Recent preclinical studies have shown the feasibility of specific variants of nuclear transfer to prevent mitochondrial DNA disorders. Nuclear transfer could be a valuable reproductive option for carriers of mitochondrial mutations. A clinical application of nuclear transfer, however, would entail germ-line modification, more specifically a germ-line modification of the mitochondrial genome. One of the most prominent objections against germ-line modification is the fear that it would become possible to alter ‘essential characteristics’ of a future person, thereby possibly violating the child's (...) right to an open future. As only the nuclear DNA would contain the ingredients for individual characteristics, modification of the mtDNA is often considered less controversial than modification of the nuclear DNA. This paper discusses the tenability of this dichotomy. After having clarified the concept of germ-line modification, it argues that modification of the mtDNA is not substantively different from modification of the nuclear DNA in terms of its effects on the identity of the future person. Subsequently the paper assesses how this conclusion affects the moral evaluation of nuclear transfer to prevent mtDNA disorders. It concludes that the moral acceptability of germ-line modification does not depend on whether it alters the identity of the future child—all germ-line modifications do—but on whether it safeguards the child's right to an open future. If nuclear transfer to prevent mtDNA disorders becomes safe and effective, then dismissing it because it involves germ-line modification is unjustified. (shrink)

© The Authors 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] Clark is usually among the first in philosophy to ride a new and important wave on the frontiers of cognitive science research. His Microcognition and Associative Engines chronicled connectionism, Being There explored embodied cognition, Natural Born Cyborgs deals with BCIs and environmental and technological scaffolding, and Supersizing the Mind is an extended argument for extended minds. Clark's latest, (...) showcases his new enthusiasm about predictive coding, a computational framework for understanding cognition that is generating more excitement and controversy across diverse areas of cognitive science than an offshore wind at Maverick’s does among the boarding elite....Clark is a master at taking complex ideas in cognitive science and conveying them in less technical fashion to a wide audience, doing so with panache and wit.... (shrink)

The South African government announced the much-discussed stay-at-home order between March 27 and April 30, 2020, during what was known as lockdown level 5, which meant that citizens were not allowed to leave their homes. The objective of this study is to assess the stay-at-home order against the global principles of the UDBHR. It is deducible that, in reference to the UDBHR, the government possessed the right to curtail individual liberty, thereby not infringing on Article 5 of the UDBHR and (...) therefore, in this context, passes the test of the UDBHR. However, it remains uncertain at present whether the limitation of freedom imposed by the South African stay-at-home order was successful in controlling the spread of COVID-19 and protecting individuals from harm. Initial investigations also indicate that individuals who are particularly vulnerable may not have received equitable treatment in accordance with the principle outlined in Article 10, therefore, it can be cautiously and modestly argued that the stay-at-home order does not withstand scrutiny when assessed against the UDBHR. Given the continued discussion about the efficacy of limiting freedom to control the spread of COVID-19, and the growing conviction that the advancement of justice is being called into question, the notion of least restriction ought to be considered seriously. Ten Have (2022) is correct in asserting that global bioethics should also seriously consider other principles beyond an almost exclusive focus on limiting individual freedom. The preliminary conclusion is that the potential implementation of the stay-at-home order in the future must be seriously reconsidered. (shrink)

It is important to recognize that the problem dealt with by Plato in the central part of the Sophist is one which arises from the use of certain Greek phrases, and has no necessary or direct connexion with metaphysics. We tend to obscure this fact if we use English terms such as ‘Being’, ‘Reality’, ‘Existence’, etc., in discussing the dialogue, and indeed make it almost impossible to understand what Plato is trying to do. It is the way in which die (...) Greek terms ỗν and μή ỗν and other such terms are used by the ‘sophists’ which gives rise to the problem. (shrink)

Discussion of the concept of evil in Indian philosophy.

