For courses in Earth Science, Physical Geology, Physical Geography, Earth System Science and Environmental Philosophy. This collection of essays by scholars in both the earth sciences and philosophy discusses the connections between the earth sciences and contemporary culture, and the changing role of the earth sciences in society.

In this article we engage with and against Foucault's provocation to think about diagrams of subjectivation. With Foucault we take up his meditation on spirituality and propose a Buddhist alternative to Greco-Roman technologies of self. Against Foucault's notion of an ‘arts of existence’ we suggest instead ‘cultivation of virtue’, drawing on, as an example, a famous Buddhist meditation on compassion. We conclude the article by proposing rethinking doctoral supervision in terms of a cultivation of virtue.

On scientific and moral revolutions -- Using the dead for the living: the benthamite moral revolution -- Immoralizing and criminalizing abortion: the doctors revolution -- Irredentism and counter-revolutions in geology and abortion -- The american bioethics revolution -- The structure of moral revolutions.

Reflections on the UN Declaration of Bioethics and Human Rights written when it was not yet enacted.

A counter history of the birth of bioethics, which focuses on the dissenters and whistleblowers who challenged law and institutions rather than simply the development of new technologies.

The emergence of the “4th Industrial Revolution,” i.e. the convergence of artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, advanced materials, and bioengineering technologies, could accelerate socioeconomic insecurities and anxieties or provide beneficial alternatives to the status quo. In the post-Covid-19 era, the entities that are best positioned to capitalize on these innovations are large firms, which use digital platforms and big data to orchestrate vast ecosystems of users and extract market share across industry sectors. Nonetheless, these technologies also have the potential (...) to democratize ownership, broaden political-economic participation, and reduce environmental harms. We articulate the potential sociotechnical pathways in this high-stakes crossroads by analyzing cellular agriculture, an exemplary 4th Industrial Revolution technology that synergizes computer science, biopharma, tissue engineering, and food science to grow cultured meat, dairy, and egg products from cultured cells and/or genetically modified yeast. Our exploration of this space involved multi-sited ethnographic research in both the cellular agriculture community and alternative economic organizations devoted to open source licensing, member-owned cooperatives, social financing, and platform business models. Upon discussing how these latter approaches could potentially facilitate alternative sociotechnical pathways in cellular agriculture, we reflect upon the broader implications of this work with respect to the 4th Industrial Revolution and the enduring need for public policy reform. (shrink)

Bioethics and human rights were conceived in the aftermath of the Holocaust, when moral outrage reenergized the outmoded concepts of and renaming them and to give them new purpose. Originally, the principles of bioethics were a means for protecting human rights, but through a historical accident, bioethical principles came to be considered as fundamental. In this paper I reflect on the parallel development and accidental divorce of bioethics and human rights to urge their reconciliation.

The central thesis of this article is that by anchoring bioethics' core conceptual armamentarium in a four-principled theory emphasizing autonomy and treating justice as a principle of allocation, theorists inadvertently biased 20th-century bioethical scholarship against addressing such subjects as ableism, anti-Black racism, classism, and other forms of discrimination, placing them outside of the scope of bioethics research and scholarship. It is also claimed that these scope limitations can be traced to the displacement of the nascent concept of respect for persons—a (...) concept designed to address classist and racist discrimination—with the morally solipsistic concept of autonomy. (shrink)

This textbook emphasises a hands-on, multimethod, interdisciplinary approach to behavioural research. This edition uses particularly strong observational approaches.

This book has been written in the hopes of equipping teachers-in-training—that is, teacher candidates—with the skills needed for action research: a process that leads to focused, effective, and responsive strategies that help students succeed.

The first history of American medical ethics published in more than a half century, Before Bioethics tracks the evolution of American medical ethics from colonial midwives and physicians' oaths to current bioethical controversies over abortion, AIDS, animal rights, and physician-assisted suicide.

