More women are currently incarcerated than at any other time in US history. Though the United States has begun to acknowledge mass incarceration as an international embarrassment, the discourse has centered on men of color, and the experiences and consequences of US mass incarceration for women of color have been largely ignored. This is the case in spite of a now strong mainstream, institutionalized movement to end violence against women, and a growing prison reform movement ostensibly meant to help vulnerable (...) women. This paper uses the method of immanent critique to explain why women of color have been left behind by reform strategies, and to make a normative argument for abolitionist strategies. I use Beth E. Richie’s analysis of the failure of the feminist anti-violence movement to protect poor women of color, to expose the contradictory circumstance that turns “public safety” and “anti-violence” against the women they claim to protect, and to argue that reform is not enough. (shrink)

Approximately 47 percent of women ages fifteen to forty‐four are currently without children, and slightly more than 20 percent of white women in America will never bear children, the highest percentage in modern history. Many fertile women who are childless are voluntarily so. Although any competent person twenty‐one years or older is legally eligible for voluntary sterilization, many doctors refuse to sterilize childfree women. This essay explores various reasons a woman would want to continue in her childfree lifestyle, evaluates the (...) accessibility of sterilization for women who are childfree by examining the reported reasons for denial of sterilization—both from the woman's and the physician's perspective—and assesses the legal status of voluntary sterilization for nonparous women. The essay also urges physicians to follow recommended guidelines for counseling women who, regardless of parity, desire sterilization and to provide this contraception if, after careful consideration, there are no outstanding health or other reasons that the procedure should not be performed. (shrink)

It is largely acknowledged that natural languages emerge not just from human brains but also from rich communities of interacting human brains (Senghas, ). Yet the precise role of such communities and such interaction in the emergence of core properties of language has largely gone uninvestigated in naturally emerging systems, leaving the few existing computational investigations of this issue at an artificial setting. Here, we take a step toward investigating the precise role of community structure in the emergence of linguistic (...) conventions with both naturalistic empirical data and computational modeling. We first show conventionalization of lexicons in two different classes of naturally emerging signed systems: (a) protolinguistic “homesigns” invented by linguistically isolated Deaf individuals, and (b) a natural sign language emerging in a recently formed rich Deaf community. We find that the latter conventionalized faster than the former. Second, we model conventionalization as a population of interacting individuals who adjust their probability of sign use in response to other individuals' actual sign use, following an independently motivated model of language learning (Yang, , ). Simulations suggest that a richer social network, like that of natural (signed) languages, conventionalizes faster than a sparser social network, like that of homesign systems. We discuss our behavioral and computational results in light of other work on language emergence, and other work of behavior on complex networks. (shrink)

‘Bioethics still has important work to do in helping to secure status equality for LGBT people’ writes Timothy F. Murphy in a recent Bioethics editorial. The focus of his piece, however, is much narrower than human rights, medical care for LGBT people, or ending the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Rather, he is primarily concerned with sexuality and gender identity, and the medical intersections thereof. It is the objective of this response to provide an alternate account of bioethics from a Queer perspective. I (...) will situate Queer bioethics within Queer studies, and offer three ‘lessons’ that bioethics can derive from this perspective. These are not definitive rules for Queer bioethics, since it is a field which fundamentally opposes categorizations, favoring pastiche over principles. These lessons are exploratory examples, which both complement and contradict LGBT bioethics. My latter two lessons – on environmental bioethics and disability – overlap with some of Murphy's concerns, as well as other conceptions of LGBT bioethics. However, the first lesson takes an antithetical stance to Murphy's primary focus by resisting all forms of heteroconformity and disavowing reproduction as consonant with Queer objectives and theory. The first lesson, which doubles as a primer in Queer theory, does heavy philosophical lifting for the remainder of the essay. This response to Timothy F. Murphy, whose work is certainly a legacy in bioethics, reveals the multiplicity of discourses in LGBT/Queer studies, many of which are advantageous – even essential – to other disciplines like bioethics. (shrink)

