Stem cell research. Drug company influence. Abortion. Contraception. Long-term and end-of-life care. Human participants research. Informed consent. The list of ethical issues in science, medicine, and public health is long and continually growing. These complex issues pose a daunting task for professionals in the expanding field of bioethics. But what of the practice of bioethics itself? What issues do ethicists and bioethicists confront in their efforts to facilitate sound moral reasoning and judgment in a variety of venues? Are those immersed (...) in the field capable of making the right decisions? How and why do they face moral challenge -- and even compromise -- as ethicists? What values should guide them? In The Ethics of Bioethics, Lisa A. Eckenwiler and Felicia G. Cohn tackle these questions head on, bringing together notable medical ethicists and people outside the discipline to discuss common criticisms, the field's inherent tensions, and efforts to assign values and assess success. Through twenty-five lively essays examining the field's history and trends, shortcomings and strengths, and the political and policy interplay within the bioethical realm, this comprehensive book begins a much-needed critical and constructive discussion of the moral landscape of bioethics. (shrink)

Department of Philosophy and Center for Health Policy, Research and Ethics, George Mason University, 4400 University Avenue, MS 2D7, Fairfax, VA 22030, USA. Tel.: +1 703 993 1724; Fax: +1 5703 993 1555; Email: leckenwi{at}gmu.edu ' + u + '@' + d + ' '//--> . Abstract Here I consider the migration of health workers and propose a conception of transnational justice that can best address the concerns it raises, including the perpetuation of global health inequities. My focus will be (...) on nurses and direct care workers (DCWs), also called paraprofessionals—the vast majority of whom are women—coming from the global South to the United States. In the first part of the paper I will identify the factors behind this flow of what I will hereafter call ‘care workers’. From there, I will describe a conception of transnational justice that seems especially promising and explore selected policy options. Finally, I will conclude by offering specific prescriptions for action on the part of a wide range of agents, including institutions as well as individuals. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

The Declaration of Helsinki is recognised worldwide as a cornerstone of research ethics. Working in the wake of the Nazi doctors’ trials at Nuremberg, drafters of the Declaration set out to codify the obligations of physician-researchers to research participants. Its significance cannot be overstated. Indeed, it is cited in most major guidelines on research involving humans and in the regulations of over a dozen countries.Although it has undergone five revisions,1 and most recently incorporated language aimed at addressing concerns over research (...) carried out in resource-poor countries,2–5 the Declaration could go much farther in addressing the profoundly altered landscape of research with humans. Research involving humans is now a global enterprise and often involves participants from resource-poor countries. Rather than being carried out at single institutions by veteran researchers, many studies are now conducted at many locations—including sites that are not academic medical centres—by new and relatively inexperienced investigators. A growing number of projects involve novel agents, based on innovative work in genomics and proteomics. Increasingly, research is sponsored by the for-profit sector. National governments and professional organisations around the globe provide laws, regulations and standards for the conduct of research involving humans. Considerable scholarship also critiques and guides this endeavour.In light of the current effort of the World Medical Association to revise the Declaration, we offer ideas on how to re-conceive the concept of “vulnerability” and its links with the principle of justice and, in turn, redirect the attention of researchers towards those who might be so designated.In the research context, “vulnerability” is associated with an inability partly or totally to protect one’s own interests. Typically, conceptions of vulnerability centre upon characteristics associated with particular groups that …. (shrink)

COVID 19 has highlighted with lethal force the need to re-imagine and re-design the provisioning of human resources for health, starting from the reality of our radical interdependence and concern for global health and justice. Starting from the structured health injustice suffered by migrant workers during the pandemic and its impact on the health of others in both destination and source countries, I argue here for re-structuring the system for educating and distributing care workers around what I call a global (...) ecological ethic. Rather than rely on a system that privileges nationalism, that is unjust, and that sustains and even worsens injustice, including health injustice, and that has profound consequences for global health, a global ecological ethic would have us see health as interdependent and aim at “ethical place-making” across health ecosystems to enable people everywhere to have the capability to be healthy. (shrink)