How did bioethics manage to grow, flourish and ultimately do so well from a very unpromising birth in the 1970s? Many explanations have been advanced. Some ascribe the field9s growth to a puzzling, voluntary abnegation of moral authority by medicine to non-physicians. Some think bioethics survived by selling out to the biomedical establishment—public and private. This transaction involved bestowing moral approbation on all manner of biomedicine9s doings for a seat at a well-stocked funding table. Some see a sort of clever (...) intellectual bamboozlement at work wherein bioethicists pitched a moral elixir of objective expertise that the morally needy but unsophisticated in medicine and the biological sciences were eager to swallow. While each of these reasons has its defenders, I think the main reason that bioethics did well was that it did good. By using the media to move into the public arena, the field engaged the public imagination, provoked dialogue and debate, and contributed to policy changes that benefitted patients and healthcare providers. (shrink)

The Johns Hopkins-Fogarty African Bioethics Training Program (FABTP) has offered a fully-funded, one-year, non-degree training opportunity in research ethics to health professionals, ethics committee members, scholars, journalists and scientists from countries across sub-Saharan Africa. In the first 9 years of operation, 28 trainees from 13 African countries have trained with FABTP. Any capacity building investment requires periodic critical evaluation of the impact that training dollars produce. In this paper we describe and evaluate FABTP and the efforts of its trainees.Our data (...) show that since 2001, the 28 former FABTP trainees have authored or co-authored 105 new bioethics-related publications; were awarded 33 bioethics-related grants; played key roles on 78 bioethics-related research studies; and participated in 198 bioethics workshops or conferences. Over the past nine years, trainees have collectively taught 48 separate courses related to bioethics and have given 170 presentations on various topics in the field. Many former trainees have pursued and completed doctoral degrees in bioethics; some have become editorial board members for bioethics journals. Female trainees were, on average, less experienced at matriculation and produced fewer post-training outputs than their male counterparts. More comprehensive studies are needed to determine the relationships between age, sex, previous experience and training program outputs. (shrink)

The great number of contradictory statements which confront us when we examine the various explanations of Anaxagoras' philosophy make it more than usually important to decide what is to be admitted as first-hand evidence and what is not. I purpose, then, to begin by accepting the barest minimum of data, and I shall try to exclude any direct comments upon Anaxagoras' work by later writers. Sufficient justification for such a course may be found in the bewildering masses of confusion which (...) have gathered around his teaching. (shrink)

Randomised clinical trials provide the most valid means of establishing the efficacy of clinical therapeutics. Ethical standards dictate that patients and clinicians should not consent to randomisation unless there is uncertainty about whether any of the treatment options is superior to the others ("equipoise"). However, true equipoise is rarely present; most randomised trials, therefore, present challenging ethical dilemmas. Minimising the tension between science and ethics is an obligation of investigators and clinicians. This article briefly reviews several techniques for addressing this (...) issue and suggests that unbalanced randomisation, a technique rarely employed in current clinical trial practice, may be useful for enhancing the ethical design of human experimentation. (shrink)

The text is taken from Georg Luck's edition . I have also consulted P. Burman , S. G. Owen's editio maior , A. L. Wheeler's Loeb edition in the 2nd edition revised by G. P. Goold , and Georg Luck's commentary . I have also had a preview of J. B. Hall's forthcoming Teubner edition and I have used his apparatus, in which the traditional sigla for the principal manuscripts are retained.

This paper explores the use of an ethics framework based on the Public Health Code of Ethics to guide rationing decisions during a pandemic flu crisis involving a shortage of ventilators. While the law provides public health officials with authority to act, public health officials, as community leaders and health department managers, must address complex questions about how they should use their legal authority, how they can ethically justify a particular action, how they should engage community stakeholders in decision making, (...) and how the process of public justification should take place. Recognising the need for a tool that could help public health officials manage ethical tensions in practice, such as allocation of scarce resources, the Public Health Leadership Society led efforts to develop a Public Health Code of Ethics. The 12 Principles in the Code were written to express the general norms implicit in the practice of public health professionals. The Code offers no hierarchical weighting of the different principles and anticipates that weights and specification of the principles would take place in the context of each community through a process of engagement between public health officials and community stakeholders about specific cases. We describe how public health officials can use the Code to guide deliberation in helping communities prepare to address the tragic choices when allocating scarce ventilators in an influenza pandemic. (shrink)

This Reader explores the extent of Oriental influence on European thought, primarily in the period of the Enlightenment and the nineteenth-century period of doubt and scepticism that followed it. It is the first Reader to bring together in one place a series of specific historical and textual studies of Oriental influence upon European thinkers.

Oxford Scholarly Classics brings together a number of great academic works from the archives of Oxford University Press. Reissued in a uniform series design, they will enable libraries, scholars, and students to gain fresh access to some of the finest scholarship of the last century.

jild-i 1. Āzādī va marzʹhāyash -- jild-i 2. Istiqlāl (farhangī).

