John Harris argues that opponents of human embryonic stem cell research, Catholics specifically, suffer an inconsistency in their moral thinking, opposing it on the basis that the sacrifice of an embryo is impermissible even for the good of curing disease. They have no objection to natural procreation, however, which results in many early miscarriages. Harris contends that Catholics tacitly endorse these miscarriages as a permissible sacrifice for the good of producing other, healthy children. This paper offers a response to the (...) argument that relies on only basic moral principles that Harris himself is likely to accept. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 12.3 (Autumn 2012): 461–476. (shrink)

There are ethical guidelines that form the foundation of the traditional doctor–patient relationship in medicine. Health care providers are under special obligations to their patients. These include obligations to disclose information, to propose alternative treatments that allow patients to make decisions based on their own values, and to have special concern for patients’ best interests. Furthermore, patients know that these obligations exist and so come to their physicians with a significant level of trust. In this sense, therapeutic medicine significantly differs (...) from straightforward business practices such as the buying and selling of houses, cars, cell phones, etc. However, we argue that this relationship differs when medicine is used for enhancement rather than therapy. When patients seek enhancements they are not as vulnerable as when they are ill. And in an enhancement setting, physicians have little role outside of medical risks to discuss motivation and alternatives. Therefore, we conclude that a more reasonable alternative may be for doctors and patients to use ethical norms associated more with straightforward business practices, specifically sales. We believe that full disclosure of this different set of norms will benefit both physicians and patients. (shrink)

Well-being is that which is non-instrumentally good for a person. It is identical to how well someone's life goes. There are three main theories of well-being: hedonism, desire-fulfillment, and objective list theories. Each of these theories is subject to criticism, which has led some philosophers to posit a hybrid theory in which well-being is defined as taking pleasure in objective goods. One problem that comes with such an account is the possibility of what I will call harmless pleasures; that is, (...) pleasures that while not taken in something bad, are neither linked to objective goods. It is counterintuitive to say that such pleasures do not make a person's life go better, yet this seems to be what hybrid theories entail. I call this the harmless-pleasure objection. In this paper, I argue that there is no obvious solution to this objection and this result casts doubt on hybrid theories of well-being. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 4, Page 24-26, April 2012.

In relating philosophy to intercultural understanding, one of the key problems that arises is that of the relationship between tolerance and religious belief.This paper challenges the common understanding of tolerance in contemporary debates over religious diversity. It argues that tolerance is overused and over-applied in these debates, and has wrongfully come to refer to tactlessness, harshness of condemnation, and even exclusivity of belief. In seeking to clarify the concept and ensure its appropriate usage, it proposes that religious tolerance should only (...) be applied to beliefs and actions following from those beliefs. It offers a framework in which tolerance about epistemic matters and tolerance about metaphysical matters is differentiated, and proposes that rejecting a certain element of metaphysical tolerance, namely the coexistence of incompatible content, is not a legitimate condition for intolerance. These clarifications enable a more consistent way of understanding tolerance and religious diversity. (shrink)

In relating philosophy to intercultural understanding, one of the key problems that arises is that of the relationship between tolerance and religious belief.This paper challenges the common understanding of tolerance in contemporary debates over religious diversity. It argues that tolerance is overused and over-applied in these debates, and has wrongfully come to refer to tactlessness, harshness of condemnation, and even exclusivity of belief. In seeking to clarify the concept and ensure its appropriate usage, it proposes that religious tolerance should only (...) be applied to beliefs and actions following from those beliefs. It offers a framework in which tolerance about epistemic matters and tolerance about metaphysical matters is differentiated, and proposes that rejecting a certain element of metaphysical tolerance, namely the coexistence of incompatible content, is not a legitimate condition for intolerance. These clarifications enable a more consistent way of understanding tolerance and religious diversity. (shrink)

In September of 2008, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith published Dignitas Personae, which addresses several newly emerging topics in thearea of biomedical ethics. One of these topics is genetic engineering, which we can define as the intentional manipulation of genetic material so as to produce some desired trait or characteristic. Genetic engineering is discussed in Dignitas Personae, but is done so relatively briefly. In this paper, I explore some of the metaphysical and ethical questions that are key (...) in assessing the morality of this practice by examining other Church documents as well as philosophical literature. Ultimately, I will argue that aside from some instrumental restrictions, questions about the moral permissibility of genetic engineering, the distinction between therapy and enhancement, and what it means to be human are not as easily answered from a Catholic perspective as one might think. (shrink)