Worldwide, the aging population is growing by leaps and bounds, affecting all regions and most countries (WHO 2006a; Weinberger 2007). These changing demographics generate a greater need for long-term care, whether provided in homes or institutional settings such as assisted living facilities and nursing homes. The majority of those in need will dwell in developing countries. Most will be women. The current state of the dependent elderly and of long-term care systems around the world is, by all accounts, precarious and (...) in urgent need of attention. While there are important differences in these systems and among populations living under different social, political, economic, and health-care structures.. (shrink)

The issues are familiar to most in bioethics by now, through professional or personal experiences (or both). The rapidly expanding population of elderly persons who require care is raising critical...

In a White House ceremony on May 16, 1997, President Clinton issued an apology on behalf of the nation for the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, a forty-year research project in which African-American men were deceived and denied treatment in order to document the natural course of syphilis. Reflection on this occasion can give us pause to take pride in the progress made toward more ethical research with humans. The President's apology is perhaps the most public of a number of recent events (...) representing a renewed attention to ethics in research with human participants. Alongside it stand the efforts of treatment activists for people with acquired immune deficiency syndrome and the revelations of the human radiation experiments. In 1995, President Clinton called for the creation of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission, which was charged with a host of projects aimed at investigating the organization and function of the federal system for overseeing human subjects research in the United States, and giving guidance on specific forms of research. (shrink)

In a White House ceremony on May 16, 1997, President Clinton issued an apology on behalf of the nation for the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, a forty-year research project in which African-American men were deceived and denied treatment in order to document the natural course of syphilis. Reflection on this occasion can give us pause to take pride in the progress made toward more ethical research with humans. The President's apology is perhaps the most public of a number of recent events (...) representing a renewed attention to ethics in research with human participants. Alongside it stand the efforts of treatment activists for people with acquired immune deficiency syndrome and the revelations of the human radiation experiments. In 1995, President Clinton called for the creation of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission, which was charged with a host of projects aimed at investigating the organization and function of the federal system for overseeing human subjects research in the United States, and giving guidance on specific forms of research. (shrink)

Drawing on a conception of people as ‘ecological subjects’, creatures situated in specific social relations, locations, and material environments, I want to emphasize the importance of place and place‐making for basing, demonstrating, and forging future solidarity. Solidarity, as I will define it here, involves reaching out through moral imagination and responsive action across social and/or geographic distance and asymmetry to assist other people who are vulnerable, and to advance justice. Contained in the practice of solidarity are two core ‘enacted commitments’, (...) first, to engaging our moral imaginations and recognizing others in need and, second, to responsive action. Recognizing the suffering of displacement and responding through place‐making should follow from even the most simplistic understanding of people as ‘implaced’. Recognition, furthermore, that places are created and sustained, transformed, or neglected in ways that foster or perpetuate inequities, including health inequities, generates responsibilities concerning place‐making. Place‐based interventions, on either count, should be principal and, indeed, prioritized ways of showing solidarity for the vulnerable and promoting justice. Where solidaristic relations do not prevail, place‐making can catalyze and nurture them, and over time advance justice. On the moral landscapes of bioethics, the terrain where care and health are or should be at the center of attention, an ethic of place and place‐making for those who have been displaced – patients, the elderly, urban populations, and asylum‐seekers, for instance – expresses and has rich potential for nurturing bonds of solidarity. (shrink)

