Synthetic biologists aim to generate biological organisms according to rational design principles. Their work may have many beneficial applications, but it also raises potentially serious ethical concerns. In this article, we consider what attention the discipline demands from bioethicists. We argue that the most important issue for ethicists to examine is the risk that knowledge from synthetic biology will be misused, for example, in biological terrorism or warfare. To adequately address this concern, bioethics will need to broaden its scope, contemplating (...) not just the means by which scientific knowledge is produced, but also what kinds of knowledge should be sought and disseminated. (shrink)

Spontaneous abortion is rarely addressed in moral evaluations of abortion. Indeed, 'abortion' is virtually always taken to mean only induced abortion. After a brief review of medical aspects of spontaneous abortion, I attempt to articulate the moral implications of spontaneous abortion for the two poles of the abortion debate, the strong pro-abortion and the strong anti-abortion positions. I claim that spontaneous abortion has no moral relevance for strict pro-abortion positions but that the high incidence of spontaneous abortion is not (as (...) some claim) eo ipso any sort of justification for voluntarily induced abortion. Secondly, I show that if the strict anti-abortionist position is to be taken seriously in its insistence that prenatal life has a right to be protected by virtue of its being conceived, then it seems necessary to take measures to prevent spontaneous abortion and its presumptive causes, and this as a matter of moral obligation. (shrink)

Principlism aims to provide a framework to help those working in medicine both to identify moral problems and to make decisions about what to do. For it to meet this aim, the principles included within it must express values that all morally serious people share (or ought to share), and there must be no other values that all morally serious people share (or ought to share). This paper challenges the latter of these claims. I will argue that as a descriptive (...) claim about what values morally serious people do in fact share, principlism is inadequate; more principles would be needed to make this claim true. Furthermore, I will argue that while, taken as a claim about what principles we ought to share, principlism could turn out to be correct, it is either unsupported or unable to meet its aims. The only way in which principlists can avoid these problems is to add to the current four principles. (shrink)

In this work, we attempt to define a notion of compositeness compatible with Quantum Field Theory. Considering the analytic properties of the S-matrix, we conclude that there is no satisfactory definition of compositeness compatible with Quantum Field Theory. Without this notion, one must claim that all bound states are equally fundamental, that is, one cannot rigorously claim that everyday objects are made of atoms or that atoms are made of protons and neutrons. I then show how an approximate notion of (...) compositeness may be recovered in the regime where the mass of a bound state is close to a multi-particle threshold. -/- Finally, we see that rejecting compositeness solves several of the "problems of everyday objects" encountered in an undergraduate metaphysics course. (shrink)

If we assume that “enhancement” names all efforts to boost human mental and physical capacities beyond the normal upper range found in our species, then enhancement covers such a broad range of interventions that it becomes implausible to think that there is any generic ethical case to be made either for or against it. Michael Sandel has recently made such a generic case, which focuses on the importance of respecting the “giftedness” of human nature. Sandel succeeds in diagnosing an important (...) worry we may have about the use of some enhancements by some parents, but his arguments are better understood as opposing “procrustean parenting” rather than enhancement in general. (shrink)

This paper argues for thinking about religious commitments as different in kind from everyday ordinary understandings of the world. It argues against the straightforward assertion from the cognitive science of religion that belief in the supernatural is easy. That is, there is a way in which intuitions of invisible presence come very easily to people. Yet to sustain that belief commitment is hard, especially when the invisible other is omnipotent and benevolent. Here I suggest that it makes more sense to (...) understand faith commitments as a kind of frame that coexists with everyday commitments. The approach shares much with Neil van Leeuwen’s understanding of religious commitments and factual commitments as being held with different kinds of cognitive attitudes. Here I suggest that people engage the faith frame the way engage play and fiction—except that in the case of faith, the commitment is a serious claim about the world. (shrink)

Conflicts between the ethical values of an organisation and the ethical values of the employees of that organisation can often lead to conflict. When the ethical values of the employee are considerably higher than those of the organisation the potential for catastrophic results is enormous. In recent years several high profile cases have exposed organisations with ethical weaknesses. Academic medical institutions have exhibited such weaknesses and when exposed their employees have almost invariably been vindicated by objective inquiry. The mechanisms that (...) work to produce such low ethical standards in what should be exemplary organisations are well documented and have been highlighted recently. The contribution of elements of medical training in eroding ethical standards of medical students have also been emphasised recently and strategies proposed to reduce or reverse this process. The ability to rapidly change the ethical and professional culture of graduate medical trainees may help to deal with some of the perceived problems of declining ethical standards in academic medicine. (shrink)