I was the graduate student that Albert Jonsen so aptly describes. Bronx born and educated at the City College of New York, I emigrated to the Midwest to study at the Minnesota Center for the Philosophy of Science, where May Brodbeck, Herbert Feigl and other “logical positivists” were engaging in an ongoing dialogue with postpositivists like Paul Feyerabend and Karl Popper. In this environment, I studied philosophy of science, epistemology, and metaethics—the epistemology and logic of ethical concepts and language. I (...) even wrote my thesis on the ur-text of the metaethical turn, G. E. Moore's Principia Ethica. Then, like other epistemologists and metaethicists, “a public disaster, the American military involvement in Southeast Asia,” as well as the burgeoning civil rights movement, drew me into the sphere of public debate. (shrink)

The American Medical Association enacted its Code of Ethics in 1847, the first such national codification. In this volume, a distinguished group of experts from the fields of medicine, bioethics, and history of medicine reflect on the development of medical ethics in the United States, using historical analyses as a springboard for discussions of the problems of the present, including what the editors call "a sense of moral crisis precipitated by the shift from a system of fee-for-service medicine to a (...) system of fee-for-system medicine, better known as 'managed care.'" The authors begin with a look at how the medical profession began to consider ethical issues in the 1800s and subsequent developments in the 1900s. They then address the sociological, historical, ethical, and legal aspects of the practice of medicine. Later chapters discuss current and future challenges to medical ethics and professional values. Appendixes display various versions of the AMA's Code of Ethics as it has evolved over time. Contributors: George J. Annas, J.D., M.P.H., Arthur Isak Applbaum, Ph.D., Robert B. Baker, Ph.D., Chester R. Burns, M.D., Ph.D., Arthur L. Caplan, Ph.D., Alexander Morgan Capron, J.D., Christine K. Cassel, M.D., Linda L. Emanuel, M.D., Ph.D., Eliot L. Freidson, Ph.D., Albert R. Jonsen, Ph.D., Stephen R. Latham, J.D., Ph.D., Susan E. Lederer, Ph.D., Florencia Luna, Ph.D., Edmund D. Pellegrino, M.D., Charles E. Rosenberg, Ph.D., Mark Siegler, M.D., Rosemary A. Stevens, Ph.D., Robert M. Tenery, Jr., M.D., Robert M. Veatch, Ph.D., John Harley Warner, Ph.D., Paul Root Wolpe, Ph.D. (shrink)

Bioethicists function in an environment in which their peers - healthcare executives, lawyers, nurses, physicians - assert the integrity of their fields through codes of professional ethics. Is it time for bioethics to assert its integrity by developing a code of ethics? Answering in the affirmative, this paper lays out a case by reviewing the historical nature and function of professional codes of ethics. Arguing that professional codes are aggregative enterprises growing in response to a field's historical experiences, it asserts (...) that bioethics now needs to assert its integrity and independence and has already developed a body of formal statements that could be aggregated to create a comprehensive code of ethics for bioethics. A Draft Model Aggregated Code of Ethics for Bioethicists is offered in the hope that analysis and criticism of this draft code will promote further discussion of the nature and content of a code of ethics for bioethicists. (shrink)