In September of 2008, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith published Dignitas Personae, which addresses several newly emerging topics in thearea of biomedical ethics. One of these topics is genetic engineering, which we can define as the intentional manipulation of genetic material so as to produce some desired trait or characteristic. Genetic engineering is discussed in Dignitas Personae, but is done so relatively briefly. In this paper, I explore some of the metaphysical and ethical questions that are key (...) in assessing the morality of this practice by examining other Church documents as well as philosophical literature. Ultimately, I will argue that aside from some instrumental restrictions, questions about the moral permissibility of genetic engineering, the distinction between therapy and enhancement, and what it means to be human are not as easily answered from a Catholic perspective as one might think. (shrink)

The nature of the doctor–patient relationship is central to the practice of medicine and thus to bioethics. The American Medical Association (in AMA principles of medical ethics, available at: https://www.ama-assn.org/delivering-care/ethics/patient-physician-relationships, 2016) states, “The practice of medicine, and its embodiment in the clinical encounter between a patient and a physician, is fundamentally a moral activity that arises from the imperative to care for patients and to alleviate suffering.” In this issue of Christian Bioethics, leading scholars consider what relevance (if any) Christianity (...) brings to the relationship between physician and patient: does Christianity make a difference? The contributors consider this question from several different perspectives: the proper model of medicine, the role that the Christian moral tradition can play in medicine in a secular pluralistic society, how a Christian understanding of virtue can inform practices such as perinatal hospice and physician-assisted suicide, and whether or not appeals to Christian values can (or should) ground a physician’s right to conscientious objection. (shrink)

There remains a need to properly analyze the metaphysical assumptions underlying two organ procurement policies: presumed consent and organ sales. Our contention is that if one correctly understands the metaphysics of both the human body and material property, then it will turn out that while organ sales are illiberal, presumed consent is not. What we mean by illiberal includes violating rights of bodily integrity, property, or autonomy, as well as arguing for or against a policy in a manner that runs (...) afoul of Rawlsian public reason. (shrink)

Laws requiring autopsies have generated little controversy. Yet it is considered unconscionable to take organs without consent for transplantation. We think an organ draft is justified if mandatory autopsies are. We reject the following five attempts to show why a mandatory autopsy policy is legitimate, but organ conscription is not: (1) The social contract gives the state a greater duty to protect its citizens from each other than from disease. (2) There is a greater moral obligation to prevent murders than (...) disease-caused deaths because killing people is morally worse than allowing people to die. (3) Autopsies do not confiscate body parts, but organ transplants do. (4) The citizenry's knowledge that their organs are very likely to be taken will generate more anxiety than the remote possibility of a mandatory autopsy. (5) A religious conviction that one's organs will be needed in order to be resurrected is threatened by organ transplantation but not by autopsies that "return" body parts. (shrink)

This is a book about how we see: the environment around us (its surfaces, their layout, and their colors and textures); where we are in the environment; whether or not we are moving and, if we are, where we are going; what things are good for; how to do things (to thread a needle or drive an automobile); or why things look as they do.The basic assumption is that vision depends on the eye which is connected to the brain. The (...) author suggests that natural vision depends on the eyes in the head on a body supported by the ground, the brain being only the central organ of a complete visual system. When no constraints are put on the visual system, people look around, walk up to something interesting and move around it so as to see it from all sides, and go from one vista to another. That is natural vision—and what this book is about. (shrink)

Both the psychology of perception and the philosophy of perception seem to show a new face when the process is considered at its own level, distinct from that of sensation. Unfamiliar conceptions in physics, anatomy, physiology, psychology, and phenomenology are required to clarify the separation and make it plausible. But there have been so many dead ends in the effort to solve the theoretical problems of perception that radical proposals may now be acceptable. Scientists are often more conservative than philosophers (...) of science. I end, therefore, as I began, with a plea for help. (shrink)

This authoritative volume provides a comprehensive road map of the important and rapidly growing field of emotion regulation.

