspective, and argues that perception and action are more deeply interdependent than we usually assume. A standard view conceives perception as input from world to mind and action as output from mind to world, with the serious business of thought in between. Hurley criticizes this picture, and considers (...) how the interdependence of perceptual experience and agency at the personal level (of mental contents and norms) may emerge from the subpersonal level (of underlying causal processes and complex dynamic feedback systems). Her two-level view has wide implications, for topics that include self-consciousness, the modularity of mind, and the relations of mind to world. The self no longer lurks hidden somewhere between perceptual input and behavioral output, but reappears out in the open, embodied and embedded in its environment. Hurley traces these themes from Kantian and Wittgensteinian arguments through to intriguing recent work in neuropsychology and in dynamic systems approaches to the mind, providing a bridge from mainstream philosophy to work in other disciplines. Consciousness in Action is unique in the range of philosophical and scientific work it draws on, and in the deep criticism it offers of centuries-old habits of thought. (shrink)

These interviews with Hélène Cixous offer invaluable insight into her philosophy and criticism. Culled from newspapers, journals, and books, _White Ink_ collects the best of these conversations, which address the major concerns of Cixous's critical work and features two dialogues with twentieth-century intellectuals Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. The interviews in _White Ink_ span more than three decades and include a new conversation with Susan Sellers, the book's editor and a leading Cixous scholar and translator. Cixous discusses her work (...) and writing process. She shares her views on literature, feminism, theater, autobiography, philosophy, politics, aesthetics, religion, ethics, and human relations, and she reflects on her roles as poet, playwright, professor, woman, Jew, and, her most famous, "French feminist theorist." Sellers organizes _White Ink_ in such a way that readers can grasp the development of Cixous's commentary on a series of vital questions. Taken together, the revealing performances in _White Ink_ provide an excellent introduction this thinker's brave and vital work—each one an event in language and thought that epitomizes Cixous's intellectual and poetic force. (shrink)

Kant's Observations of 1764 and Remarks of 1764–5 document a crucial turning point in his life and thought. Both reveal the growing importance for him of ethics, anthropology and politics, but with an important difference. The Observations attempts to observe human nature directly. The Remarks, by contrast, reveals a revolution in Kant's thinking, largely inspired by Rousseau, who 'turned him around' by disclosing to Kant the idea of a 'state of freedom' as a touchstone for his thinking. This and related (...) thoughts anticipate such famous later doctrines as the categorical imperative. This collection of essays by leading Kant scholars illuminates the many and varied topics within these two rich works, including the emerging relations between theory and practice, ethics and anthropology, men and women, philosophy, history and the 'rights of man'. (shrink)

Summary Analogue models are actual physical setups used to model something else. They are especially useful when what we wish to investigate is difficult to observe or experiment upon due to size or distance in space or time: for example, if the thing we wish to investigate is too large, too far away, takes place on a time scale that is too long, does not yet exist or has ceased to exist. The range and variety of analogue models is too (...) extensive to attempt a survey. In this article, I describe and discuss several different analogue model experiments, the results of those model experiments, and the basis for constructing them and interpreting their results. Examples of analogue models for surface waves in lakes, for earthquakes and volcanoes in geophysics, and for black holes in general relativity, are described, with a focus on examining the bases for claims that these analogues are appropriate analogues of what they are used to investigate. A table showing three different kinds of bases for reasoning using analogue models is provided. Finally, it is shown how the examples in this article counter three common misconceptions about the use of analogue models in physics. (shrink)

As one might expect, feminist health‐care ethics takes place at the intersection of feminist ethics and health‐care ethics (also known as (bio)medical ethics and bioethics). It encompasses a wide range of efforts to bring feminist perspectives and tools to bear on the set of ethical issues that arise within the realm of health and health care. These efforts expand and modify debates in both fields: that is, they add the perspective of gender analysis to the apparently gender‐neutral tradition of medical (...) ethics, while also enriching the often theoretical discussions of feminist ethics through focus on the concrete reality and complexities of health‐care practices. (shrink)

Blood banks all over the world attempt to cover the demand for blood by donations from voluntary non-remunerated donors. The discussion regarding the acceptability of blood donations by haemochromatosis patients focuses on the question of whether health benefits violate the rule of the altruistic donor. Utilitarian and deontological arguments for and against the policy of accepting blood donors who need to let blood regularly in order to stay healthy are considered by this article. A closer look at the procedure reveals (...) that the confusion is due to the conflation of, on the one hand the phlebotomy, and on the other hand, the decision about the destination of the blood afterwards. The health benefits are connected to the phlebotomy and not to the donation. The morally relevant point in the decision as to whether the candidate is a truly altruistic donor is whether he donates without asking for a benefit in return. It is concluded that haemochromatosis patients can be free, voluntary, and altruistic blood donors. (shrink)