The US healthcare industry emits an estimated 479 million tonnes of carbon dioxide each year; nearly 8% of the country’s total emissions. When assessed by sector, hospital care, clinical services, medical structures, and pharmaceuticals are the top emitters. For 15 years, research has been dedicated to the medical structures and equipment that contribute to carbon emissions. More recently, hospital care and clinical services have been examined. However, the carbon of pharmaceuticals is understudied. This article will focus on the carbon emissions (...) of pharmaceuticals since they are consistently calculated to be among the top contributors to healthcare carbon and assess the factors that contribute to pharmaceutical carbon emissions. Specifically, overprescription, pharmaceutical waste, antibiotic resistance, routine prescriptions, non-adherence, drug dependency, lifestyle prescriptions, and drugs given due to a lack of preventive healthcare will be identified. Prescribing practices have environmental ramifications. Carbon reduction, when focused on pharmaceuticals, can lead to cleaner, more sustainable healthcare. (shrink)

Volume 26, Issue 2, June 2020, Page 82-90.

Medicalization occurs when an aspect of embodied humanity is scrutinized by the medical industry, claimed as pathological, and subsumed under medical intervention. Numerous critiques of medicalization appear in academic literature, often put forth by bioethicists who use a variety of “lenses” to make their case. Feminist critiques of medicalization raise the concerns of the politically disenfranchised, thus seeking to protect women—particularly natal sex women—from medical exploitation. This article will focus on three feminist critiques of medicalization, which offer an alternative narrative (...) of sickness and health. I will first briefly describe the philosophical origins of medicalization. Then, I will present three feminist critiques of medicalization. Liberal feminism, trans feminism, and crip feminism tend to regard Western medicine with a hermeneutics of suspicion and draw out potential harms of medicalization of reproductive sexuality, gender, and disability, respectively. While neither these branches of feminism—nor their critiques—are homogenous, they provide much-needed commentaries on phallocentric medicine. I will conclude the paper by arguing for the continual need for feminist critiques of medicalization, using uterus transplantation as a relevant case study. (shrink)

Health care is ubiquitous in the industrialized world. Yet, every medical development, technique, and procedure impacts the environment. Green bioethics synthesizes environmental ethics and biomedical ethics, thus creating an interdisciplinary approach to sustainable health care. Notably, green bioethics addresses not the structure of environmental sustainability in health-care institutions but the sustainability of individual health-care offerings. It parallels traditional biomedical ethics by providing four principles for ethical guidance: distributive justice, resource conservation, simplicity, and ethical economics. Through these four principles, green bioethics (...) presents a coherent framework for evaluating the sustainability of medical developments, techniques, and procedures. The future of our world may very well depend on how effectively we halt ecological destruction and conserve our resources in all areas of life. The principles of green bioethics, outlined in this book, will advance sustainability in health care. (shrink)

Bioethics, Volume 36, Issue 5, Page 547-555, June 2022.

The carbon emissions of global healthcare activities make up 4%–5% of total world emissions, with the majority coming from industrialised countries. The solution to healthcare carbon reduction in these countries, ostensibly, would be preventive healthcare, which is less resource intensive than corrective healthcare in itself and, as a double benefit, reduces carbon by preventing diseases which may require higher healthcare carbon to treat. This leads to a paradox: preventive healthcare is designed to give humans longer, healthier lives. But, by extending (...) life spans, the carbon emissions of a person increase both over a lifetime and in the medical industry overall. At the same time, the need for higher carbon end-of-life care does not disappear, particularly in resource intensive countries. This article will first identify sources of healthcare carbon, focusing on the industrialised world, and explain various efforts towards healthcare carbon reduction, which include preventive healthcare. Second, it will develop the ‘paradox of prevention’—that preventive healthcare may save healthcare carbon by proximally reducing the need for medical treatments, but also, paradoxically, result in more healthcare carbon both in an individual’s life and in the medical industry. The third section will offer ethical principles for approaching the paradox of prevention. The conclusion will emphasise the need for institutional approaches to healthcare carbon reduction in the industrialised world, which will relieve some of the tensions of healthcare industry decarbonisation and individual healthcare carbon use. (shrink)