A provocative work by medical ethicist James Hughes, Citizen Cyborg argues that technologies pushing the boundaries of humanness can radically improve our quality of life if they are controlled democratically. Hughes challenges both the technophobia of Leon Kass and Francis Fukuyama and the unchecked enthusiasm of others for limitless human enhancement. He argues instead for a third way, "democratic transhumanism," by asking the question destined to become a fundamental issue of the twenty-first century: How can we use new cybernetic (...) and biomedical technologies to make life better for everyone? These technologies hold great promise, but they also pose profound challenges to our health, our culture, and our liberal democratic political system. By allowing humans to become more than human - "posthuman" or "transhuman" - the new technologies will require new answers for the enduring issues of liberty and the common good. What limits should we place on the freedom of people to control their own bodies? Who should own genes and other living things? Which technologies should be mandatory, which voluntary, and which forbidden? For answers to these challenges, Citizen Cyborg proposes a radical return to a faith in the resilience of our democratic institutions. (shrink)

Modern emotion theories emphasise the adaptive value of emotions. Emotions are by no means always helpful, however. They often must be regulated. The study of emotion regulation has its origins in the psychoanalytic and stress and coping traditions. Recently, increased interest in emotion regulation has led to crucial boundary ambiguities that now threaten progress in this domain. It is argued that distinctions need to be made between (1) regulation of emotion and regulation by emotion; (2) emotion regulation in self and (...) emotion regulation in others; and (3) conscious and nonconscious emotion regulation. Using a process model of emotion generation, this review considers promising research on basic processes and individual differences in emotion regulation and poses five theoretical challenges. (shrink)

Emotion regulation has the odd distinction of being a wildly popular construct whose scientific existence is in considerable doubt. In this article, we discuss the confusion about whether emotion generation and emotion regulation can and should be distinguished from one another. We describe a continuum of perspectives on emotion, and highlight how different (often mutually incompatible) perspectives on emotion lead to different views about whether emotion generation and emotion regulation can be usefully distinguished. We argue that making differences in perspective (...) explicit serves the function of allowing researchers with different theoretical commitments to collaborate productively despite seemingly insurmountable differences in terminology and methods. (shrink)

This classic book by Theodor W. Adorno anticipates many of the themes that have since become common in contemporary philosophy: the critique of foundationalism, the illusions of idealism and the end of epistemology.

For centuries psychologists have been trying to explain how a man or an animal could perceive space. They have thought of space as having three dimensions and the difficulty was how an observer could see the third dimension. For depth, as Bishop Berkeley asserted at the outset of the New Theory of Vision (1709), “is a line endwise to the eye which projects only one point in the fund of the eye.” Space was its dimensions. It was empty save for (...) a collection of objects or bodies. For an observer, the objects were in different directions at various distances and the question was how these distances could be detected. For two hundred and fifty years we have tried to answer this question and failed. The explanations have been controversial, contradictory, and confused. (shrink)

Speakers often do not state requests directly but employ innuendos such as Would you like to see my etchings? Though such indirectness seems puzzlingly inefficient, it can be explained by a theory of the strategic speaker, who seeks plausible deniability when he or she is uncertain of whether the hearer is cooperative or antagonistic. A paradigm case is bribing a policeman who may be corrupt or honest: A veiled bribe may be accepted by the former and ignored by the latter. (...) Everyday social interactions can have a similar payoff structure (with emotional rather than legal penalties) whenever a request is implicitly forbidden by the relational model holding between speaker and hearer (e.g., bribing an honest maitre d’, where the reciprocity of the bribe clashes with his authority). Even when a hearer’s willingness is known, indirect speech offers higher-order plausible deniability by preempting certainty, gossip, and common knowledge of the request. In supporting experiments, participants judged the intentions and reactions of characters in scenarios that involved fraught requests varying in politeness and directness. (shrink)

Kant's Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason is one of the great modern examinations of religion's meaning, function and impact on human affairs. In this volume, the first complete English-language commentary on the work, James J. DiCenso explains the historical context in which the book appeared, including the importance of Kant's conflict with state censorship. He shows how the Religion addresses crucial Kantian themes such as the relationship between freedom and morality, the human propensity to evil, the status (...) of historical traditions in relation to ethical principles, and the interface between individual ethics and social institutions. The major arguments are clearly and precisely explained, and the themes are highlighted and located within Kant's mature critical philosophy, especially his ethics. The commentary will be valuable for all who are interested in the continuing relevance of religion for contemporary inquiries into ethics, public institutions and religious traditions. (shrink)