Preface Introduction Christopher J. Berry: Adam Smith: Outline of Life, Times, and Legacy Part One: Adam Smith: Heritage and Contemporaries 1: Nicholas Phillipson: Adam Smith: A Biographer's Reflections 2: Leonidas Montes: Newtonianism and Adam Smith 3: Dennis C. Rasmussen: Adam Smith and Rousseau: Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment 4: Christopher J. Berry: Adam Smith and Early Modern Thought Part Two: Adam Smith on Language, Art and Culture 5: Catherine Labio: Adam Smith's Aesthetics 6: James Chandler: Adam Smith as Critic 7: (...) Michael C. Amrozowicz: Adam Smith: History and Poetics 8: C. Jan Swearingen: Adam Smith on Language and Rhetoric: The Ethics of Style, Character, and Propriety Part Three: Adam Smith and Moral Philosophy 9: Christel Fricke: Adam Smith: The Sympathetic Process and the Origin and Function of Conscience 10: Duncan Kelly: Adam Smith and the Limits of Sympathy 11: Ryan Patrick Hanley: Adam Smith and Virtue 12: Eugene Heath: Adam Smith and Self-Interest Part Four: Adam Smith and Economics 13: Tony Aspromourgos: Adam Smith on Labour and Capital 14: Nerio Naldi: Adam Smith on Value and Prices 15: Hugh Rockoff: Adam Smith on Money, Banking, and the Price Level 16: Maria Pia Paganelli: Commercial Relations: from Adam Smith to Field Experiments Part Five: Adam Smith on History and Politics 17: Spiros Tegos: Adam Smith: Theorist of Corruption 18: David M. Levy & Sandra J. Peart: Adam Smith and the State: Language and Reform 19: Fabrizio Simon: Adam Smith and the Law 20: Edwin van de Haar: Adam Smith on Empire and International Relations Part Six: Adam Smith on Social Relations 21: Richard Boyd: Adam Smith, Civility, and Civil Society 22: Gavin Kennedy: Adam Smith on Religion 23: Samuel Fleischacker: Adam Smith and Equality 24: Maureen Harkin: Adam Smith and Women Part Seven; Adam Smith: Legacy and Influence 25: Spencer J. Pack: Adam Smith and Marx 26: Craig Smith: Adam Smith and the New Right 27: Tom Campbell: Adam Smith: Methods, Morals and Markets 28: Amartya Sen: The Contemporary Relevance of Adam Smith. (shrink)

Genomic research results and incidental findings with health implications for a research participant are of potential interest not only to the participant, but also to the participant's family. Yet investigators lack guidance on return of results to relatives, including after the participant's death. In this paper, a national working group offers consensus analysis and recommendations, including an ethical framework to guide investigators in managing this challenging issue, before and after the participant's death.

Returning genomic research results to family members raises complex questions. Genomic research on life-limiting conditions such as cancer, and research involving storage and reanalysis of data and specimens long into the future, makes these questions pressing. This author group, funded by an NIH grant, published consensus recommendations presenting a framework. This follow-up paper offers concrete guidance and tools for implementation. The group collected and analyzed relevant documents and guidance, including tools from the Clinical Sequencing Exploratory Research Consortium. The authors then (...) negotiated a consensus toolkit of processes and documents. That toolkit offers sample consent and notification documents plus decision flow-charts to address return of results to family of living and deceased participants, in adult and pediatric research. Core concerns are eliciting participant preferences on sharing results with family and on choice of a representative to make decisions about sharing after participant death. (shrink)

This book is a critical introduction to code and software that develops an understanding of its social and philosophical implications in the digital age. Written specifically for people interested in the subject from a non-technical background, the book provides a lively and interesting analysis of these new media forms.