The grounds for global solidarity have been theorized and conceptualized in recent years, and many have argued that we need a global concept of solidarity. But the question remains: what can motivate efforts of the international community and nation-states? Our focus is the grounding of solidarity with respect to global inequities in health. We explore what considerations could motivate acts of global solidarity in the specific context of health migration, and sketch briefly what form this kind of solidarity could take. (...) First, we argue that the only plausible conceptualization of persons highlights their interdependence. We draw upon a conception of persons as ‘ecological subjects’ and from there illustrate what such a conception implies with the example of nurses migrating from low and middle-income countries to more affluent ones. Next, we address potential critics who might counter any such understanding of current international politics with a reference to real-politik and the insights of realist international political theory. We argue that national governments – while not always or even often motivated by moral reasons alone – may nevertheless be motivated to acts of global solidarity by prudential arguments. Solidarity then need not be, as many argue, a function of charitable inclination, or emergent from an acknowledgment of injustice suffered, but may in fact serve national and transnational interests. We conclude on a positive note: global solidarity may be conceptualized to helpfully address global health inequity, to the extent that personal and transnational interdependence are enough to motivate national governments into action. (shrink)

Given that, globally, health professionals' involvement in crises—especially complex crises where human action plays a contributing role—has risen to new proportions, emergency preparedness is an increasingly integral capacity of health systems. As the United States has come to see itself as vulnerable to violence, its leaders have begun to reorganize the country's health system around protection from terrorism and other health emergencies, upholding this as an essential element or “indispensable pillar” in their strategy for securing the homeland. Biodefense and emergency (...) preparedness have thus come to capture the energies and expertise of nearly all health professionals and, increasingly, to define the specific ends that organize their work. a. (shrink)

I argue that a particular epistemological approach, “ecological thinking,” helps to demonstrate that long-term care work is organized transnationally—through health, economic, labor, and immigration policies established primarily by governments, transnational corporations, other for-profit entities, and international lending bodies—to create and sustain injustice against the dependent elderly and those who care for them, and to weaken the care capacities of countries and their health systems, especially those of source countries. An ecological approach also helps to reveal the grounding of global responsibilities (...) and an alternative conception of justice for long-term care and global health equity more generally. (shrink)

In recent years, the flow of undocumented labor from the global South to richer nations has increased considerably. Many undocumented women workers find employment as caregivers for the dependent elderly, whose numbers are burgeoning in affluent countries. Here we present a profile of undocumented non-citizen caregivers in the United States and delineate some of the key injustices they suffer. After identifying the causal factors responsible for the flow of undocumented labor from the global South to richer nations like the United (...) States, we discuss the criteria that a theory of transnational justice must meet if it is to address the problem of justice for this population. We argue that Iris Young's "social connection" model of responsibility is a promising approach for helping to correct the injustices suffered by undocumented, non-citizen caregivers. (shrink)

Disaster research has grown in scope and frequency. Research in the wake of disasters and during humanitarian crises – particularly in resource-poor settings – is likely to raise profound and unique ethical challenges for local communities, crisis responders, researchers, and research ethics committees. Given the ethical challenges, many have questioned how best to provide research ethics review and oversight. We contribute to the conversation concerning how best to ensure appropriate ethical oversight in disaster research and argue that ethical disaster research (...) requires of researchers and RECs a particular sort of ongoing, critical engagement which may not be warranted in less exceptional research. We present two cases that typify the concerns disaster researchers and RECs may confront, and elaborate upon what this ongoing engagement might look like – how it might be conceptualized and utilized – using the concept of real-time responsiveness. The central aim of RTR, understood here as both an ethical ideal and practice, is to lessen the potential for research conducted in the wake of disasters to create, perpetuate, or exacerbate vulnerabilities and contribute to injustices suffered by disaster-affected populations. Well cultivated and deployed, we believe that RTR may enhance the moral capacities of researchers and REC members, and RECs as institutions where moral agency is nurtured and sustained. (shrink)

: The model of moral reasoning used in Institutional Review Board review fails to uphold ethical ideals for research participants for it does not adequately acknowledge the particular context of research or of subjects, including their gender, their socioeconomic status, and the communities in which they lead their lives. The ethical review of research needs to take seriously the particularities of the research context as well as the situations of potential participants. A variety of conclusions are drawn for changes to (...) the system for ethical review. Most significant is a call for effective consultation with the various communities affected by research and greater reliance on subject representatives. Also proposed is national review for selected research. (shrink)

