Those—other social scientists as well as laymen—who have read recent studies of national character and culture by anthropologists, while not having had experience in this field themselves, often seem to believe that the results which such anthropological investigators obtain are interesting, but that the methods used were intuitional, magical, or just invisible. The status of the work is cast in doubt, as falling short of an ideal that scientific description and analysis must be reproducible by any observer to whom a (...) set of techniques of the discipline has been communicated. This paper attempts to show why and how such a belief is erroneous, and then to describe some of the fundamentals of method in current cultural anthropology as used in research and as related to the general structure of scientific method today. (shrink)

Before commenting on the papers from a recent interdisciplinary gathering of scholars from China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, a case is made for regional academia conversations today, because international conferences, especially in the humanities and social sciences, are still dominated by “Western” traditions, discourse, and protocols. After touching on the relative stability or variability of phenomena and procedures in the natural sciences, humanities, and social sciences, political and cultural questions are considered along with some of the ongoing consequences of the (...) East Asian adoption of the European model of the modern research university. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

At home and abroad, Kagawa Toyohiko was probably the best-known Japanese Christian evangelist, social reformer, writer, and public intellectual of the twentieth century, nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature twice and the Nobel Peace Prize three times. Appealing to the masses with little knowledge of Christian faith, Kagawa believed that a positive, religio-aesthetic interpretation of nature and science was a key missiological concern in Japan. He reasoned that a faith rooted in the kenotic movement of incarnation and self-giving must (...) strongly support the scientific quest. A voracious reader of science and especially biology, he argues for “directionality,” or what he calls “initial purpose” in the long, painful, cosmic journey from matter to life to mind. Through an antireductionistic, a posteriori methodological pluralism that sought to “see all things whole,” this “scientific mystic” employed Christian, Buddhist, Neo-Confucian, personalist, and vitalist ideas to envision complementary roles for science and religion in modern society. (shrink)

In recent years, a number of articles have appeared in the nursing literature proposing that the branch of modern physics known as quantum theory offers insights that may be useful in nursing practice and healthcare management. This paper critiques this literature in the light of key concepts in quantum theory. The conclusion is that quantum theory has been misunderstood and misapplied within the nursing journals. Quantum theory is essentially mathematical and is based on quantitative experimentation. To successfully apply this theory (...) to nursing practice, nurses will have to equip themselves with the necessary mathematical and experimental skills. (shrink)

In the face of the anthropogenic threats to the singular planetary habitat we share with other human beings and non-human species, humanities scholars feel a renewed sense of urgency 1) to acknowledge the ways our species has funded particular histories of environmental exploitation, alienation, and collapse, 2) to unpack inherited assumptions that impact our views of nature and interspecies relations, and 3) to suggest ways of thinking and acting that seek to repair the damage and promote mutual flourishing for all (...) of earth inhabitants. This volume brings together scholars in philosophy, theology, and religion who take up this urgent ethical task from a broad range of perspectives and locations. (shrink)

This volume contains thirteen papers that were presented at the 2017 Annual Meeting of the Canadian Society for History and Philosophy of Mathematics/Société canadienne d’histoire et de philosophie des mathématiques, which was held at Ryerson University in Toronto. It showcases rigorously reviewed modern scholarship on an interesting variety of topics in the history and philosophy of mathematics from Ancient Greece to the twentieth century. A series of chapters all set in the eighteenth century consider topics such as John Marsh’s (...) techniques for the computation of decimal fractions, Euler’s efforts to compute the surface area of scalene cones, a little-known work by John Playfair on the practical aspects of mathematics, and Monge’s use of descriptive geometry. After a brief stop in the nineteenth century to consider the culture of research mathematics in 1860s Prussia, the book moves into the twentieth century with an examination of the historical context within which the Axiom of Choice was developed and a paper discussing Anatoly Vlasov’s adaptation of the Boltzmann equation to ionized gases. The remaining chapters deal with the philosophy of twentieth-century mathematics through topics such as an historically informed discussion of finitism and its limits; a reexamination of Mary Leng’s defenses of mathematical fictionalism through an alternative, anti-realist approach to mathematics; and a look at the reasons that mathematicians select specific problems to pursue. Written by leading scholars in the field, these papers are accessible to not only mathematicians and students of the history and philosophy of mathematics, but also anyone with a general interest in mathematics. (shrink)