David Berry and Michael Dieter: Introduction -- Florian Cramer: What is post-digital? -- Malcolm Levy and Christine Paul: Genealogies of the new aesthetic -- David Berry: The post-digital constellation -- Lukacs Mirocha: Communication models, aesthetics and ontology of the computational age revealed -- Katja Kwastek: How to be theorized: a f*** academic essay on the new aesthetic -- Daniel Pinkas: A hyperbolic new aesthetic -- Stamatia Portanova: The genius and the algorithm: reflections on the new aesthetic as a (...) computer's vision -- Lev Manovich and Alise Tifentale: Selfiecity: exploring photography and self-fashioning in social media -- David Golumbia: Judging like a machine -- Caroline bassett: Not now? : feminism, technology, postdigital -- Geoff Cox: Postscript on the problem of temporality in the post-digital -- Michael Dieterdark: Patterns: interface design, augmentation and crisis -- Sean Cubitt: Data visualisation and the subject of political aesthetics -- Mercedes Bunz: School will never end: on infantilization in digital environments: amplifying empowerment or propagating stupidity? -- Jussi Parikkathe : City and the city: London 2012 visual (un)commons -- Shintaro Miyazaki: Going beyond the visible: new aesthetic as an aesthetic of blindness? -- Thomas Apperley: Glitch sorting: minecraft, curation and the postdigital -- Marc Tuters: Through glass darkly: Google's gnostic governance -- Vito Campanelli: New aesthetic in the perspective of social photography -- Søren Bro Pold and Christian Ulrik Andersen: Aesthetics of the banal: "new aesthetics" in an era of diverted digital revolutions -- Wendy Chunnet: Works now: belated too early. (shrink)

Nous commençons à mesurer l’importance culturelle du numérique comme nouvelle idée unificatrice d’une université totalement redimensionnée. Au-delà d’une simple question de littéracie informatique ou informationnelle, les humanités numériques nous offrent l’occasion de développer une approche critique de l’écriture numérique conçue comme une forme d’alphabétisation et de littérature, de façon à développer une culture numérique partagée comme une nouvelle forme de Bildung. Tandis que les technologies numériques produisent de nouvelles formes de subjectivités computationnelles, les humanités numériques peuvent nous aider à aller (...) au-delà d’un rapport consumériste aux nouveaux gadgets et à casser ces boîtes noires qui, à la fois comme objets techniques et comme métaphores, absorbent aujourd’hui une si grande partie de notre attention. (shrink)

The authors conducted a baseline survey of baccalaureate and graduate degree health humanities programs in the United States and Canada. The object of the survey was to formally assess the current state of the field, to gauge what kind of resources individual programs are receiving, and to assess their self-identified needs to become or remain programmatically sustainable, including their views on the potential benefits of program accreditation. A 56-question baseline survey was sent to 111 institutions with baccalaureate programs and 20 (...) institutions with graduate programs. Respondents were asked about three areas: (1) program administration (managing unit, paid director, faculty lines, paid staff, funding sources); (2) educational program (curricular structure, CIP code usage, completion rates); and (3) views on accreditation for the field. A clear majority of respondents agreed that some form of accreditation or consultation service could address resource and sustainability issues. Overall, the survey responses to staffing, curricular structure, and support suggest the need for developing a sustainable infrastructure for health humanities. (shrink)

Like many other locals, I was unprepared for the global media's invasion of Roslin. The former mining village just outside the southern city limits is best known to most Edinburgh citizens for its tiny, ornately carved medieval chapel. Constructed for Crusading Knights and long associated with Freemasons, Rosslyn Chapel was made famous by Sir Walter Scott's LayoftheLastMinstrel. Nowadays it is visited, in coachloads, by devotees of less literary and historically more dubious esoterica, many of whom believe that the Holy Grail (...) and/or a version of the gospels are buried beneath it. In the local media, demands for the chapel's foundations to be excavated in search of secret clues to the meaning of life, death, and everything, have figured just as prominently as articles agonizing over scientific developments at the Roslin Institute, half a country mile away. (shrink)

The authors report and comment on student reactions to a clinical example of moral choice in the microallocation of scarce resources. Four patients require dialysis simultaneously, but only one kidney machine is available. What moral, as opposed to clinical, criteria are available to determine who should have priority?

A practical and thought provoking introduction to the most important ethical issues in medicine today. Over 700 entries, from short essays to brief definitions of key terms and concepts, have been contributed by leading clinicians and medical ethicists.

This manuscript describes a pilot study in ethics education employing a problem-based learning approach to the study of novel, complex, ethically fraught, unavoidably public, and unavoidably divisive policy problems, called “fractious problems,” in bioscience and biotechnology. Diverse graduate and professional students from four US institutions and disciplines spanning science, engineering, humanities, social science, law, and medicine analyzed fractious problems employing “navigational skills” tailored to the distinctive features of these problems. The students presented their results to policymakers, stakeholders, experts, and members (...) of the public. This approach may provide a model for educating future bioscientists and bioengineers so that they can meaningfully contribute to the social understanding and resolution of challenging policy problems generated by their work. (shrink)

