According to agent-based approaches to virtue ethics, the rightness of an action is a function of the motives which prompted that action. If those motives were morally praiseworthy, then the action was right; if they were morally blameworthy, the action was wrong. Many critics find this approach problematically insensitive to an act’s consequences, and claim that agent-basing fails to preserve the intuitive distinction between agent- and act-evaluation. In this article I show how an agent-based account of right action can be (...) made sensitive to an act’s consequences. According to the approach which I defend, an action is right just in case it realizes an agent’s morally praiseworthy motive. Conversely, an action is wrong just in case it realizes a morally blameworthy motive. Specifying act-evaluation in terms of the realization, rather than the expression, of an agent’s motives allows an agent-based approach to distinguish between agent- and act-evaluation. This is because an agent may act from a morally praiseworthy motive, but fail to realize that motive. Her action will therefore not have been the right one, despite its being the expression of morally praiseworthy motives. (shrink)

Caregiving relationships are often characterized by an imbalance of power between the caregiver and her cared-for. The danger that this power will be abused is a source of serious moral concern. In this article, I argue that the risk of an abuse of power sometimes stems not from the possession of power itself, but from the very nature of caring relationships. This is because carers must be prepared to exercise non-minimal amounts of power over their cared-fors, even if doing so (...) is likely to cause the cared-for distress or even pain. This means that caring itself, rather than the malign influence of power dynamics, generates a risk of unintentional abuse. One of the ways in which this risk can be reduced, I argue, is by trying to avoid an exclusive focus on the outcomes of care, and by paying more attention to the way in which that care is delivered. (shrink)

When I say ‘pain’, it is clearly a singular phenomenon. Yet if I ask for an example, you can provide many varying instances that confound the idea of its singularity. How can a pinprick be of the same thing as depression or grief? This study maintains the singularity of pain by exploring the process and structure of its experience to account for its variance and its subjectivity. Heidegger’s Being and Time provides the pathway to achieving this, where we comprehend how (...) pain’s myriad manifestations, and their inherent subjectivity, relate to our way of Being – the meaningful horizon through which we encounter pain. The study comes to tie the process of encountering pain with a structure that suffering provides, which explains both the variance and the subjectivity of the pain experience. This can then be mapped onto individual experiences of a singular phenomenon to understand how they arose and what has conditioned them. (shrink)

It is plausible to think that practices of caring are partly constituted by a caregiver's commitment to a cared-for. However, discussions of caring often contain no explicit discussion of such commitments, and do not attempt to draw any philosophical conclusions from the nature of caring relations as committed. A discussion of caring practices that emphasizes the importance of commitment therefore has the potential to generate important new insights for our understanding of caring. This essay begins that project by arguing that (...) a commitment-centric conception of caring entails the truth of moral partialism. Although many care-ethicists are sympathetic to partialism, the arguments in its defense remain controversial. As I show in this article, however, partialism is necessarily true given the committed nature of caring. This is because the concept of commitment is itself a necessarily partial one: to say that we are equally committed to everyone or everything is equivalent to saying that we are not committed to anything. Thus, when viewed as a species of commitment, it is part of the concept of caring that it requires us to put the needs of those we care for before the needs of those unknown to us. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that care ethics should be understood as a form of value pluralism. Writers on the ethics of care tend not explicitly to address issues in the theory of value, although much of what has been written about care ethics may be taken to suggest that it endorses some form of value monism. I argue against this conception of care ethics by showing that the practical reality of caregiving is more accurately represented by a pluralist account (...) of value. Practices of care are plausibly guided by a number of distinct and potentially conflicting values. These include quality of life, autonomy, dignity, personal development, and the value of nurturant relationships. Whilst caring takes each of these values to be important in its own right, they are not always jointly realisable, and carers are sometimes forced to promote one such value at the expense of another. The possibility of conflict between values is, of course, precisely what a pluralist conception of value tells us to expect. In this respect, then, value pluralism more faithfully reflects the reality of caregiving than does value monism, and care ethicists ought for this reason to endorse it. (shrink)