Standard bioethics textbooks present the field to students and non-experts as a form of "applied ethics." This ahistoric and rationalistic presentation is similar to that used in philosophy of science textbooks until three decades ago. Thomas Kuhn famously critiqued this self-conception of the philosophy of science, persuading the field that it would become deeper, richer, and more philosophical, if it integrated the history of science, especially the history of scientific change, into its self-conception. This essay urges a similar reconceptualization for (...) bioethics, arguing that the analysis of moral change ought to be integral to bioethics (and to ethics generally). It proceeds by suggesting the sterility of the ahistoric, rationalist applied ethics model of bioethics embraced by standard bioethics textbooks. It also suggests the fecundity of alternative conceptions of the bioethics that focus on the history of successful and failed attempts to negotiate moral change, and the history of multifaceted relations between moral philosophy and practical ethics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Theory of International Bioethics: Multiculturalism, Postmodernism, and the Bankruptcy of Fundamentalism 1Robert Baker (bio)AbstractThis first of two articles analyzing the justifiability of international bioethical codes and of cross-cultural moral judgments reviews “moral fundamentalism,” the theory that cross-cultural moral judgments and international bioethical codes are justified by certain “basic” or “fundamental” moral principles that are universally accepted in all cultures and eras. Initially propounded by the judges at (...) the 1947 Nuremberg Tribunal, moral fundamentalism has become the received justification of international bioethics, and of cross-temporal and cross-cultural moral judgments. Yet today we are said to live in a multicultural and postmodern world. This article assesses the challenges that multiculturalism and postmodernism pose to fundamentalism and concludes that these challenges render the position philosophically untenable, thereby undermining the received conception of the foundations of international bioethics. The second article, which follows, offers an alternative model—a model of negotiated moral order—as a viable justification for international bioethics and for transcultural and transtemporal moral judgments.Man in the Twentieth Century can not be circumscribed by the standards of any single culture.American Anthropological Association (1948) in a statement officially denouncing the 1948 United Nation’s Declaration of Human Rights.Recently... so-called “liberal” medicine has revived the old rights of a clinic understood in terms of a special contract, a tacit pact made between one man and another. This patient gaze has even been attributed the power of assuming [a role in clinical decision making].Miracles are not so easy to come by....Michel Foucault (1975, p. 5) [End Page 201]An Overview of the AnalysisInternational bioethics originated in the trauma of the Holocaust, specifically, in the 1946–1947 Nuremberg “Doctors Trial” when a tribunal of three American judges convicted Nazi medical researchers of “crimes against humanity.” In justifying their judgment, the Nuremberg Tribunal cited 10 principles for morally permissible research, which, they claimed, were based on “fundamental” principles that civilized societies “all agree” upon and accept as the foundations of their “moral, ethical, and legal” norms. Foremost among the principles was one stating that morally permissible human experiments require the informed voluntary consent of the subject. The Nuremberg judgment soon became associated with the ideal of human rights declared in the 1948 United Nations Charter. These two ideas—fundamental principles of morality and human rights—have been linked in all major formulations of international bioethics promulgated in the past 50 years, including the Council of Europe’s 1997 Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Dignity of the Human Being with Regard to the Application of Biology and Biomedicine (Council of Europe 1997; Dommel and Alexander 1997). In this paper, I explore the received justification for international bioethics—the idea that it is grounded in fundamental principles accepted in all societies—tracing it from its initial, almost off-hand, promulgation by the Nuremberg Tribunal, through its more thoughtful development by such bioethicists as Ruth Macklin, to its more complex use by the President’s Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments.After a brief review of the evolution of the received justification, I discuss the viability of this justification in the face of the critique implicit in two important intellectual movements: multiculturalism and postmodernism. In the international context, multiculturalism asserts the claim that there are no common moral principles shared by all cultures. Postmodernism asserts a similar claim against all universal standards, moral and nonmoral. In the 1990s, bioethicists have attempted to respond to these claims in various ways. These responses are documented, analyzed, and then shown to be “bankrupt,” in the sense that they undercut the most important objective of moral fundamentalism: the justification of transcultural moral judgments, such as the condemnation of the Nazi doctors.A second article, which follows the present one in the same issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, revisits the contractarian tradition [End Page 202] of Hobbes and Locke, as it has been reinterpreted by David Gauthier (1986), John Rawls (1971, 1993), and Robert Nozick (1974), to develop the idea of negotiated moral order as the basis of international bioethics. When conceptualized as a negotiated moral order, international bioethics can accept the genuine insights... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Theory of International Bioethics: The Negotiable and the Non-NegotiableRobert Baker (bio)AbstractThe preceding article in this issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal presents the argument that “moral fundamentalism,” the position that international bioethics rests on “basic” or “fundamental” moral principles that are universally accepted in all eras and cultures, collapses under a variety of multicultural and postmodern critiques. The present article looks to the contractarian tradition (...) of Hobbes and Locke—as reinterpreted by David Gauthier, Robert Nozick, and John Rawls—for an alternative justification for international bioethics. Drawing on the central themes of this tradition, it is argued that international bioethics can be rationally reconstructed as a negotiated moral order that respects culturally and individually defined areas of nonnegotiability. Further, the theory of a negotiated moral order is consistent with traditional ideals about human rights, is flexible enough to absorb the genuine insights of multiculturalism and postmodernism, and yet is strong enough to justify transcultural and transtemporal moral judgments, including the condemnation of the Nazi doctors at Nuremberg. This theory also is consistent with the history of the ethics of human subjects experimentation and offers insights into current controversies such as the controversy over changing the consent rule for experiments in emergency medicine and the controversy over exempting certain clinical trials of inexpensive treatments for preventing the perinatal transmission of AIDS from the ethical standards of the sponsoring country.The Preamble to the Council of Europe’s (1997) Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine, the most recently ratified code of international bioethics, is noteworthy because it never mentions “principles,” the concept most frequently cited by the fundamentalists as basic to international bioethics. Instead it stresses rights, a concept that has been utterly ignored by the fundamentalist theorists of international bioethics. The Preamble exemplifies a conception of international [End Page 233] bioethics as an ethics of covenants and conventions grounded in human rights. In the full text of the Preamble, the term “rights” appears eight times and the expressions “convention” and “covenant” are used six times; the term “principle” does not appear at all. In this essay, I develop a theoretical framework for international bioethics based on conventions, covenants, and areas of “nonnegotiability”—a concept that serves as a functional analogue to the traditional notion of “human rights.” I also shall argue that, unlike the theory of basic principles central to moral fundamentalism, the theory of negotiated morality appears immune to the multicultural and postmodern critiques of international bioethics that were analyzed in the preceding article in this issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal (Baker 1998).Negotiated Moral Order: A Model for International BioethicsReconsidering ContractarianismThe linkage of “conventions” and “covenants” with human rights that is evident in the Council of Europe’s Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine traces back directly to the moral and political theories of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. Such philosophers as David Gauthier (1986), Robert Nozick (1974), and John Rawls (1971, 1993) recently have reinvigorated this classic contractarian line of analysis. In this section, I shall reconsider classical contractarian theory from a perspective informed by these more recent analyses.The most riveting feature of all forms of contractarian theory is the metaphor of the contract itself, particularly the legitimating role it accords to assent. Because contractarians look to the assent of those who would be bound by a moral norm as ultimately the sole source of a norm’s legitimacy, the most important corollary of contractarian moral theory is that moral norms are illegitimate insofar as agents either in principle could not, hypothetically would not, or actually will not rationally assent to be bound by them. Contractarians also argue that because legal norms are legitimated by acceptance of the authority of those who promulgate them, the authority of such norms is bounded by the actual or hypothetical assent of the governed. These features of contractarian analysis generate the correlative concepts of human rights and civil rights.Less often remarked, but nonetheless integral to the metaphor of the social contract, is the contractarian recognition that the interests of the [End Page 234] parties who contract to form civil society are naturally in conflict (or, as Hobbes put... (shrink)