This paper explores the specific questions raised for social epistemology encountered in code and software. It does so because these technologies increasingly make up an important part of our urban environment, and stretch across all aspects of our lives. The paper introduces and explores the way in which code and software become the conditions of possibility for human knowledge, crucially becoming computational epistemes, which we share with non-human but crucially knowledge-producing actors. As such, we need to take account of this (...) new computational world and think about how we live today in a highly mediated code-based world. Nonetheless, here I want to understand software epistemes as a broad concept related to the knowledge generated by both human and non-human actors. The aim is to explore changes that are made possible by the installation of code/software via computational devices, streams, clouds or networks. This is what Mitcham calls a ?new ecology of artifice?. By exploring two case studies, the paper attempts to materialise the practice of software epistemologies through a detailed analysis. This analysis is then drawn together with a notion of compactants to explore how studying tracking software and streams is a useful means of uncovering the agency of software and code for producing these new knowledges. (shrink)

Human genetic engineering may soon be possible. The gathering debate about this prospect already threatens to become mired in irresolvable disagreement. After surveying the scientific and technological developments that have brought us to this pass, _The Ethics of Genetic Engineering_ focuses on the ethical and policy debate, noting the deep divide that separates proponents and opponents. The book locates the source of this divide in differing framing assumptions: reductionist pluralist on one side, holist communitarian on the other. The book argues (...) that we must bridge this divide, drawing on the resources from both encampments, if we are to understand and cope with the distinctive problems posed by genetic engineering. These problems, termed "fractious problems," are novel, complex, ethically fraught, unavoidably of public concern, and unavoidably divisive. Berry examines three prominent ethical and political theories – utilitarianism, Kantianism, and virtue ethics – to consider their competency in bridging the divide and addressing these fractious problems. The book concludes that virtue ethics can best guide parental decision making and that a new policymaking approach sketched here, a "navigational approach," can best guide policymaking. These approaches enable us to gain a rich understanding of the problems posed and to craft resolutions adequate to their challenges. (shrink)

The use of networks as an explanatory framework is widespread in the literature that surrounds technology and information society. The three books reviewed here — The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler, Decoding Liberation: The Promise of Free and Open Source Software by Samir Chopra and Scott Dexter, and The Exploit: A Theory of Networks by Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker — all make a claim to the novelty that networks provide to their subject matter. By looking closely at the (...) way in which the network is utilized in each of the texts, this review attempts to question the extent to which a network analysis can ground a claim about a discontinuity in technology, society or economics. (shrink)

AIDSThe sudden appearance of a truly new disease is a wake-up call. A new global pandemic of an infectious agent, transmitted through sexual contact and blood, affecting alienated and/or deprived people and communities, infectious throughout, that causes a slowly progressive breakdown of defence against other infectious diseases, as well as causing dementia in some, and leads to a premature death, occurring in an era of extensive travel and rapid communication, is a veritable tocsin. These crude ingredients of AIDS as a (...) medical and social phenomenon, blended with the poignant personal histories revealed to clinical professionals, spiced — as if this were necessary — by the fear, the prejudice, the wild theorising and the voyeurism, have presented a substantial challenge to practical medical ethics.Familiar ethical debates have been reopened with new perspective and insight, others have been examined thoroughly for the first time. Building on the major developments in medical ethics over recent decades, AIDS has provided an opportunity, indeed a necessity, for its maturation. It continues to present new issues for debate, while those that were present from the outset continue to perplex us, as this issue of the journal should show. In teaching, AIDS offers a plethora of examples to illustrate most of the central tenets and tensions of medical ethics. As an exemplar, it has provided preparation and precedent for addressing some of the issues emerging from new challenges, such as screening for susceptibility to genetic disease.AJPBereavementThe word comes from the same germanic root as “to be robbed excessively”. Bereavement is an intensely personal and disorienting experience, to which people can react with denial, anger, guilt or depression, sometimes prolonged. In Western countries nowadays it is most commonly experienced in mid-life through the death of a parent, or in old age through that of a …. (shrink)