Moral distress has been the subject of extensive research and debate in the nursing ethics literature since the mid-1980s, but the concept has received comparatively little attention from those working outside of applied ethics. In this article, I defend a care ethical account of moral distress, according to which the phenomenon is the product of an agent’s inability to live up to one of her caring commitments. This account has a number of attractions. First, it places a greater emphasis on (...) the importance of the relationship between the caregiver and her cared-for than that found in previous accounts. Second, it does not make problematic assumptions about the correctness of a caregiver’s moral judgments, as has been claimed in relation to previous accounts of moral distress. Finally, my account allows for a clear conceptual distinction to be drawn between moral distress and other forms of negative moral emotion such as guilt and regret. Earlier accounts draw this distinction by appealing to the causal aetiology of moral distress, but as I show here, such appeals are ultimately unsuccessful unless they are made from an explicitly care ethical starting point. One of the implications of my account is that moral distress has the potential to occur in the context of any caregiving relationship. This claim is explored in the final section of the paper, in relation to student-teacher and parent-child caregiving. (shrink)

Hegel introduced the Phenomenology of Mind as a work on the problem of knowledge. In the first chapter, entitled “Sense Certainty, or the This and Meaning,” he concluded that knowledge cannot consist of an immediate awareness of particulars ). The tradition discusses sense certainty in terms of this failure of immediate knowledge without, however, specifically addressing the problem of reference. Yet reference is distinct from knowledge in the sense that while there can be no knowledge of objects without reference, there (...) may be reference without knowledge. If that is the case, then the failure of immediate knowledge does not entitle us to conclude anything about the success or failure of reference. It is not surprising, then, that a few scholars have begun to examine sense certainty primarily as a thesis about reference. (shrink)

Paul's letter to the Philippians, a dense and dynamic piece of rhetoric, is too often overlooked in Pauline interpretation. Careful, critical analysis of the argument in the letter as a whole, as well as its famous hymn, attunes the interpreter to the ethical and political dimensions of this important document.

This is a collection of thirteen original essays, of uniformly high quality, on various aspects of Hegel’s political thought. The contributors include younger as well as established Hegel authorities. The opening and concluding pieces are by Z. Pelczynski, who also invited and selected the contributions and served as general editor. The other contributors are John Plamenatz, J.-F. Suter, Judith Shklar, D.-H. Ilting, G. Heiman, Manfred Riedel, D. Cooper, D. P. Verene, W. H. Walsh, R. N. Berki, and Eugène Fleischmann. Their (...) collective effort contributes much to clarifying the wealth of historical, sociological, psychological and philosophical matter that is packed into Hegel’s often obscure theoretical texts on society and polity. Attention is also paid to his less theoretical writings such as The German Constitution and ‘The English Reform Bill’, which helps to clarify the relationship between these and the major theoretical treatises, part III of the Encyclopedia and, especially, the Philosophy of Right. (shrink)

Bioethics in a Liberal Societ By Max Charlesworth, Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pp. 172. ISBN 0?521?44952?9. £9.95 pbk. The Logical Universe: The Real Universe By Noel Curran Avebury, 1994. Pp. 158. ISBN 1?85628?863?3. £32.50. Beyond Postmodern Politics: Lyotard, Rorty, Foucault By Honi Fern Haber Routledge, 1994. Pp.viii + 160. ISBN 0?415?90823?X. $15.95. Baudrillard's Bestiary: Baudrillard and Culture By Mike Gane Routledge, 1991, Pp. 184. ISBN 0?415?06307?8. £10.99 pbk. Truth, Fiction and Literature: A Philosophical Perspective By Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom (...) Olsen Clarendon Press, 1994. Pp. 456. ISBN 0?19?824082?1. £45.00. Milton and the Drama of History: Historical Vision, Iconoclasm, and the Literary Imagination By David Loewenstein Cambridge University Press, 1990. Pp. x + 197. ISBN 0?521?37253?4. £25.00. Philosophy and Knowledge: A Commentary on Plato's Theaetetus Ronald M. Polansky Associated University Presses, 1992. Pp. 260. ISBN 0?8387?5215?2. £29.95. Heidegger and French Philosophy: Humanism, Antihumanism and Being By Tom Rockmore Routledge, 1995. Pp. xx + 250. ISBN 0?415?11181?1. £14.99 pbk. Living Poetically: Kierkegaard's Existential Aesthetics By Sylvia Walsh The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994. Pp. 294. ISBN 0?271?01328?1. (shrink)

Bracken synthesizes Polanyi’s notion of morphogentic field and Whitehead’s notion of societies of actual occasions. These comments emphasize the implications of the metaphors involved in these notions. The rnetaphor of plants growing in afield lies beyond the concept of a morphogenetic field, and the metaphor of a society of interacting persons lies behind the concept of a society of actual occasions. I suggest that one of the implications of this metaphor is that there is not, as Bracken argues, a problem (...) of continuity in Whitehead’s metaphysics of events. (shrink)