Review of: War No More: Three Centuries of American Antiwar and Peace Writing. Edited by Lawrence Rosenwald. Library Classics of the United States, 2016. For those offering a course in the peace history of America, this is your text. From the title you may correctly surmise that there is content by or about those living in colonial America, but the very first offering of this edited magisterial compilation of primary documents is a fragment from the legendary pre-colonial peacemaker Dekanawideh, circa (...) 1450, the man credited with having united the five warring Iroquois tribes. From that, editor Lawrence Rosenwald then moves to John Woolman, colonial pacifist Quaker, and then to another Quaker, this one straddling the colonial-to-United States transition, Warner Mifflin. Mifflin paid serious costs for his abolitionist and antiwar stance; the actual words of someone clearly far ahead of his time are instructive. (shrink)

In the September-October 2001 issue of the Hastings Center Report, editor Gregory Kaebnick encouraged bioethicists to turn their attention toward “easily overlooked, relatively little-talked-about societal topics” such as race. In 2000 the president of the American Society for Bioethics had called for a more socially conscious bioethics. Race was risky territory, Kaebnick pointed out, but this challenge did not justify avoidance. Over the next fifteen years, the response to this editor's invitation to examine the racial dimensions of medicine in (...) the Report was limited both in quantity and in terms of the range of topics covered. All told, the bioethics community has not responded to the editor's call for bioethicists to engage with the racial dimension of medicine, and the Report has not really come through on the tacit commitment made in 2001. The lack of interest in race matters evidenced in the Report as well as the American Journal of Bioethics has also prevailed in medical humanities journals, whose few pieces on race have tended to remove race relations from our current realities in two ways: some articles locate medical racism in the American past or in colonial Africa, while others analyze the medical disorders of fictional characters. Bioethicists have not embraced the opportunity to create a sociologically and historically informed bioethics that might be applied to the lives of black Americans and their unending health crisis. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning. By Albert R. Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin.

Recent reports of “switched” embryos and gametes place already fragile couples in unfortunate circumstances, raise vexing questions regarding such fundamental concepts as parenthood and reproduction, and cast a shadow on the integrity of the infertility industry.

In this issue of the Hastings Center Report, Jonathan Kimmelman and Alex London argue that in assessing the success of clinical translation, it is narrow‐minded to focus only on how many new drugs get licensed and how quickly they achieve licensure. Kimmelman and London show that clinical translation should be judged on its ability to generate as comprehensive an intervention ensemble as possible for the tested interventions. I would like to extend Kimmelman and London's position in two ways. First, (...) I would argue that in the current environment, failures should be seen not just as acceptable, but probably as the most useful outcomes that translational research efforts can offer. Second, an intervention ensemble probably cannot be generated with information only about the drug or drugs produced by a single company. For most conditions and diseases, there are already a large number of other interventions whose use is supported or contradicted by various levels of evidence. (shrink)

