Moral and social arguments weigh heavily against performing medical procedures solely for purposes of sex selection. The medical profession has a responsibility to abandon its posture of ethical neutrality and take a firm stand now against sex selection.

The ArgumentA survey of 2901 genetics professionals in 36 nations suggests that eugenic thought underlies their perceptions of the goals of genetics and that directiveness in counseling after prenatal diagnosis leads to individual decisions based on pessimistically biaed information, especially in developing nations of Asia and Eastern Europe. The “non-directive counseling” found in English-speaking nations is an aberration from the rest of the world. Most geneticists, except in China, rejected government involvement in premarital testing or sterilization, but most also held (...) a pessimistic view of persons with genetic disabilities. Individual, but not state-coerced, eugenics survives in much modern genetic practice. (shrink)

We surveyed the approaches of 661 geneticists in 18 nations to 14 clinical cases and asked them to give their ethical reasons for choosing these approaches. Patient autonomy was the dominant value in clinical decision-making, with 59% of responses, followed by non-maleficence (20%), beneficence (11%) and justice (5%). In all, 39% described the consequences of their actions, 26% mentioned conflicts of interest between different parties and 72% placed patient welfare above the welfare of others. The U.S., Canada, Sweden, and U.K. (...) led in responses favoring autonomy. There were substantial international differences in moral reasoning. Gender differences in responses reflected women's greater attention to relationships and supported feminist ethical theories. (shrink)

The bibliography covers the years from january 1916 through february 1976. it lists, in philosophy, 14 books written or co-authored by charles hartshorne, six peirce volumes edited, with paul weiss, and 358 papers published in journals (approximately 100 different journals), symposia, anthologies, and "festschriften", including approximately 100 book reviews. in ornithology it includes one book and 12 papers published in ten different journals. the total number of items is 384.

Contributors to this volume demonstrate how the ethics of care factors into a variety of social policies and institutions, and can indeed be useful in thinking about a number of different social problems. Divided into two sections, the first looks at care as a model for an evaluative framework that rethinks social institutions, liberal society, and citizenship at a basic conceptual level. The second explores care values in the context of specific social practices or settings, as a framework that should (...) guide thinking. (shrink)

ExcerptMany people assume that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 was an exclusively or primarily Western project, imposed on the rest of the world by the European and American powers that emerged victorious from World War II. Harvard Law professor Mary Ann Glendon’s 2001 book, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, suggests otherwise. It was not the great powers but small powers that pushed hardest for a declaration of rights. And it (...) was often great powers—and one must acknowledge, great powers dominated by people of European ancestry—that did not like the idea of being pushed around by politically and economically weaker inhabitants of the Global South, who were just beginning to emerge from centuries of Western colonialism and other forms of oppression.1. (shrink)

Assuming that future experiments confirm Aspect's discovery of nonlocal interactions between quantum pairs of correlated particles, we analyze the constraints imposed by the EPR reasoning on the said interactions. It is then shown that the nonlocal relativistic quantum potential approach plainly satisfies the Einstein causality criteria as well as the energy-momentum conservation in individual microprocesses. Furthermore, this approach bypasses a new causal paradox for timelike separated EPR measurements deduced by Sutherland in the frame of an approach by means of space-time (...) zigzags with advanced potentials. It is finally demonstrated that this inherent quantum causal direct interaction establishes permanent EPR correlations which are always restricted to spacelike separations and are instantaneous only in the center-of-mass rest frame of the two-particle system. (shrink)

How do researchers and/or practitioners know when change efforts are bringing about significant transformation? Here we draw on a theory of change put forward by the feminist economic geographers, Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson. Proposing “a postcapitalist politics” that builds on possibility rather than probability, they direct theoretical attention and community engaged action research to recognizing and supporting non-capitalist economic practices and sensibilities that already exist despite the dominance of capitalism that keeps them hidden and ignored and to understanding the (...) “reluctant subject” of change efforts. We enter into a conversation with their theory of change by inferring criteria for assessing significance and using those criteria in dialogue with two social movements we have researched: the feminist movement in Bogotá in the 1970s and 1980s and the contemporary local food movement in North Carolina. Lessons from these movements, in turn, help refine the criteria. Gibson-Graham are unusual – and consequently resonant with cultural-historical activity theory and related social practice theories of identity – in that they bring into dialogue theorists of the political and those interested in embodiment and the micro-politics of everyday life enabling both to better understand and support conditions for positive social and economic transformation. (shrink)

The lexicographic power ΔΓ of chains Δ and Γ is, roughly, the Cartesian power Πγ∈Γ Δ, totally ordered lexicographically from the left. Here the focus is on certain powers in which either Δ = R or Γ = R, with emphasis on when two such powers are isomorphic and on when ΔΓ is 2-homogeneous. The main results are: (1) For a countably infinite ordinal α, Rα* +α ≃ Rα. (2) RR ≄ RQ. (3) For Δ a countable ordinal ≥ 2. (...) ΔR, with its smallest element deleted, is 2-homogeneous. (shrink)