In 2014, the United States health care industry produced an estimated 480 million metric tons of carbon dioxide ; nearly 8% of the country's total emissions. The importance of sustainability in health care — as a business reliant on fossil fuels for transportation, energy, and operational functioning — is slowly being recognized. These efforts to green health care are incomplete, since they only focus on health care structures. The therapeutic relationship is the essence of health care — not the buildings (...) that contain the practice. As such, this article will first postulate reasons for a lack of environmental sustainability in US health care. Second, the article will focus on current green health care initiatives in the United States in which patients and physicians participate. Third, the rationale for participation in green initiatives will be explained. Fourth, the article will propose that, based on the environmental values of patients and physicians, health care insurance plans and health care insurance companies can be targeted for green health care reform, thereby closing the loop of sustainable health care delivery. (shrink)

The carbon emissions of global health care activities make up 4–5% of total world emissions, placing it on par with the food sector. Carbon emissions are particularly relevant for health care because of climate change health hazards. Doctors and health care professionals must connect their health care delivery with carbon emissions and minimize resource use when possible as a part of their obligation to do no harm. Given that reducing carbon is a global ethical priority, the informed consent process in (...) health care delivery must change. I argue that the expanded role of bioethicists in this climate crisis is to promote and support “green informed consent:” the sharing of climate information with patients, offering options for lower-carbon health care, and accepting the patient’s right to decline treatments which are deemed too carbon intensive for their values. (shrink)

This book focuses on material culture as a subject of philosophical inquiry and promotes the philosophical study of material culture by articulating some of the central and difficult issues raised by this topic and providing innovative solutions to them, most notably an account of improvised action and a non-intentionalist account of function in material culture. Preston argues that material culture essentially involves activities of production and use; she therefore adopts an action-theoretic foundation for a philosophy of material culture. Part 1 (...) illustrates this foundation through a critique, revision, and extension of existing philosophical theories of action. Part 2 investigates a salient feature of material culture itself—its functionality. A basic account of function in material culture is constructed by revising and extending existing theories of biological function to fit the cultural case. Here the adjustments are for the most part necessitated by special features of function in material culture. These two parts of the project are held together by a trio of overarching themes: the relationship between individual and society, the problem of centralized control, and creativity. (shrink)

Function theorists routinely speculate that a viable function theory will be equally applicable to biological traits and artifacts. However, artifact function has received only the most cursory scrutiny in its own right. Closer scrutiny reveals that only a pluralist theory comprising two distinct notions of function--proper function and system function--will serve as an adequate general theory. The first section describes these two notions of function. The second section shows why both notions are necessary, by showing that attempts to do away (...) with one of them fail. This demonstration draws on examples from the artifactual realm to motivate major points of the argument. The third section is an outline of artifact function. It confirms the conclusions of the second section, and also begins the task of describing some of the special features of artifact function needing accommodation within the general theory. (shrink)

Similarity is one of the most important relations humans perceive, arguably subserving category learning and categorization, generalization and discrimination, judgment and decision making, and other cognitive functions. Researchers have proposed a wide range of representations and metrics that could be at play in similarity judgment, yet have not comprehensively compared the power of these representations and metrics for predicting similarity within and across different semantic categories. We performed such a comparison by pairing nine prominent vector semantic representations with seven established (...) similarity metrics that could operate on these representations, as well as supervised methods for dimensional weighting in the similarity function. This approach yields a factorial model structure with 126 distinct representation‐metric pairs, which we tested on a novel dataset of similarity judgments between pairs of cohyponymic words in eight categories. We found that cosine similarity and Pearson correlation were the overall best performing unweighted similarity functions, and that word vectors derived from free association norms often outperformed word vectors derived from text (including those specialized for similarity). Importantly, models that used human similarity judgments to learn category‐specific weights on dimensions yielded substantially better predictions than all unweighted approaches across all types of similarity functions and representations, although dimension weights did not generalize well across semantic categories, suggesting strong category context effects in similarity judgment. We discuss implications of these results for cognitive modeling and natural language processing, as well as for theories of the representations and metrics involved in similarity. (shrink)