Reductionism and holism, that is, antireductionism, are two of the prevailing paradigms within the philosophy of biology. Reductionists strive to understand biological phenomena by reducing them to a series of levels of complexity with each lower level forming the foundation for the subsequent level, by mapping such biological phenomena inasmuch as possible to the principal phenomena within the fundamental sciences of chemistry and physics. In this way, complex phenomena can be reduced to assemblages of more elementary explananda. Holism, in counterpart, (...) claims that there independently exist phenomena arising from ordered levels of complexity that have intrinsic causal power and cannot be reduced in this way. When dealing with the nature of biology and its unique foundations of essentialism, determinism and ethics, the pedagogical lens through which these foundations are conveyed to learners could provide a limited perspective if only the reductive approach is followed as it would not sensitise learners to the true complexity of the phenomenon of life and the study thereof, and it is the purpose of this article to frame the reductionist–antireductionist debate in order to illustrate this.Contribution: This article contributes new knowledge to the field of the philosophy of science; more specifically, the philosophy of biology by critically evaluating the pervasive dialectic between the theoretical frameworks of reductionism and antireductionism and alluding to the pedagogical consequences thereof. (shrink)

An introduction to the Yijing (I Ching) 易經 or Classic/Scripture of Change : its nature, its history of interpretation, and its cultural influences. New York: Oxford University Press (forthcoming).

It is sometimes argued that medical professionals should protect a future child's rights by prohibiting disabled parents from using technology to deliberately have a disabled child because disability is taken as an inevitable, severe threat to a child's otherwise “open” future. I will first argue that the open future that allegedly protects a child's future autonomy is precluded by the very conditions needed to develop that future autonomy. Any child's future will be narrowed as they are socialized in a way (...) that gives them the capacity for autonomous choice. However, oppressive master narratives can diminish a future child's autonomy by distorting their narrative identity and constricting their agency. In fact, the open future argument does just this by advancing one of the most damaging master narratives about disability: that disability inevitably and severely restricts a person's autonomy and closes their future. (shrink)

During the Middle Ages, philosophers and theologians argued over the extramental reality of universal forms or essences. In the early modern period, the relation between subjectivity and objectivity, the individual self and knowledge of the outside world, was a rich subject of debate. Today, there is considerable argument about the relation between spontaneity and determinism within the evolutionary process, whether a principle of spontaneous self-organization as well as natural selection is at work in the aggregation of molecules into cells and (...) the development of primitive forms of life into complex organisms. In _Subjectivity, Objectivity and Intersubjectivity_, Joseph A. Bracken proposes that what is ultimately at stake here is the age-old problem of the relationship between the One and the Many, universality and particularity on different levels of existence and activity within nature. Bracken rejects traditional models of this relationship, wherein either the One or the Many is presupposed to have priority over the other. He instead suggests that a new social ontology—one that is grounded in a theory of universal intersubjectivity—protects both the concrete particularity of individual entities in their specific relations to one another and their enduring corporate reality as a stable community or environment within Nature. What emerges is a bold reimagining of the sometimes strained relationship between religion and science. Bracken's clear writing, sophisticated philosophical analysis, and exemplary scholarship will lend this new work an enthusiastic appreciation by readers with deep interests in philosophy and philosophical theology. (shrink)

This paper examines the need for static dispositions within the basic ontology of the powers view of properties. To lend some focus, Neil Williams’s well developed case for static dispositions is considered. While his arguments are not necessarily intended to address fundamental ontology, they still provide a useful starting point, a springboard for diving into the deeper metaphysical waters of the dispositionalist approach. Within that ontological context, this paper contends that Williams’s arguments fail to establish the need to posit static (...) dispositions, or at least any sort not already well appreciated by advocates of the powers view. The paper then proceeds to suggest an alternative motivation for positing static dispositions, the success of which depends greatly on which ontological approach to objects is paired with the powers view. (shrink)

It may seem obvious that causing disability in another person is morally problematic in a way that removing or preventing a disability is not. This suggests that there is a moral asymmetry between causing disability and causing non-disability. This chapter investigates whether there are any differences between these two types of actions that might explain the existence of a general moral asymmetry. After setting aside the possibility that having a disability is almost always bad or harmful for a person (a (...) view that we have critiqued at length elsewhere), seven putative differences are considered. Ultimately, it is concluded that none of these seven factors can ground a general moral asymmetry between causing disability and causing non-disability, though each factor can provide some moral reason to avoid causing disability in certain particular cases. (shrink)