The essential purpose of the present article is to put forward a new theory concerning the last scene of the Septem, 1005–78. The problem of the play's ending as a whole has been very thoroughly discussed by P. Nicolaus, Die Frage nach der Echtheit der Schlussszene von Aischylos' Sieben gegen Theben ; since I have no wish to duplicate Nicolaus's work I shall deal only very briefly with those aspects of the problem on which I find myself in agreement with (...) him and with other scholars. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Imagining Karma, Ethical Transformation in Amerindian, Buddhist, and Greek RebirthA. L. HermanImagining Karma, Ethical Transformation in Amerindian, Buddhist, and Greek Rebirth. By Gananath Obeyesekere. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. 448 pp.Gananath Obeyesekere, professor emeritus of anthropology at Princeton University, is probably one of the world's greatest living anthropologists. The proof of that assertion lies in this his latest work on comparative anthropology, a study of the concept (...) and practice of rebirth—"reincarnation" as he calls it—from ancient Greece and India to modern West Africa, Melanesia, and North America. In what follows let me briefly set forth what I understand his central thesis to be, the evidence for it, and the conclusions to be drawn from it. I will end with two very modest problems connected with this altogether intriguing and brilliant investigation into the doctrine of rebirth.As a modified structural anthropologist, Gananath Obeyesekere rejects the rationalist model structuralism of Claude Levi-Strauss. He follows instead the lead of two of his empiricist predecessors, Max Weber and Fernand Braudel, pointing out that structures, types, or models "are constructions of scholars, not universals waiting to be discovered" (p. 351). Consequently, as this book aptly proves, Obeyesekere's own "imagined" models are based on parole data following the actual language of the cultures being studied.Obeyesekere thus begins his book with an elementary rebirth structure based on such parole. He refers to this primitive, first structure as "rebirth eschatology," which entails the rebirth of a deceased's soul into the body of a newborn relative of the deceased but without any determining ethical component as found in the more sophisticated and complex "karmic eschatologies." Such ethically neutral kin group rebirths are found among certain small-scale societies in West Africa, the Trobriand Islands, the Northwest American coast tribes, and the Inuits (Eskimos). Obeyesekere [End Page 303] draws extensively on field studies of these groups to bolster his conclusions about them. This simple rebirth eschatology is non-Indic in origin, Obeyesekere claims, since no evidence of influences have been found between these practitioners of rebirth eschatology and work relating to the Indic religions (Hinduism and Buddhism). The entry of the soul into postdeath life, either in this world or the world of the ancestors, depends not at all, consequently, on one's this-worldly behavior such that "morality does not affect the fate of the soul after death" (p. 74).Obeyesekere turns next to the "transformation" of this rebirth eschatology. It occurs with the introduction of the concept of ethicization, "the processes whereby morally right or wrong action becomes a religiously right or wrong action that in turn affects a person's destiny after death" (p. 75). It is Obeyesekere's contention that when ethicization is systematically introduced into any rebirth eschatology the latter must logically transform itself into a so-called "karmic eschatology." In other words, this second topological model or conceptual structure, karmic eschatology, the new ethicized rebirth eschatology, says that the otherworld for the dead is not simply a way station for departed souls waiting to be reborn, but rather that otherworld is now a place of retribution and punishment. Kinship affiliation alone no longer determines who goes where after death but moral action does. My own guess is that rebirth eschatology was introduced to answer the question of why the grandchild resembles the deceased grandparent. Karmic eschatology, on the other hand, was probably introduced to solve a more complex and sophisticated puzzle: Why is it, if there really is justice in the universe, that the wicked never get appropriately punished and the good never get sufficiently rewarded? At this stage of transformation, the law of karma, or some other principle of universal justice, now says that everyone gets what's coming to them, either in this life or the next, and that rebirth is necessary to make that principle of justice workable.1 In arguing that "rebirth cannot be divorced from ethics; it looks as if it is generated from ethics" (p. 82), Obeyesekere would seem to concur that karmic eschatology was introduced to answer the question: Why do the wicked seem to prosper and the good appear to suffer?Following... (shrink)

This is, in effect, an extended footnote to CQ 34 , 271. There, having occasion to discuss the ‘Aristophanic’ synopsis of Aeschylus' Eumenides, I expressed doubt about the value of such synopses in general; and I must now seek to justify this aspersion. I am not claiming any expertise in the study of Hellenistic scholarship, and shall largely be leaving it to others to decide what conclusion to draw from the facts I am pointing out; but my note will have (...) served its purpose if it stimulates discussion. (shrink)