This commentary was submitted to the World Medical Association on behalf of the International Network on Feminist Approaches to Bioethics. Our submission included a description of feminist research ethics, suggestions for specific revisions to the Declaration, and elements found in other international research ethics codes that are important from a feminist perspective. Our goals were to encourage the WMA to craft a declaration that: conceptualizes issues of vulnerability in richer and more nuanced ways, resists the influence of profit motives, and (...) extends the scope of responsibility for ethical research more broadly. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungSeit einigen Jahren erscheinen in deutschsprachigen Medien Beiträge, die einen neuen Trend in der Versorgung von langzeitpflegebedürftigen Menschen beschreiben: die Migration in ausländische Pflegeheime, insbesondere nach Thailand oder Ost-Europa. Diese Art der Migration wird kontrovers aufgenommen. Einige Medienbeiträge beschreiben diese Praxis u. a. als „Greisen-Export“, „gerontologischen Kolonialismus“ oder „inhumane Deportation“. Die Begriffe weisen darauf hin, dass diese Migration aus sogenannten High Income Countries in Low and Middle Income Countries aus ethischer Sicht problematisch sein könnte. Allerdings gibt es bislang keine wahrnehmbare (...) wissenschaftliche ethische Auseinandersetzung mit dem Phänomen. In diesem Beitrag diagnostizieren wir, dass es sich bei der Migration Langzeit-Pflegebedürftiger tatsächlich um ein ethisch relevantes Problem handelt, und wir ordnen die von uns identifizierten ethisch relevanten Bereiche unterschiedlichen Ebenen zu: einer individual-, einer gesellschafts-, und einer global-ethischen Ebene. Auf der individualethischen Ebene diskutieren wir Fragen der Autonomie, der Verwandtschaftsbeziehungen, der Rolle von Kultur und Traditionen und der „guten Pflege“. Auf der gesellschaftsethischen Ebene diskutieren wir strukturelle Herausforderungen der Langzeitpflege und Fragen der sozialen Gerechtigkeit. Auf der globalethischen Ebene verbinden wir unser Thema mit der ethischen Diskussion des Medizintourismus und des Brain Drains und mit Fragen globaler Gerechtigkeit. Um eine weiterführende normative Analyse vornehmen zu können, sind weitere empirische Daten zu dem Phänomen notwendig. (shrink)

Given that, globally, health professionals' involvement in crises—especially complex crises where human action plays a contributing role—has risen to new proportions, emergency preparedness is an increasingly integral capacity of health systems. As the United States has come to see itself as vulnerable to violence, its leaders have begun to reorganize the country's health system around protection from terrorism and other health emergencies, upholding this as an essential element or “indispensable pillar” in their strategy for securing the homeland. Biodefense and emergency (...) preparedness have thus come to capture the energies and expertise of nearly all health professionals and, increasingly, to define the specific ends that organize their work. a. (shrink)

The Law is a grim, unsmiling thing, Not Justice, though. Justice is witty and whimsical and kind and caring.Rohinton Misuy, A Fine Balance;When the South Carolina Supreme Court upheld the conviction and twelve-year sentence of Regina McKnight, it affirmed that state 's commitment to bring the full force of the law to the punishment of pregnant women who use drugs. Prosecutors linked the delivery of Ms.McKnight 's stillborn baby to her use of cocaine, and argued successfully for a finding of (...) homicide by child abuse. The McKnight judgment follows the South Carolina Supreme Court decision in the case of Cornelia Whitner. Whitner was sentenced to prison for illegal drug use during pregnancy on the grounds that the viable fetus is a child under the state s criminal child endangerment statute.On the basis of constitutional concerns such as due process and privacy, worries that criminal prosecutions may thwart public policy goals such as keeping families together and promoting the health of women and children, and findings that legislatures did not intend to include the fetus in the scope of drug laws or child abuse and neglect laws, criminal prosecution has been resisted in most jurisdictions. (shrink)