The deeply entrenched, sometimes heated conflict between the disability movement and the profession of bioethics is well known and well documented. Critiques of prenatal diagnosis and selective abortion are probably the most salient and most sophisticated of disability studies scholars’ engagements with bioethics, but there are many other topics over which disability activists and scholars have encountered the field of bioethics in an adversarial way, including health care rationing, growth-attenuation interventions, assisted reproduction technology, and physician-assisted suicide. The tension between the (...) analyses of the disabilities studies scholars and mainstream bioethics is not merely a conflict between two insular political groups, however; it is, rather, also an encounter between those who have experienced disability and those who have not. This paper explores that idea. I maintain that it is a mistake to think of this conflict as arising just from a difference in ideology or political commitments because it represents a much deeper difference—one rooted in variations in how human beings perceive and reason about moral problems. These are what I will refer to as variations of moral psychology. The lived experiences of disability produce variations in moral psychology that are at the heart of the moral conflict between the disability movement and mainstream bioethics. I will illustrate this point by exploring how the disability movement and mainstream bioethics come into conflict when perceiving and analyzing the moral problem of physician-assisted suicide via the lens of the principle of respect for autonomy. To reconcile its contemporary and historical conflict with the disability movement, the field of bioethics must engage with and fully consider the two groups’ differences in moral perception and reasoning, not just the explicit moral and political arguments of the disability movement. (shrink)

In taking properties to have powerful or dispositional essences, dispositionalism is primed to provide an account of causation. This paper lays out a challenge confronting the dispositionalist’s ability to account for how powers causally interact with one another so as to bring about collective results. The challenge, here labeled the “interaction gap,” is raised for two competing kinds of approaches to dispositional interaction: contribution combinationist and mutual manifestationist. After carefully highlighting and testing potential resources for closing the interaction gap, it (...) is concluded that the mutual manifestationist approach holds a significant advantage. In turn, the importance of the interaction gap itself is highlighted. While powers prime an ontology to yield an account of causation, how far that account can actually go depends on the metaphysical details of one’s view of powers and their causal interaction. (shrink)

The deeply entrenched, sometimes heated conflict between the disability movement and the profession of bioethics is well known and well documented. Critiques of prenatal diagnosis and selective abortion are probably the most salient and most sophisticated of disability studies scholars’ engagements with bioethics, but there are many other topics over which disability activists and scholars have encountered the field of bioethics in an adversarial way, including health care rationing, growth-attenuation interventions, assisted reproduction technology, and physician-assisted suicide. -/- The tension between (...) the analyses of the disabilities studies scholars and mainstream bioethics is not merely a conflict between two insular political groups, however; it is, rather, also an encounter between those who have experienced disability and those who have not. This paper explores that idea. I maintain that it is a mistake to think of this conflict as arising just from a difference in ideology or political commitments because it represents a much deeper difference—one rooted in variations in how human beings perceive and reason about moral problems. These are what I will refer to as variations of moral psychology. The lived experiences of disability produce variations in moral psychology that are at the heart of the moral conflict between the disability movement and mainstream bioethics. I will illustrate this point by exploring how the disability movement and mainstream bioethics come into conflict when perceiving and analyzing the moral problem of physician-assisted suicide via the lens of the principle of respect for autonomy. To reconcile its contemporary and historical conflict with the disability movement, the field of bioethics must engage with and fully consider the two groups’ differences in moral perception and reasoning, not just the explicit moral and political arguments of the disability movement. (shrink)

Management Ethics: Integrity at Work redefines what it means for a manager to function with integrity in the private and public sectorsùdomestically and globally. It integrates the latest theoretical work in both descriptive and normative ethics, and incorporates legal, communication, quality, and organizational theories into a conceptual framework that improves managerial judgment in the handling of moral complexity at work. The authors use their organizational ethics consulting and academic research experience to provide practical assessment and decision-making tools that convert ethics (...) theories into sound action steps. The book examines three key dimensions of management integrityùjudgment, process, and developmental dimensionsùand applies them to individual chapters devoted to the subprocesses of ethical planning, organizing, leading, and controlling. The authors focus their theories and tools on 28 ethics minicases related to each management function in seven allied management application clusters: accounting, auditing management; finance, investment management; marketing, advertising management; business management, business law, human resource management; technology, quality operations, organizational behavior management; public, nonprofit, health care management; and international, environmental, public policy management. Management Ethics: Integrity at Work builds management integrity by linking and enhancing both ethics and management competence in responsible planning, organizing, leading, and controlling for use by professionals and students in the private and public sectorsùdomestically and globally. (shrink)