We distinguish and review aspects of the history of two models of triage: egalitarian and utilitarian. Egalitarian triage is widely and successfully practiced in battlefield medicine, as well as in the emergency room and the ICU. Utilitarian triage has been sporadically practiced and typically collapses under the pressure of public scrutiny. Unfortunately, the two models tend to be conflated, confusing our understanding of the past and confounding our ability to plan for the future.

Philosophy textbooks typically treat bioethics as a form of "applied ethics"-i.e., an attempt to apply a moral theory, like utilitarianism, to controversial ethical issues in biology and medicine. Historians, however, can find virtually no cases in which applied philosophical moral theory influenced ethical practice in biology or medicine. In light of the absence of historical evidence, the authors of this paper advance an alternative model of the historical relationship between philosophical ethics and medical ethics, the appropriation model. They offer two (...) historical case studies to illustrate the ways in which physicians have "appropriated" concepts and theory fragments from philosophers, and demonstrate how appropriated moral philosophy profoundly influenced the way medical morality was conceived and practiced. (shrink)

This paper develops a critique of the concept of ‘ethical identity’ as this has been used recently to distinguish between ‘cynical’ and ‘authentic’ forms of corporate responsibility. Taking as our starting point Levinas’ demanding view of responsibility as ‘following the assignation of responsibility for my neighbour’, we use a case study of a packaging company—PackCo—to argue that a concern with being seen and/or seeing oneself as responsible should not be confused with actual responsibility. Our analysis of the case points first (...) to the allure of programmes of strategic corporate responsibility and the ways in which, through identification, they can provide a tacit form of moral sanction to managers in their aggressive pursuit of profit. It then contrasts the responses of different managers to negative staff feedback to illustrate the difference between managers’ attempts to defend their identity of being ‘responsible’ managers, and responsible conduct itself. The paper concludes that a potent danger of programmes of corporate responsibility is that they allow managers to deceive not just others, but also themselves in relation to the exercise of responsibility. (shrink)