The Law is a grim, unsmiling thing, Not Justice, though. Justice is witty and whimsical and kind and caring.Rohinton Misuy, A Fine Balance;When the South Carolina Supreme Court upheld the conviction and twelve-year sentence of Regina McKnight, it affirmed that state 's commitment to bring the full force of the law to the punishment of pregnant women who use drugs. Prosecutors linked the delivery of Ms.McKnight 's stillborn baby to her use of cocaine, and argued successfully for a finding of (...) homicide by child abuse. The McKnight judgment follows the South Carolina Supreme Court decision in the case of Cornelia Whitner. Whitner was sentenced to prison for illegal drug use during pregnancy on the grounds that the viable fetus is a child under the state s criminal child endangerment statute.On the basis of constitutional concerns such as due process and privacy, worries that criminal prosecutions may thwart public policy goals such as keeping families together and promoting the health of women and children, and findings that legislatures did not intend to include the fetus in the scope of drug laws or child abuse and neglect laws, criminal prosecution has been resisted in most jurisdictions. (shrink)

In this commentary, I describe an ecostructural approach to health ethics, which is grounded in a conception of people as ecological subjects and privileges place in supporting health and health justice. This approach sees people as dwelling in health ecosystems that can support or undermine health, and it situates us in social norms and processes, with a particular concern for structural health injustice. In patient care, an ecostructural approach can be operationalized by attending to conditions in the sites where birthing, (...) healing, and dying take place and by critiquing their economic structures. For public health, relationships between people, animals, land, the built environment, and climate demand attention, as do racist norms and economic processes that thwart health justice. For global health, an ecostructural approach might envision a revolution in governance that challenges nationalism, in which health systems treat citizens while depending on human resources supplied through structures that sustain health injustice. (shrink)

The intersection of national security, foreign policy, and health has been explored in a number of arenas, but little attention has been devoted to the ethical issues surrounding the global health impact of current counterterrorism policy and practice. In this essay, we’ll review a range of harms to population health traceable to counterterrorism operations, identify concerns involving moral agency and responsibility—specifically of humanitarian health workers, military medical personnel, and national security officials and operatives—and highlight two interrelated policy issues: the need (...) for a conception of national security that incorporates a cosmopolitan concern for health, and the need for shared health governance, including governance of activities affecting health. (shrink)

Biomedical and behavioral research may affect strongly held social values and thereby create significant controversy over whether such research should be permitted in the first place. Institutional review boards responsible for protecting the rights and welfare of participants in research are sometimes faced with review of protocols that have significant implications for social policy and the potential for negative social consequences. Although IRB members often raise concerns about potential long-term social implications in protocol review, federal regulations strongly discourage IRBs from (...) considering them in their decisions. Yet IRBs often do consider the social implications of research protocols and sometimes create significant delays in initiating or even prevent such research. The social implications of research are important topics for public scrutiny and professional discussion. This article examines the reasons that the federal regulations preclude IRBs from assessing the social risks of research, and examines alternative approaches that have been used with varying success by national advisory groups to provide such guidance. The article concludes with recommendations for characteristics of a national advisory group that could successfully fulfill this need, including sustainability, independence, diverse and relevant expertise, and public transparency. (shrink)

Vulnerability is one of the least examined concepts in research ethics. Vulnerability was linked in the Belmont Report to questions of justice in the selection of subjects. Regulations and policy documents regarding the ethical conduct of research have focused on vulnerability in terms of limitations of the capacity to provide informed consent. Other interpretations of vulnerability have emphasized unequal power relationships between politically and economically disadvantaged groups and investigators or sponsors. So many groups are now considered to be vulnerable in (...) the context of research, particularly international research, that the concept has lost force. In addition, classifying groups as vulnerable not only stereotypes them, but also may not reliably protect many individuals from harm. Certain individuals require ongoing protections of the kind already established in law and regulation, but attention must also be focused on characteristics of the research protocol and environment that present ethical challenges. (shrink)

