As theorists, developers, and practitioners of the anticipatory governance of emerging technologies, we applaud Ankeny et al.’s...

Background Forward-looking, democratically oriented governance is needed to ensure that human genome editing serves rather than undercuts public values. Scientific, policy, and ethics communities have recognized this necessity but have demonstrated limited understanding of how to fulfill it. The field of bioethics has long attempted to grapple with the unintended consequences of emerging technologies, but too often such foresight has lacked adequate scientific grounding, overemphasized regulation to the exclusion of examining underlying values, and failed to adequately engage the public. Methods (...) This research investigates the application of scenario planning, a tool developed in the high-stakes, uncertainty-ridden world of corporate strategy, for the equally high-stakes and uncertain world of the governance of emerging technologies. The scenario planning methodology is non-predictive, looking instead at a spread of plausible futures which diverge in their implications for different communities’ needs, cares, and desires. Results In this article we share how the scenario development process can further understandings of the complex and dynamic systems which generate and shape new biomedical technologies and provide opportunities to re-examine and re-think questions of governance, ethics and values. We detail the results of a year-long scenario planning study that engaged experts from the biological sciences, bioethics, social sciences, law, policy, private industry, and civic organizations to articulate alternative futures of human genome editing. Conclusions Through sharing and critiquing our methodological approach and results of this study, we advance understandings of anticipatory methods deployed in bioethics, demonstrating how this approach provides unique insights and helps to derive better research questions and policy strategies. (shrink)

This essay describes and critically evaluates a co-operative educational program to train Ugandan health care workers in bioethics. It describes one bottom-up effort, a week-long intensive workshop in bioethics provided by the authors to health care professionals in a developing country—Uganda. We will describe the background and circumstances that led to the organization of the workshop, and review its planning, design, curriculum, and outcome. We will focus especially on measures taken to make the workshop relevant for the audience of Ugandan (...) professionals, and describe lessons learned after two presentations of the workshop. Finally, we will discuss the strengths and weaknesses of such a format, and its potential value in raising bioethical expertise in developing countries. (shrink)

Though there are good arguments against physician participation in executions, physicians should be allowed to make their own decisions about whether they will participate, and professional medical organizations should not flatly destroy the careers of those who do.

Analisar os brinquedos em sua seriedade, considerando-os como "manifestações concretas de dominação social e cultural"(p.9), é a proposta do sociólogo Paulo de Salles Oliveira, em Brinquedo e indústria cultural. O autor, que já havia publicado, anteriormente, Brinquedos artesanais e expressividade cultural (SESC, 1982), e O que é brinquedo (Brasiliense, 1984), traz nesse novo trabalho, originalmente sua dissertação de mestrado em Ciências Sociais (PUC-SP), outra contribuição importante a esse assunto tão significativo, mas pouco explorado entre nós. O texto final é resultado (...) de pesquisa bibliográfica interpretado com precisão, e de trabalho de campo, nem sempre explicitado, que o autor classifica de "oculto"(p.12), englobando entrevistas com crianças, pais, educadores, industriais e comerciantes da área. A análise não é efetuada de maneira abstrata, situando-se uno contexto histórico da sociedade brasileira atuar, reconhecendo "que seu substrato se aloja no modo de produção capitalista, tal qual se estabelece em um país dependente, econômica, social, política e culturalmente" (p.33). [...] Palavras-chave: Indústria Cultural; Brinquedos; Brasil; Social. (shrink)

Rastreamos doctrinas unamunianas del Otro en el Edipo, rey de Sólbeles y en el Sofista platónico, edípico hacia el «padre» Parménides al filosofar sobre lo otro (té `ttapov). Examinamos el platonismo del Otro en Del setííimie,zío trágico, en las acotaciones de Unamuno a la tragedia de Sófocles y en su propio drama El Otro.