Although bioethics societies are developing standards for clinical ethicists and a code of ethics, they have been castigated in this journal as “a moral, if not an ethics, disaster” for not having completed this task. Compared with the development of codes of ethics and educational standards in law and medicine, however, the pace of pro-fessionalization in bioethics appears appropriate. Assessed by this metric, none of the charges leveled against bioethics are justified. The specific charges leveled against the American Society for (...) Bioethics and Humanities and its Core Competencies report are analyzed and rejected as artifacts of an ahistoric conception of the stages by which organizations professionalize. For example, the charge that the ASBH should provide definitive criteria for what counts as “medical ethics consultation” antecedent to further progress towards professionalization is assessed by comparing it with the American Medical Association's decades-long struggle to define who can legitimately claim the title “medical doctor.” Historically, clarity about who is legitimately a doctor, a lawyer — or a “clinical ethicist”— is a byproduct of, and never antecedent to, the decades-long process by which a field professionalizes. The charges leveled against ASBH thus appear to be a function of impatient, ahistoric perfectionism. (shrink)

The Cambridge World History of Medical Ethics is the first comprehensive scholarly account of the global history of medical ethics. Offering original interpretations of the field by leading bioethicists and historians of medicine, it will serve as the essential point of departure for future scholarship in the field. The volumes reconceptualize the history of medical ethics through the creation of new categories, including the life cycle; discourses of religion, philosophy, and bioethics; and the relationship between medical ethics and the state, (...) which includes a historical reexamination of the ethics of apartheid, colonialism, communism, health policy, imperialism, militarism, Nazi medicine, Nazi "medical ethics," and research ethics. Also included are the first global chronology of persons and texts; the first concise biographies of major figures in medical ethics; and the first comprehensive bibliography of the history of medical ethics. An extensive index guides readers to topics, texts, and proper names. (shrink)

February is Black History Month and so healthcare practitioners will soon rummage history books for information about famous African Americans, like Onesimus, the African slave who...

Shen-yi Liao and Vanessa Cabonell’s “Materialized Oppression in Medical Tools and Technologies,” joins the long list of groundbreaking papers whose importance is obscured by an innocuous title. Som...