The acceptance of military directives violating medical ethics and international covenants encouraged by the demonisation of the enemy by the US president in 2002 has effectively removed the right of medical personnel to refuse participation in internationally proscribed actionsMedicine and its traditional ethic of care is today a victim of the current conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan, its uniquely humanising mission rejected by US President George W Bush and his advisors. In denying the applicability of international agreements guaranteeing medicine’s ecumenical (...) role in this conflict they have transformed medicine into just another weapon of tactical significance. The result, predictable in retrospect, has been to make military physicians and nurses complicit—actively or passively—in what Litton calls an “atrocity-producing situation”, resulting in detainee or prisoner abuse.1From the first revelations of detainee torture in US detention camps to recent allegations of continued abuse , the focus of international attention has shifted from the US prosecution of low ranking, non-commissioned military personnel to the context in which the atrocities they committed occurred. “No one up the chain of command has ever been held accountable for what is in these horrifying images,” Center for Constitutional Rights Director Bill Goodman said of recently published photographs of 2004 prisoner torture and abuse.2 “The situation in several areas violates international law and conventions on human rights and torture,” said the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture following a 2006 investigation.3The denial of international law and convention involved the overt disavowal of covenants and conventions that for almost 150 years required medical personnel in the US military to act within the guidelines of a Hippocratic vision of medicine. To understand how fundamental this change has been requires a brief review of the history of medicine’s previously protected status and then a description of …. (shrink)

An assessment of a protocol devised to guide practitioners thinking of using covert video surveillance. Such surveillance is particularly used to help identify cases of Munchausen's syndrome by proxy. The protocol in question has been written by staff at the Academic Department of Paediatrics, North Staffordshire Hospital, Stoke-on-Trent in association with their local Area Child Protection Committee and has been commended by the Department of Health to others wishing to implement covert video surveillance.

There are religious and philosophical versions of the thesis that AIDS is a punishment for homosexual behaviour. It is argued here that the religious version is seriously incomplete. Because of this incompleteness and because of the indeterminacies that ordinarily attend religious argumentation, it is concluded that the claim may be set aside as unconvincing. Homosexual behaviour is then judged for its morality against utilitarian, deontological, and natural law theories of ethics. It is argued that such behaviour involves no impediment to (...) important moral goals and is not therefore immoral. Where natural law might be used to condemn homosexual behaviour, it is argued that the theory itself is not well established. Consequently there is a prima facie reason for rejecting the philosophical version of the punishment thesis. This conclusion is further supported by noting the lack of proportion between the purported immorality of homosexuality and a punishment as devastating as AIDS. (shrink)

If there is such a thing as a genuine property appropriately called "intrinsic value" this property must be such that recognition that something does, or would, possess it, has a necessary tendency to motivate towards sustaining that thing in existence or producing it (if possible). There is just one thing which possesses that property and that is the property of being pleasurable (properly conceived) which, therefore, is the same as intrinsic value. (The same, mutatis mutandis, applies to intrinsic disvalue and (...) painfulness.) Why this seems not to be so is explained. (shrink)

Contingency-theorists have gestured to a series of phenomena such as random mutations or rare Armageddon-like events as that which accounts for evolutionary contingency. These phenomena constitute a class, which may be aptly called the ‘sources of contingency’. In this paper, I offer a probabilistic conception of what it is to be a source of contingency and then examine two major candidates: chance variation and genetic drift, both of which have historically been taken to be ‘chancy’ in a number of different (...) senses. However,contrathe gesturing of contingency-theorists, chance variation and genetic drift are not always strong sources of contingency, as they can be non-chancy in at least one sense that opposes evolutionary contingency. The probabilistic conception offered herein allows for sources of contingency to appropriately vary in strength. To this end, I import Shannon’sinformation entropyas a statistical measure for systematically assessing the strength of a source of contingency, which is part and parcel of identifying sources of contingency. In brief, the higher the entropy, the greater the strength. This is also empirically significant because molecular, mutational, and replicative studies often contain sufficient frequency or probability data to allow for entropies to be calculated. In this way, contingency-theorists can evaluate the strength of a source of contingency in real-world cases. Moreover, the probabilistic conception also makes conceptual room for the converse of sources of contingency: ‘sources of directionality’, which ought to be recognised, as they can interact with genuine sources of contingency in undermining evolutionary contingency. (shrink)

As ethical attitudinists say, ethical statements cannot be strictly true or false, since they express wishes or attitudes, not beliefs. However, the wishes expressed by basic moral judgments about human rights are such that it is a necessary truth that those who know what human beings are have them, and those who do not acknowledge these rights show their lack of a living sense of human reality. The same goes for basic judgments about the rights of animals, and it is (...) blindness about the ontology of animal reality which lies behind the cruelty to animals inherent in vivisection and factory farming. One current source of this blindness may be the physicalist metaphysics which is typical of our day, and which should be sharply distinguished from metaphysical naturalism. (shrink)