The conduct of research in settings affected by disasters such as hurricanes, floods and earthquakes is challenging, particularly when infrastructures and resources were already limited pre-disaster. However, since post-disaster research is essential to the improvement of the humanitarian response, it is important that adequate research ethics oversight be available. We aim to answer the following questions: 1) what do research ethics committee members who have reviewed research protocols to be conducted following disasters in low- and middle-income countries perceive as the (...) key ethical concerns associated with disaster research?, and 2) in what ways do REC members understand these concerns to be distinct from those arising in research conducted in non-crisis situations? This qualitative study was developed using interpretative description methodology; 15 interviews were conducted with REC members. Four key ethical issues were identified as presenting distinctive considerations for disaster research to be implemented in LMICs, and were described by participants as familiar research ethics issues that were amplified in these contexts. First, REC members viewed disaster research as having strong social value due to its potential for improving disaster response, but also as requiring a higher level of justification compared to other research settings. Second, they identified vulnerability as an overarching concern for disaster research ethics, and a feature that required careful and critical appraisal when assessing protocols. They noted that research participants’ vulnerabilities frequently change in the aftermath of a disaster and often in unpredictable ways. Third, they identified concerns related to promoting and maintaining safety, confidentiality and data security in insecure or austere environments. Lastly, though REC members endorsed the need and usefulness of community engagement, they noted that there are significant challenges in a disaster setting over and above those typically encountered in global health research to achieve meaningful community engagement. Disaster research presents distinctive ethical considerations that require attention to ensure that participants are protected. As RECs review disaster research protocols, they should address these concerns and consider how justification, vulnerability, security and confidentially, and community engagement are shaped by the realities of conducting research in a disaster. (shrink)

In this article, we explore how a posthumanist stance has enabled us to work a different consideration of the way in which voice is constituted and constituting in educational inquiry; that is, we position voice in a posthuman ontology that is understood as attributable to a complex network of human and nonhuman agents that exceed the traditional understanding of an individual. Drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, Barad, and Bennett, we present a research artifact that illustrates how this (...) posthuman voice is productively bound to an agentic assemblage. The reconfiguration of a posthuman voice with/in an educational research artifact further enables us to explore various analytic questions: What happens when voice exceeds language and is more than vocalized words emanating from a speaking subject? If the materiality of voice is not limited to sound, how do we account for it? That is, how might the materiality of voice be located in the space of intra-action among human and non-human objects? We conclude with implications for thinking qualitative methodology in education differently. (shrink)

Lisa A. Eckenwiler, Long-term care, globalization, and justice, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012, reviewed by Lynette Reid.

Lisa A. Eckenwiler, Long-term care, globalization, and justice, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012, reviewed by Lynette Reid.

Critical congenital heart disease screening is rapidly becoming the standard of care in the United States after being added to the Recommended Uniform Screening Panel in 2011. Newborn screens typically do not require affirmative parental consent. In fact, most states allow parents to exempt their baby from receiving the required screen on the basis of religious or personally held beliefs. There are many ethical considerations implicated with allowing parents to exempt their child from newborn screening for CCHD. Considerations include the (...) treatment of religious exemptions in our current legal system, as well as medical and ethical principles in relation to the rights of infants. Although there are significant benefits to screening newborns for CCHD, when a parent refuses for religious or personal beliefs, in the case of CCHD screening, the parental decision should stand. (shrink)