Through the use of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs), multiple children are born adding to worldwide carbon emissions. Evaluating the ethics of offering reproductive services against its overall harm to the environment makes unregulated ARTs unjustified, yet the ART business can move towards sustainability as a part of the larger green bioethics movement. By integrating ecological ethos into the ART industry, climate change can be mitigated and the conversation about consumption can become a broader public discourse. Although the impact of naturally (...) made children on the environment is undeniable, I will focus on the ART industry as an anthropogenic source of carbon emissions which lead to climate change. The ART industry is an often overlooked source of environmental degradation and decidedly different from natural reproduction as fertility centres provide a service for a fee and therefore can be subject to economic, policy and bioethical scrutiny. In this article, I will provide a brief background on the current state of human-driven climate change before suggesting two conservationist strategies that can be employed in the ART business. First, endorsing a carbon capping programme that limits the carbon emissions of ART businesses will be proposed. Second, I will recommend that policymakers eliminate funded ARTs for those who are not biologically infertile. I will conclude the article by urging policymakers and all those concerned with climate change to consider the effects of the reproductive technologies industry in light of climate change and move towards sustainability. (shrink)

Every day from the moment we wake up until the moment we sleep, we have the option to look outward or look inward. This is more than an outlook; it is also a metaphor. As we – citizens, ethicists,...

Bioethics, Volume 36, Issue 5, Page 547-555, June 2022.

Rieke van der Graaf, Karin Jongsma, Martine de Vries, Suzanne van de Vathorst, and Ineke Bolt have done well to voice ethical concerns over the decision of the IAB to host the next WCB in Qatar. Conferences should be more sustainable. Yet, attention to the carbon impact of conferences—and, perhaps, any country that a person might travel to for business or pleasure—are only one small part of environmentally responsible citizenship, especially for those trained in ethics and committed to health. Both (...) bioethics as a discipline and bioethicists as individuals need to interrogate their environmental choices. To this end, some ecological choices are more obvious targets of ethical scrutiny—diet and travel—while others appear sacrosanct, like reproduction and even healthcare use. This underscores the importance of making sustainable and ethical organizational choices, such as where to hold a conference, without absolving environmental accountability in other ethical calculations. Many organizations in academic and clinical medicine need to make drastic alterations in their practices and policies to effectively mitigate carbon. While the burden is not only on bioethics alone, the expectation that it should be remains. (shrink)

Extending her earlier work on a theory of human rights in her 1993 Operative Rights, Singer (emerita, American philosophy presumably, City U. of New York) critiques philosophies from Rousseau to Kymlicka in clarifying her views--influenced by Dewey and Mead (George Herbert, not Margaret)--and applying them to such issues as multiculturalism, minority rights, and conflict resolution. The analysis pivots on her concept of "a normative community" rather than natural rights. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

Baruch Spinoza was born in Amsterdam during a period of unprecedented scientific, artistic, and intellectual discovery. Upon its release, Spinoza’s Ethics was banned; today it is the quintessential example of philosophical method. Although acknowledged as difficult, the book is widely taught in philosophy, literature, history, and politics. This introduction is designed to be read side by side with Spinoza's work. As a guide to the style, vocabulary, and arguments of the Ethics, it offers a range of interpretive possibilities to prepare (...) students to become conversant with Spinoza's philosophical method and his challenge to conventional thinking. (shrink)

After the typical theological and bioethical questions about in vitro fertilization (IVF) are vetted, there remains a three-dimensional understanding of responsibility that is not typically considered in Christian bioethics. This paper will explore responsibility to the spouses’ loving union, their bodies, and society in order to ascertain the morality of IVF. In a marriage partnership, the spouses’ primary responsibility is to each other. Although in matrimony physical union is essential to marriage, children are not. The second dimension of responsibility focuses (...) on the body—“the temple of God”—and on our responsibility to care for it. This concerns the woman, her husband, and even the newborn. Finally, the third understanding of responsibility leads us to address social concerns, with an emphasis on social dynamics, especially the cost of IVF procedures and how they siphon medical resources away from more urgent human needs in health care and within society. (shrink)

This book provides a new interpretation of Kants critical work that shows Kants deep connection to Spinoza, and reveals new directions for thinking about Kant in relation to contemporary European philosophy.