Moral distress has been covered extensively in the nursing literature and increasingly in the literature of other health professions. Cases that cause nurses’ moral distress that are mentioned most frequently are those concerned with prolonging the dying process. Given the standard of aggressive treatment that is typical in intensive care units (ICUs), much of the existing moral distress research focuses on the experiences of critical care nurses. However, moral distress does not automatically occur in all end-of-life circumstances, nor does every (...) critical care nurse suffer its damaging effects. What are the practices of these nurses? What specifically do they do to navigate around or through the distressing situations? The nursing literature is lacking an answer to these questions. This article reports a study that used narrative analysis to explore the reported practices of experienced critical care nurses who are skilled at and comfortable working with families and physicians regarding the withdrawal of aggressive treatment. A major finding was that these nurses did not report experiencing the dam-Moral Agency, Moral Imagination, and Moral Community: Antidotes to Moral Distress Terri Traudt, Joan Liaschenko, and Cynthia Peden-McAlpine Terri Traudt, MBC, MA, is a Communications Consultant specializing in bioethics at the Center for Bioethics at the University of Minnesota, in Minneapolis. [email protected] Joan Liaschenko, PhD, RN, FAAN, is a Professor at the Center for Bioethics and Nursing at the University of Minnesota. Cynthia Peden-McAlpine, PhD, ACNS, BC, is an Associate Professor in the School of Nursing at the University of Minnesota. © 2016 by The Journal of Clinical Ethics. All rights reserved. aging effects of moral distress as described in the nursing literature. The verbal communication and stated practices relevant to this finding are organized under three major themes: (1) moral agency, (2) moral imagination, and (3) moral community. Further, a total of eight subthemes are identified. The practices that constitute these themes and subthemes are further detailed and discussed in this article. Understanding these practices can help mitigate critical care nurses’ moral distress. (shrink)

: Bioethical discussion of justice in health care has been much enlivened in recent years by new developments in the theory of rationing and by the emergence of a strong communitarian voice. Unfortunately, these developments have not enjoyed much in the way of close engagement with feminist-inspired reflections on power, privilege, and justice. I hope here to promote interchange between "mainstream" treatments of justice in health care and feminist thought.

Israel Scheffler and others have had trouble accepting such drastic theses in my work as that worlds, even old ones, are made by right versions, even new ones, and that two conflicting versions may both be right. But further explication shows how such theses have advantages over the more usual common-sense alternatives.

In the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights a quite large number of things are said to be ‘human rights’ and though in that Declaration the term ‘inalienable’ is not used to describe the rights in question it has been so used by commentators—at least with respect to some of the rights enumerated. I shall forgo asking the prior question as to whether any such thing as a human right exists and ask simply whether any such thing as an (...) inalienable right exists. My intention will be to show that it does not. (shrink)

A r anderson and n d belnap, Jr., Maintained in their 1962 article, "the pure calculus of entailment," that necessary propositions can be entailed only by necessary propositions, And not by contingent ones. Against this r w ashby offered an apparently conclusive counterexample in "entailment and modality" (1963). In support of anderson and belnap, The author of the present paper develops a definition of entailment and argues that contingent propositions never entail necessary ones. However, Psychological factors may intervene in our (...) logical perceptions to produce an appearance or illusion of entailment between a contingent and a necessary proposition. (staff). (shrink)

Kenneth Teitelbaum’s new book, Critical Issues in Democratic Schooling: Curriculum, Teaching, and Socio-Political Realities (2020), explores the myriad socio-political issues undergirding the work...

In 1924The Classical Quarterlypublished a note by Alexander Haggerty Krappe titled ‘Euripides’Alcmaeonand the Apollonius Romance’. Drawing attention to the obscure origins of the ancient Greek and Roman novels in general and pointing out the scholarly agreement on the role love plays in both the ancient novels and Euripidean tragedy, Krappe observed that ‘Euripides was drawn upon for whole episodes in order to enrich the plot of the [ancient] novel’. Krappe then goes on in his note to attribute the plot of (...) Euripides' lostAlcmaeonas a source of inspiration for one of the major episodes of theHistoria Apollonii Regis Tyri. Today, this reliance of the ancient novels on Euripides is generally recognized, but, curiously, Krappe, while identifying an episode from the lostAlcmaeon, failed to identify a clear plot-borrowing from another extant Euripidean play, theAlcestis. (shrink)

The limited objectives of this paper are to show that A), what seem to be merely superficial incoherencies in Rorty’s preferred pragmatism [according to which, “the only constraints on inquiry are conversational ones”] really are not but B), along with every assertion of Rorty’s defining his system and its consequences, belie an intrinsic incoherency resulting from that system’s intended conflation of “correspondence truth” and “pragmatic truth.” Then C), I shall argue that should we ask of a philosophy that denies to (...) its own statements of purported fact correspondence truth what use it is, the answer has to be, “Worse than no use at all”---at least, if like Rorty’s preferred pragmatism it demonstrably concludes in the conceptual annihilation of all inquiry. (shrink)