A decade ago some members of the American Society for Bioethics and the Humanities (ASBH) concluded that the society's reluctance to develop a code of professional ethics, although a tolerable anom...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Negotiating International Bioethics: A Response to Tom Beauchamp and Ruth MacklinRobert Baker (bio)AbstractCan the bioethical theories that have served American bioethics so well, serve international bioethics as well? In two papers in the previous issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, I contend that the form of principlist fundamentalism endorsed by American bioethicists like Tom Beauchamp and Ruth Macklin will not play on an international stage. Deploying (...) techniques of postmodern scholarship, I argue that principlist fundamentalism justifies neither the condemnation of the Nazi doctors at Nuremberg, nor, as the Report of the Advisory Committee on the Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE) demonstrates, condemnation of Cold War radiation researchers. Principlist fundamentalism thus appears to be philosophically bankrupt. In this issue of the Journal, Beauchamp and Macklin reject this claim, arguing that I have misread the ACHRE report and misunderstood Nazism. They also argue that the form of post-postmodern negotiated human rights theory that I proffer is adequate only insofar as it is itself really fundamentalist; insofar as I take postmodernism seriously, however, I mire international bioethics in relativism. In this response, I reaffirm my anti-fundamentalism, provide further evidence in support of my reading of the ACHRE report, and defend my post-postmodern version of rights theory. I also develop criteria for a minimally adequate theoretical framework for international bioethics.Universal Morality Reconsidered 1Paradoxically, the need for content-full universal moral principles tends to be most deeply felt and most adamantly asserted in the face of striking evidence of their absence. People are inspired to claim that Nazis must accept the universal principle that doing harm is wrong because they are appalled by the horror of the Holocaust. Yet the event itself provides palpable evidence that the Nazis saw no wrong in doing harm. One has the suspicion that claims of universalism [End Page 423] confound philosophical aspirations with empirical observations. This distinction makes a significant difference because empirical claims can be disconfirmed by data, whereas philosophical claims can only be challenged on the level of theory.I am, like Tom Beauchamp and James Childress, a common morality theorist. Thus, I believe, as they do, that ethics “relies heavily on ordinary shared moral beliefs for its content, rather than relying on pure reason, natural law, a special moral sense, and the like” (Beauchamp and Childress 1994, p. 100). For most of human history sexism and slavery were considered moral. They certainly were the norm. Thus, if one looks to common morality as the source of moral content, empirical claims of moral universalism appear suspect. Insofar as one would condemn sexism and slavery, one needs to find some theoretical justification for condemnation that goes beyond a consensus on moral content (hence my embrace of the structural analogue of human rights theory).Beauchamp, however, takes a very different view. He asserts in his critique of my position, that: “it is an institutional fact about the substance of morality (not merely [as Baker claims] the formal features of the concept of morality and not merely my view of it) that it contains fundamental and shared precepts. It is by appeal to this shared moral substance that persons are enabled to make justifiable cross-temporal and cross-cultural judgments” (Beauchamp 1998, p. 395). Beauchamp is thus claiming that it is both an empirical and a conceptual truth there is common core underlying the morality of all societies. He fleshes this claim out in another passage.[T]he term morality refers to norms about right and wrong human conduct that are so widely shared that they form a stable... communal consensus.... These standards sometimes vary from society to society, but embedded in the beliefs of all moral societies are the core dimensions of morality: Persons must keep their promises, must respect the rights of others, must not kill or cause harm to innocent persons, must not abuse children, and the like. All morally committed persons are comfortable with these norms and do not doubt their relevance and importance.(Beauchamp 1998, p. 394)Insofar as Beauchamp is making an empirical claim in this passage, the examples cited are problematic. “Promise keeping,” for example, cannot be a cultural universal because the practice is... (shrink)

The British National Health Service (BNHS) was founded, to quote Minister of Health Aneurin Bevan, to ‘universalise the best’. Over time, however, financial constraints forced the BNHS to turn to incrementalist budgeting, to rationalise care and to ask its practitioners to act as gatekeepers. Seeking a way to ration scarce tertiary care resources, BNHS gatekeepers began to use chronological age as a rationing criterion. Age-rationing became the ‘done thing’ without explicit policy directives and in a manner largely invisible to patients, (...) to Parliament, and to the public. The invisibility of the practice, however, violates the publicity principle that John Rawls and other philosophers believe essential to fairness. BNHS invisible age-rationing practices are thus a test case of the principle that fairness presupposes publicity; they raise the question: is it possible to preserve equitability in a system that uses non-public criteria to allocate scarce resources? To seek an answer, published data on access to end-stage renal disease (ESRD) treatment in Britain and the European Community (EC) are analysed. Among the findings are: that BNHS age-rationing acts as an excuse for denying care to those most likely to need ESRD treatment; and is, moreover, arbitrary and inequitable. It is further argued that no age-rationing policy can sustain visibility, and that, if the BNHS is to be fair to its patients, it must reform its present age-rationing practices, replacing them by a publicly visible, outcome-based rationing policy that rations either in terms of QALYs or triage categories. (shrink)

The self-interaction spin-2 approach to GR has been extremely influential in the particle physics community. Leaving no doubt regarding its heuristic value, we argue that any view of the metric field of GR as nothing but a stand-in for a self-coupling field in at spacetime runs into a dilemma: either the view is physically incomplete in so far as it requires recourse to GR after all, or it leads to an absurd multiplication of alternative viewpoints on GR rendering any understanding (...) of the metric field as nothing but a spin-2 field in at spacetime unjustified. (shrink)

When laypeople learned what decisions physicians were making about laypeople's health they were often appalled. … They discovered that physicians … were making controversial moral moves, choices th...