The scarcity of vital organs has prompted several calls to either modify the dead donor rule or interpret it more broadly. Given its symbolic importance, however, the rule should be changed only cautiously.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Clinical Bioethics at NIH:History and A New VisionJohn C. Fletcher (bio)On July 3, 1995, Dr. John I. Gallin, Director of the Magnuson Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), convened a one-day "Conference on the Future of Clinical Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health Intramural Program." Conferees included NIH officials and a panel of consultants from bioethics programs around the nation.1 The subject was the (...) future of NIH's intramural bioethics program and specifically a vision of a new multi-component program, presented by Dr. Gallin, the first speaker. Dr. Harold Varmus, Director of NIH, was there to assure his support for Dr. Gallin's vision. This author, honored to be second speaker, was invited to sketch a brief history of bioethics at NIH. The present article reviews some of this history and then reports on Dr. Gallin's proposal, points of consensus among speakers and conferees, and the search for a Chief of the Clinical Bioethics Program.History of Bioethics at NIHIt is often said that NIH is a well-kept secret as the nation's leading biomedical research facility. Also, few people know that NIH has a long history in bioethics. Some key events in that history are shown in Figure 1, beginning with two that occurred prior to the birth of bioethics. NIH made an early policy response to protect human subjects of research and to find acceptable limits for scientific freedom. The Clinical Center (CC), a 550-bed research hospital, opened in 1953. A subcommittee of the Medical Board, the Clinical Research Committee (CRC), was formed for prior group review of all studies with normal volunteers. The traditional practice was for researchers themselves to decide when studies would begin, which subjects to recruit, and whether informed consent would be sought. The CRC intervention bit into this tradition. In addition, patient studies that posed significant risks or departed widely from medical practice were reviewed by referral from the Clinical Directors of the various Institutes. Was this CRC an early institutional review [End Page 355] board (IRB)? As a guest researcher, I was permitted to observe the CRCs meetings between 1966 and 1969. It functioned much like an IRB but had no community or non-scientist members. Other IRB-like review groups undoubtedly existed prior to the CRC. Robert Levine (personal communication, September 7, 1995) recalls that Beth Israel Hospital in Boston had one in 1938. Historical research is clearly needed on the earliest forms of research review.Table 1. Bioethics at NIHEventYearClinical Research Committee1953Surgeon-General's PPO #1291966NIGMS funds Hastings Genetics Group1973OPRR's Mission1974NLM's grant to KennedyInstitute for Bibliography of Bioethics1974Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee1974STEP Series Bioethics Speakers1975Pre-IRBs at the CC1975-76Assistant for Bioethics to Director, CC1977RAC-Human Gene Therapy Subcommittee1983Lipsett Proposal (ICD)1983Liaison Group, CC1983Bioethics Program, CC1985Durable Power of Attorney for Researchwith Incapacitated Subjects1985-86NLM funds National Reference Centerfor Bioethics Literature1985National Institute for Nursing Research1986Bioethics Post-Doctoral Fellows Program1989ELSI Program1989Bioethicists on CC-IRBs1989CC-Ethics Committee1990Office of Human Subjects Research1992 [End Page 356]Between 1963 and 1967, the media exposed instances of ethically troubling research, and Beecher (1966) and Pappworth (1967) published sharp criticisms of the weak state of research ethics. In 1966, Surgeon-General William Stewart and NIH Director James Shannon issued a policy requiring local group review of all research involving human subjects before making an application for NIH peer review (Surgeon General 1966). The policy was the first in any nation to mandate ethics committees for clinical research. However, it did not apply to the NIH intramural program until Congress passed the National Research Act in 1974 (Public Law 93-348; 202, 88 Stat. 342, 1974). This lag permitted NIH intramural investigators the luxury of feeling above the norms imposed on ordinary mortals and guaranteed more resistance to the inevitable change to come. Resistance to change marked the intramural program from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s... (shrink)

Advance directives such as living wills are attractive in that they give us a sense of control over our futures. But they also tend to obscure conflicts between a patient's competent wishes and later, incompetent interests. They allow caregivers to avoid evaluating quality of life in assessing the best interests of incompetent patients.

Ethical and legal traditions recognize prenatal duties to avoid harm to offspring. However, applying the harm principle to pregnancy requires a careful balancing of a baby's welfare with a pregnant woman's interest in liberty and bodily integrity. In the case of maternal PKU the mother can prevent harm to her baby by returning to the admittedly unpleasant diet that prevented her from being retarded. Informing, counseling, and access to medical care should be the primary policy. Seizures and forced treatment cannot (...) be justified in this case, and only rarely in other situations. (shrink)

Hastings Center Report, Volume 52, Issue 2, Page 14-20, March‐April 2022.