There are differences in caregivers’ literacy and health literacy levels that may affect their ability to consent to children participating in clinical research trials. This study aimed to explore the effectiveness, and caregivers’ understandings, of the process of informed consent that accompanied their child’s participation in a dental randomized control trial (RCT). Telephone interviews were conducted with a convenience sample of ten caregivers who each had a child participating in the RCT. Pre-tested closed and open-ended questions were used, and the (...) findings were produced from an inductive analysis of the latter and a descriptive analysis of the former. Participants had limited understanding of the purpose of the RCT and rated the readability of the consent form more highly than they rated their understanding of the research. All felt that informed consent was vital, but some caregivers had not read the consent documents. Some caregivers enrolled their child in the RCT because they trusted the researchers, and the majority wanted to improve dental care for children. The informed consent process was not always effective despite high readability of the informed consent documents. Researchers must consider the health literacy of the study group, and actively engaging with caregivers to achieve meaningful informed consent may be challenging. Future research could explore participants’ perspectives of informed consent in populations with low health literacy and assess whether an underlying expectation not to comprehend health-related information may be a barrier to informed consent. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:In Which Henry James Strikes BedrockRalph M. BerryIn Stanley Cavell’s account of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, everything we know depends upon what Wittgenstein calls grammatical criteria. These criteria are what we go on when judging that something counts as an instance of our concept of a “chair,” “ardent love,” “headache,” etc. For the arts, Wittgenstein’s focus on criteria leads in two, apparently opposite, directions. First, by making the activity of (...) judging constitutive for language and culture, Wittgenstein makes aesthetics (or what is traditionally called aesthetics) a model for all philosophical activity. Determining the basis on which a phenomenon will count as an instance of any concept turns out to involve capacities that formerly seemed relevant only in cases of aesthetic judgment.But Wittgenstein’s focus on criteria also works against this centrality of aesthetics, for it makes an exceptional or limiting case of the art contemporary with Wittgenstein. According to Cavell, what modernist art reveals is that judging what counts as a novel, painting, sculpture, etc., is no longer determined by grammatical criteria, or none to which we have access as we do our criteria for “chair,” “ardent love,” “headache,” etc. This does not mean, or not quite, that nobody knows any longer what a novel is. It comes closer to meaning that the experience of modern art is of finding out what we know, what our criteria for sculptures, paintings, novels are. And it makes modernism the disclosure of a new artistic necessity: not merely to create a new work, but to create a new basis for work, a new medium for fiction. 1In what follows my aim is to see how this necessity arises. My focus is on a particular period of Henry James’s career, roughly from his review of Eliot’s Middlemarch in 1873 to his essay on Maupassant in 1888, a [End Page 61] period that surrounds his now famous response to Walter Besant in “The Art of Fiction.” I do not insist that this moment in James’s career is a founding moment for modernist fiction. My only insistence is that, whatever conditions do give rise to modernism—either for a whole culture or for an individual—they look like this moment.INear the end of “The Art of Fiction,” Henry James takes issue with Walter Besant (and the critic Andrew Lang) over the use of the word “story.” 2 His stated provocations are, first, that Besant (in his lecture) has distinguished between “a part of a novel which is the story and part of it which... is not” (“AF,” p. 178) and, second, that Besant and Lang (in his review of Besant’s lecture) have made “adventure” a defining feature of any story (p. 179). James’s procedure in the first case is to give examples of “the only [sense of ‘story’] that I see” in which it can be spoken of as different from the novel as a whole. His procedure in the second case is to give examples of what constitutes an adventure “for me” (or what “I should say” is an adventure) and to confess that he is “utterly at a loss to see why” the plot of his own novella “An International Episode” does not count as an adventure if the other examples cited by Lang and Besant do. James gives no reasons why anyone ought to use the words “story” and “adventure” as he does. If we see senses of “story” other than the ones that James sees, if the fact that he is “utterly at a loss” makes no impression on us, or if we just do not care what Henry James considers adventurous, nothing he says seems designed to change our minds. His whole case rests on nothing stronger than the likelihood that, in the circumstances he describes, we too will call or judge or find what he calls/judges/finds “a story,” “an adventure,” “exciting,” etc. If we don’t, of course, we just don’t, but the surprise is how often we do. 3Contrary to what James maintains, the problem with Besant and Lang’s definition of “story” is not that it is “altogether arbitrary” (p. 179... (shrink)

S. Matthew Liao's paper (2005) exemplifies what I characterize as the third stage in the lifecycle of bioethics, “bioethics as co-PI,” in which bioethics asserts a role in directing the biomedical...

This commentary focuses on two moral values implied by the case study but not specified in the working party's conclusions, namely equitable treatment of the most vulnerable and the value of political government.

Medical ethics, principles, persons, and perspectives is discussed under three headings: History, Theory, and Practice. Under Theory, the author will say something about some different approaches to the study and discussion of ethical issues in medicine—especially those based on principles, persons, or perspectives. Under Practice, the author will discuss how one perspectives based approach, hermeneutics, might help in relation first to everyday ethical issues and then to public controversies. In that context some possible advantages of moving from controversy to conversation (...) will be explored; and that will then be illustrated with reference to a current controversy about the use of human embryos in stem cell therapy research. The paper begins with history, and it begins in the author’s home city of Edinburgh. (shrink)