Corporate Philanthropy is multi-dimensional, differs between sectors and involves both individual and organisational decision-making to achieve business and social goals. However, the CP literature characteristically focuses on strategic decisions made by business leaders and ignores the role of employees, especially those in lower status and lower paid positions. To redress this imbalance, we conducted a qualitative study of employees’ involvement in CP processes in ten workplaces in the South East of England to identify whether and how they are involved in (...) CP decision-making and to capture their perspective on the nature of CP and the benefits generated by such activities. We specifically chose to study workplaces where employees are involved in the actual execution of the CP strategy, prioritising companies with a visible presence on the high street. The results illustrate the benefits of involving employees in CP decision-making, which we argue derives in part from the ‘liminal-like states’ that typify CP activities organised by shop floor staff, involving the temporary overturning of hierarchies, humanising of workplaces and opportunities for lower level staff to prioritise their personal philanthropic preferences and signal their charitable identity to colleagues and customers. Whilst the data also suggest that CP decision-making remains predominantly top-down and driven by profit-oriented goals, we conclude that employees should be involved in choosing charitable causes as well as in designing and implementing workplace fundraising, in order to maximise the advantages of CP for the company and for wider society. (shrink)

In this paper we argue the need to reimagine research ethics frameworks to include notions of environmental sustainability. While there have long been calls for healthcareethics frameworks and decision-making to include aspects of sustainability, less attention has focused on howresearchethics frameworks could address this. To do this, we first describe the traditional approach to research ethics, which often relies on individualised notions of risk. We argue that we need to broaden this notion of individual risk to consider issues associated with (...) environmental sustainability. This is because research is associated with carbon emissions and other environmental impacts, both of which cause climate change health hazards. We introduce how bioethics frameworks have considered notions of environmental sustainability and draw on these to help develop a framework suitable for researchers. We provide a case study of data-driven health research to apply our framework. (shrink)

Tool use rivals language as an important domain of cognitive phenomena, and so as a source of insight into the nature of cognition in general. But the favoured current definition of tool use is inadequate because it does not carve the phenomena of interest at the joints. Heidegger's notion of equipment provides a more adequate theoretical framework. But Heidegger's account leads directly to a non-individualist view of the nature of cognition. Thus non-individualism is supported by concrete considerations about the nature (...) of tools and tool use. (shrink)

“My first long haul flight that didn’t fill up and an empty row for me. I have been blessed by the algorithm ”. The phrase ‘blessed by the algorithm’ expresses the feeling of having been fortunate in what appears on your feed on various social media platforms, or in the success or virality of your content as a creator, or in what gig economy jobs you are offered. However, we can also place it within wider public discourse employing theistic conceptions (...) of AI. Building on anthropological fieldwork into the ‘entanglements of AI and Religion’, this article will explore how ‘blessed by the algorithm’ tweets are indicative of the impact of theistic AI narratives: modes of thinking about AI in an implicitly religious way. This thinking also represents continuities that push back against the secularisation thesis and other grand narratives of disenchantment that claim secularity occurs because of technological and intellectual progress. This article will also explore new religious movements, where theistic conceptions of AI entangle technological aspirations with religious ones. (shrink)

This article will examine the Catholic concept of global justice within a health care framework as it relates to women's needs for delivery doctors in the developing world and women's demands for assisted reproduction in the developed world. I will first discuss justice as a theory, situating it within Catholic social teachings. The Catholic perspective on global justice in health care demands that everyone have access to basic needs before elective treatments are offered to the wealthy. After exploring specific discrepancies (...) in global health care justice, I will point to the need for delivery doctors in the developing world to provide basic assistance to women who hazard many pregnancies as a priority before offering assisted reproduction to women in the developed world. The wide disparities between maternal health in the developing world and elective fertility treatments in the developed world are clearly unjust within Catholic social teachings. I conclude this article by offering policy suggestions for moving closer to health care justice via doctor distribution. (shrink)