Serious ethical violations in medicine, such as sexual abuse, criminal prescribing of opioids, and unnecessary surgeries, directly harm patients and undermine trust in the profession of medicine. We review the literature on violations in medicine and present an analysis of 280 cases. Nearly all cases involved repeated instances of intentional wrongdoing, by males in nonacademic medical settings, with oversight problems and a selfish motive such as financial gain or sex. More than half of cases involved a wrongdoer with a suspected (...) personality disorder or substance use disorder. Despite clear patterns, no factors provide readily observable red flags, making prevention difficult. Early identification and intervention in cases requires significant policy shifts that prioritize the safety of patients over physician interests in privacy, fair processes, and proportionate disciplinary actions. We explore a series of 10 questions regarding policy, oversight, discipline, and education options. Satisfactory answers to these questions will require input from diverse stakeholders to help society negotiate effective and ethically balanced solutions. (shrink)

A bilingual translation of Zhu Xi's 朱熹 Yixue qimeng 易學啟蒙 (1186).

A translation of Zhu Xi's 朱熹 Zhouyi benyi 周易本義 (1188).

This dissertation is a study of the intersection of two monumental products and shapers of the Chinese tradition: the I-ching (Book of Change), which has influenced nearly all schools of Chinese thought for two millennia; and Chu Hsi (1130-1200), whose systematization of the Confucian tradition (known in the West as Neo-Confucianism) has dominated Chinese intellectual history until the present century. Focusing on Chu Hsi's theory of mind and his view of the ordinary person's need for concrete methods of self-cultivation, the (...) dissertation demonstrates how Chu Hsi's understanding of the I – its history, its contents, and it use in the practice of divination -- was fully integrated with his moral-metaphysics and his methodology of attaining Sagehood (the Neo-Confucian religious goal). In broader perspective, this is a study of the nature and limits of Confucian rationalism, the pragmatic character of Chinese philosophy, and the incorporation of a religious ritual (divination) into a philosophical system. Chapter I is an Introduction in two sections. The first is a survey of ancient Greek and modern theories of divination, establishing a comparative framework in which to analyze Chu Hsi's theory of divination. The second is a brief sketch of the two major schools of I-ching interpretation prior to Chu Hsi. Chapter II outlines the intellectual-historical context of Chu Hsi's approach to the I, concentrating on the complementary poles of his central problematic: cultural (the problem of the "transmission of the Way") and individual (the problem of mind). The "mind of the Sage" is discussed as a symbol of the unification of these poles. Chapter III is an examination of Chu's theory of I-ching interpretation, and the role of the mythic Sage Fu Hsi, who created the hexagrams and began the transmission of the Way, in Chu Hsi's system. Chapter IV concerns the practice of divination as a method of self-cultivation. It is proposed that Chu regarded I-ching divination – within certain limits -- as a method of detecting incipient changes in external events and in one's mind, thereby cultivating "moral responsiveness," or the ability to respond in a timely, intuitive, and correct way to change. Chapter V explores certain levels of symbolic meaning in the "philosophy of change" presupposed by hexagram divination. It is suggested that the human ability to transform oneself into a fully realized moral being, in responsive harmony with the natural world, is a Confucian way of grounding the self in the creative principle that constitutes the ontological foundation of the phenomenal world. (shrink)