Pharmaceutical firms seek to fulfill their responsibilities to stakeholders by developing drugs that treat diseases. We evaluate the social and financial costs of developing new drugs relative to the realized benefits and find the industry falls short of its potential. This is primarily due to legislation-mandated reliance on animal test results in early stages of the drug development process, leading to a mere 10 percent success rate for new drugs entering human clinical trials. We cite hundreds of biomedical studies from (...) journals including Nature, Science, and the Journal of the American Medical Association to show animal modeling is ineffective, misleading to scientists, unable to prevent the development of dangerous drugs, and prone to prevent the development of useful drugs. Legislation still requires animal testing prior to human testing even though the pharmaceutical sector has better options that were unavailable when animal modeling was first mandated. We propose that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and Congress should work together to abolish regulations and policies that require animal use. Doing so will benefit pharmaceutical industry stakeholders, including patients whose health depends on drugs and the many people who rely on the financial well-being of pharmaceutical firms. (shrink)

Tracy, Shariff, and Cheng (2010) present a timely and eloquent review of the current research on the emotion pride in terms of a naturalist framework. The present commentary not only echoes arguments relating to pride’s adaptive function, but also highlights some points of theoretical clarification. Specifically, we question the necessity of the naturalist approach and the emphasis on two facets of pride.

Egg and sperm have, understandably, been the “stars” of mammalian fertilization biology, particularly because artificial reproductive technologies allow for fertilization to occur outside of the female reproductive tract without other apparent contributions from either sex. Yet, recent research, including an exciting new paper, reveals unexpected and important contributions of seminal plasma to fertility. For example, seminal plasma proteins play critical roles in modulating female reproductive physiology, and a new study in mice demonstrates that effects of some of these proteins on (...) the female can even affect the health of her progeny. Furthermore, although several actions of seminal plasma have been conserved across taxa, male accessory glands and their products are diverse – even among mammals. Taken together, these studies suggest that the actions of seminal plasma components are important to understand, and also to consider in future development of assisted reproductive technologies (ART) for humans, farm species and endangered species of mammals. (shrink)

Lisa Kemmerer | : This article explores whether or not animal activists who engage in violence might legitimately be labelled “terrorists.” To this end, I examine common assumptions concerning the use of pre-emptive counter-violence in order to defend the comparatively defenceless. Through the use of casuistry, this essay compares specific hypothetical instances of killing comparatively defenceless individuals, beginning with scenarios that offer a clear general consensus, moving to more controversial cases. This indicates that contemporary violence on behalf of animal (...) liberation, often assumed to be rash and radical, is actually quite restrained. The intent of this paper is not to make claims as to how liberationists ought to behave, but rather to highlight egregious inconsistencies in our attitudes toward violence on behalf of those who are comparatively defenceless. | : Cet article vise à déterminer si les activistes animaliers qui se livrent à des actes violents doivent légitimement ou non être taxés de « terroristes ». À cette fin, j’examine les idées courantes relatives à l’utilisation de la violence préventive dans le but de défendre des êtres qui sont relativement sans défense. À l’aide de la casuistique, cet essai compare des exemples hypothétiques spécifiques de meurtres d’individus relativement sans défense, en commençant avec des scénarios qui offrent un consensus général clair, pour passer ensuite à des cas plus controversés. Cette recherche montre que la violence contemporaine perpétrée au nom de la libération des animaux, que l’on considère souvent comme étant téméraire et radicale, est en fait assez retenue. L’objectif de cet article ne consiste pas à prendre position au sujet de la façon dont les libérationnistes devraient se comporter, mais plutôt à mettre en évidence les incohérences flagrantes de nos attitudes face à la violence perpétrée au nom des êtres qui sont relativement sans défense. (shrink)

One finds in the systems of natural languages some explicit means of elaborating not only upon the directness of the causal relationship believed to exist between two events X and Y (i.e. some means of specifying just how inevitably event X gives or gave rise to event Y), but also some manner of indicating just who or what is understood to be the primary instigator of the caused event. The goal of the present paper is to explore these notions in (...) detail and arrive at a formal, logic-based means of capturing them. (shrink)