A couple may have a child to provide stem cells for another child. They may also use preimplantation testing—even, troubling though it is, prenatal testing and selective abortion—to ensure a close tissue match.

Among various kinds of disclosures typically required in research as well as in clinical scenarios, risk information figures prominently. A key question is, what kinds of risk information would the reasonable person want to know? I will argue, however, that the reasonable person construct is and always has been incapable of settling this very question. After parsing the nebulous if not “contentless” character of the reasonable person, I will explain how Western courts have actually adjudicated cases of “negligent nondisclosure,” that (...) is, cases in which patient‐plaintiffs allege that their informed consent rights were violated by the failure of their health providers to inform them of reasonably foreseeable risks that subsequently materialized. To support my argument, I will scrutinize the landmark decision by the United Kingdom's Supreme Court in Montgomery v. Lanarkshire Health Board and, in particular, Justice Brenda Hale's concurrence. (shrink)

The relation between respect for family and reproductive choice and use of IVF technology is in dispute in recent legal cases on the disposition of frozen embryos. Couples in IVF programs should be encouraged to stipulate in advance binding instructions regarding the disposition of such embryos.

The Surfactant, Positive Pressure, and Oxygenation Randomized Trial (SUPPORT) has been the focal point of many different criticisms regarding the ethics of the study ever since publication of the trial's findings in 2010 and 2012. In this article, we focus on a concern that the technical design and implementation details of the study were ethically flawed. While the federal Office Human Research Protections focused on the consent form, rather than on the study design and implementation, OHRP's critiques of the consent (...) form reveal views about the study design and implementation that we believe are fundamentally flawed. These criticisms about the design and implementation of SUPPORT, if generalized, become relevant concerns about these aspects of many comparative effectiveness research studies.Our analytical approach will be to use SUPPORT as a prime example of comparative effectiveness research and show why it challenges some prevailing assumptions about the riskiness of research. We will address five aspects of the study design and implementation: 1) randomization, 2) treatment by protocol, 3) choice of endpoints, 4) lack of a “standard care” control group, and 5) the use of altered oximeters. Examining these aspects will allow us to answer two specific central questions. The first is a methodological question with ethical implications: was the study designed in such a way as to answer the primary study question? The second question is whether the study design added or decreased risk to the babies enrolled in the study compared to babies who were not in the study. (shrink)

In this issue of the Hastings Center Report, Mélanie Terrasse, Moti Gorin, and Dominic Sisti, urge ethicists to devote scholarly attention to a wave of troubling artificial intelligence applications affecting health consumers’ rights and the quality of their care. I very much agree. We already have neuroethicists, business ethicists, and genetics ethicists; AI‐related systems in health care present more than enough warrant to herald the appearance of a new ethics specialist—the “intel‐ethicist,” let’s say. Nonetheless, Terrasse and colleagues may have (...) exaggerated some of the potential moral problems of AI. Examining only social media and e‐health programs, the authors produce an impressive array of questions to consider, but I will argue that two of them are not nearly as worrisome as might be supposed. (shrink)

The Child Abuse Amendments of 1984 established the norms for treating disabled newborns, but they did not address the treatment of premature babies. Parents and physicians need a framework for decisionmaking. A decision handed down recently by the Texas Supreme Court is a step forward.

In most Western European countries and North America, strategies to contain the spread of AIDS have emphasized civil liberties. This may be due more to the epidemiology of the disease than to moral progress.

There is a moment in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks that brought tears to my eyes. Henrietta Lacks is the woman whose cervical tumor gave rise to a cell line—brand named HeLa—that became quite useful in many important lines of biomedical research. When the book’s author, Rebecca Skloot, tracks down Lacks’s descendents in a Baltimore ghetto, they are not doing well. Zakariyya, the youngest of her children, has had the toughest life. He was born after his mother’s cancer was (...) already widespread, and she died shortly after his birth. He has drifted in and out of the military and in and out of jail. A moody and violent man, he once killed a man over a girl by stabbing him in the chest with a kitchen knife. Skloot .. (shrink)