False belief tasks have enjoyed a monopoly in the research on children’s development of a theory of mind. They have been granted this status because they promise to deliver an unambiguous assessment of children’s understanding of the representational nature of mental states. Their poor cousins, true belief tasks, have been relegated to occasional service as control tasks. That this is their only role has been due to the universal assumption that correct answers on true belief tasks are inherently ambiguous regarding (...) the level of the child’s understanding of mental states. It has also been due to the universal assumption that nothing in the child’s developing theory of mind would lead to systematically incorrect answers on true belief tasks. We review new findings that 4- and 5-year-olds do err, systematically and profoundly, on the true belief versions of all the extant belief tasks. This reveals an intermediate level of understanding in the development of children’s theory of mind. Researchers have been unaware of this intermediate level because it produces correct answers in false belief tasks. A simple two-task battery—one true belief task and one false belief task—is sufficient to remove the ambiguity from each task. The new findings show that children do not acquire an understanding of beliefs, and hence a representational theory of mind, until after 6 years of age, or 2 years later than most developmental psychologists have concluded. This raises the question of how to interpret other new findings that infants are able to pass false belief tasks. We review these new infant studies, as well as recent studies on chimpanzees, in light of older children’s failure on true belief tasks, and end with some speculation about how all of these new findings might be reconciled. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“Normalizing” Intersex Didn’t Feel Normal or Honest to Me.Karen A. WalshI am an intersex woman with Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (CAIS). My 57–year history with this has its own trajectory—mostly driven by medical events, and how I and my parents reacted. Most of my treatment by physicians has not been positive. It didn’t make me “normal” at all. I was born normal and didn’t require medical interventions. And by (...) the way, I’ve never been confused about who or what I am.Truthful disclosure didn’t come to me about my biology and what was done to me as an infant until I was 33, when I forced the issue by removing my medical records from my endocrinologist’s office. I learned that there was never full disclosure to my [End Page 119] parents either, and therefore there was no informed consent for the “corrective” surgeries performed on me as an infant. My parents were only told that their little girl would get cancer and would not have a normal development as a girl unless her “deformed ovaries” were removed, and that they should never discuss these problems with me. Thus, after having presented with an inguinal hernia and having exploratory surgery at age 16 months, my intra–abdominal testes were removed in a second surgery two months later. I was pronounced a “male pseudohermaphrodite,” a diagnosis that was shared neither with my parents nor with me.Years later, I discovered an article my surgeon published in 1960 in the Delaware Medical Journal about me and another intersex person he operated on (whom he labeled a “true hermaphrodite”). The article gives a very detailed pathology report of my gonads, but only two sentences regarding my welfare and the rationale for performing those surgeries. Dr. J. F. Kustrup wrote in this article, “These [two cases] emphasize the need for early diagnosis and treatment in order to avoid the possibility of malignant change and to permit these individuals to follow a normal psychosexual pattern.” And: “Hermaphroditism and pseudohermaphroditism are conditions in which early diagnosis and treatment are essential to avoid malignant degeneration and to allow the child some chance toward normal pyschic [sic] development.” I was grateful to find this article because it revealed the unfounded assumptions underpinning the recommendations for treatment, much of which continues today. Worse even than the sort of social prejudice that shapes treatment is the absence of evidence for what doctors treat as “necessary” interventions. For my syndrome, CAIS, there never was—and still is not—data to support the cancer scare, or the opinion that I’d be confused and not have a normal life.From about the age of four, I can remember being different and being stonewalled by my doctor and prevented by my parents from talking about it. The feelings and fears I tried to express were shushed away, and I could tell that my questions were upsetting everyone. Even if I had wanted to be complicit with their lame diversions and nonsensical explanations, the massive abdominal scars were there as a daily reminder and hinted at a very different story.The Road to Hell is Paved with Good IntentionsGrowing up, I was treated like a fascinoma and a lab rat at a major teaching hospital on the East Coast. All I learned from those doctors as a young kid was what it feels like to be ogled, photographed and probed by a roomful of white–coated male doctors. Dissociation made itself my friend, and helped me to cope through the annual genital and anal exams and probing. I thought I was a freak and I felt completely powerless to protect myself from them and their “care”.At my annual appointment at age 12, with my mom present, three doctors told me I was infertile. Learning that I couldn’t have kids really saddened and shocked me, but there was no opportunity to talk about my feelings—either that day, or any time afterward. I was told to stop crying. I remember them telling me that there was no one else like me and that this was a random genetic anomaly, thereby reinforcing the freakishness... (shrink)

Both mainstream and disability bioethics sometimes contend that the self-assessment of disabled people about their own well-being is distorted by adaptive preferences that are only held because other, better options are unavailable. I will argue that both of the most common ways of understanding adaptive preferences—the autonomy-based account and the well-being account—would reject blanket claims that disabled people’s QOL self-assessment has been distorted, whether those claims come from mainstream bioethicists or from disability bioethicists. However, rejecting these generalizations for a more (...) nuanced view still has dramatic implications for the status quo in both health policy and clinical ethics. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 3, March 2020, Page 44-46.