How do social actors get addressees to stop retreating to metadiscussions that derail ground-level discussions, and why do they expect the strategies to work? The question is of both theoretical and practical interest, especially with regard to ground-level discussions of systemic sexism and racism derailed by qualifying “not all men” and “not all white people” perform the sexist or racist actions that are the topic of discussion. I use a normative pragmatic approach to analyze two exemplary messages designed to halt (...) retreats to metadiscussions about using “not all men” and “not all white people” qualifiers in discussions of systemic sexism and racism. I find that social actors use strategies that may at first glance appear to be out of bounds in an ideal critical discussion—e.g., demanding, shouting, cussing, sarcasm, name-calling—to cultivate a context where using not-all qualifiers becomes increasingly costly. The strategies are designed to get addressees to recognize that using not-all qualifiers is not an epistemic correction of a hasty generalization or ethical intervention to halt promulgation of stereotypes about men and white people. Instead, the strategies display that using not-all qualifiers is a fallible sign of willful hermeneutical ignorance, willful ignorance, and an attempt to reassert a measure of social dominance. These findings affirm the need to investigate the various strategies and normative materials social actors actually bring to bear to regulate disagreement. (shrink)

Inherent in providing healthcare for youth lie tensions among best interests, decision-making capacity, rights, and legal authority. Transgender youth experience barriers to needed gender-affirming care, often rooted in ethical and legal issues, such as healthcare provider concerns regarding youth capacity and rights to consent to hormone therapy. Even when decision-making capacity is present, youth may lack the legal authority to give consent. The aims of this paper are therefore to provide an empirical analysis of minor trans youth capacity to consent (...) to hormone therapy and to address the normative question of whether there is ethical justification for granting trans youth the authority to consent to this care. Through qualitative content analysis of interviews with trans youth, parents, and healthcare providers, we found that trans youth demonstrated the understandings and abilities characteristic of the capacity to consent to hormone therapy and that they did consent to hormone therapy with positive outcomes. Employing deontological and consequentialist reasoning and drawing on a foundation of empirical evidence, human rights, and best interests we conclude that granting trans youth with decisional capacity both the right and the legal authority to consent to hormone therapy via the informed consent model of care is ethically justified. (shrink)

_Wittgenstein's Art of Investigation_ is one of the first to focus on and provide an original and detailed analysis of Wittgenstein's grammatical investigations. Beth Sarkey offers us new insight into the historical context and influences on method which will help students understand the intricacies and depth of his work.

For trans youth, the experience of gender differs from expectations based on sex assigned at birth (Frohard-Dourlent, Dobson, Clark, Duoll, & Saewyc, 2016). To support gender health—the ability to...

Abstract:Increasing attention to climate change and health has re-centered environmental ethics on the medical industry and biomedical ethics on the environment. Yet, without a belief in climate change, there is little reason for sustainability in medicine. In the United States, about one-quarter of all adults self-identify as Evangelical Christians, with a sizable subset of "climate change deniers." In order for millions of Evangelicals to be persuaded about the importance of sustainability in medicine, there must be a theological justification. This article (...) will lay the foundation for an Evangelical environmental bioethic. I will first provide a brief history of environmental bioethics. Then, Christian theology will be introduced. In the following section, the work of Richard Bauckham—as a representative of Evangelical ecological theology—will be explored. His scholarship on biblical limitation can form the basis of an Evangelical environmental bioethic. The views and actions of American Evangelicals demands special attention, not only because of their number, but also because of their influence in one of the most environmentally noxious countries in the world. (shrink)

Augustine’s legacy, particularly his view of marriage as being primarily procreative and the sin of mutually desired non-procreative sex, has had a lasting impact on sexual theology and ethics in the Catholic Church. Yet indulging in the Augustinian legacy without reflection and regarding children as the end goal of marriage has led to the unchallenged assumption that children are needed in every marriage. I will examine the problematic concept of matrimony as a necessary producer of children through a variety of (...) ethical lenses – the environmental, the feminist, and the bioethical – and provide an alternative to the procreative norm of sexual expression. By focusing on the unitive aspect of marital love instead of the procreative, partners are liberated to realize their union as fully mature, regardless of biological generation thus addressing ethical concerns and providing a theological alternative to the procreative marriage. (shrink)