The question whether an entity has rights is identified with that as to whether an intrinsic value resides in it which imposes obligations to foster it on those who can appreciate this value. There should be no difficulty in granting that animals have rights in this sense, but what of other natural objects and artifacts? It seems that various inanimate things, such as fine buildings and forests, often possess such intrinsic value, yet since they can only be fully actual in (...) an observing consciousness the most basic such right is that of being observed from time to time. That, at least, is true of them as phenomenal objects. There must, however, be a thing in itself behind the phenomenal object and sometimes this may possess an intrinsic value which gives rise to rights, not a matter of the need to be actualized in an observing consciousness, though it is extremely difficult to reach reliable conclusions here. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Definition of Idealism Main Idealist Thinkers Absolute Idealism Vindicated (1) Phenomenalism (2) The Physical World as Imaginative Construction (3) The Purely Structural View of the Physical World (4) Panpsychism.

This classic study of Santayana was the first book to appear in the _Arguments of the Philosophers_ series. Growing interest in the work of this important American philosopher has prompted this new edition of the book complete with a new preface by the author reassessing his own ideas about Santayana and reflecting the new interest in the philosopher's work. A select bibliography of works published about Santayana since the book's first appearance is also included.

This paper develops a model of the nurse/physician authority relationship presented in an earlier issue of this journal, and responds to criticisms raised against that model in commentaries on that article. Specifically, I examine the discrepancy which exists between medical knowledge and nursing education, and show this discrepancy to be a difference in type, not quality. The implication is that improvements in nursing education will not affect the authority relationship between physician and nurse. To affect this relationship the nature of (...) nursing education must change. (shrink)

The perinatal necropsy is an important investigation following fetal or neonatal loss. Legal requirements on registration decree that consent is needed before necropsy can proceed in some of these babies. However, there are ill-defined grey areas which are open to legal and ethical difficulties. This paper discusses the problems that can arise with consent for a necropsy in the perinatal period. Some of these problems are clearly legal or ethical but all can cause distress to parents at a time of (...) grief and bereavement. The issues may not be readily resolved but public debate and ad hominem decisions on each perinatal loss may help to alleviate the problems. (shrink)

To investigate how bereaved families felt about the explanation received before and after forensic autopsies, the authors conducted a cross-sectional survey of the bereaved families whose next of kin underwent a forensic autopsy at the two Departments of Forensic Medicine and a few bereaved families of crime victims. Of 403 questionnaires sent, 126 families responded. Among 81.5% of the respondents who received an explanation from policemen before the autopsy, 78.8% felt that the quality of the explanation was poor or improper. (...) In Japan, the law has restricted disclosure of information from a forensic autopsy. Despite legal restrictions, 82% wanted to hear from the person who conducted the autopsy. However, police explained the results of autopsy to 65.2% of respondents. Among the families whose frustration and anger increased after autopsy, 86.4% had not been satisfied with the explanation before the autopsy. Additionally, 57.7% had not been informed on the autopsy findings at the time of the questionnaire when more than 2 years had passed after the autopsy. These results reminded us of the importance of an explanation before and shortly after a forensic autopsy for a better understanding and acceptance by bereaved families. (shrink)

Some philosophers need no introduction. Julius Kovesi is a philosopher who, regrettably, does need introducing. Kovesi’s career was as a moral philosopher and intellectual historian. This book is intended to reintroduce him, more than twenty years after his death and more than forty years after the publication of his only book, Moral Notions. This Introduction will sketch some of the key features of his life and philosophical thought.

The Baby Fae experiment has highlighted the growing trend in medicine of using animal parts in the treatment of humans. This paper raises the question of the logical and moral justification for these current practices and their proposed expansion. We argue that the Cognitive Capacity Principle establishes morally justified necessary and sufficient conditions for the use of non-human animals in medical treatments and research. Some alternative sources for medical uses are explored as well as some possible programmes for their implementation.

Neuroscience cannot and should not be allowed to replace normative questions with scientific onesOver the past few years considerable attention has been paid to a variety of issues that are now placed collectively under the heading of “Neuroethics”. In both the academic and the popular press there have been discussions about the possibilities and problems offered by cognitive enhancement and neuroimaging as well as debate about the implications of these emerging “neurotechnologies” for morality and the law. This issue of the (...) journal contains eight papers that discuss a broad range of important topics in neuroethics, from cognitive enhancement and the moral status of animals and cyborgs, to the challenges of neurological consults in end of life cases. As these papers demonstrate, advances in neuroscience raise a number of important ethical questions, but can neuroscience help provide any answers?FACT AND VALUEAccording to the received philosophical wisdom, there is a fundamental distinction between fact and value—between how things are and how they ought to be. On the basis of this distinction one cannot draw normative conclusions from descriptive premises because there is nothing in the premises that would warrant such conclusions: from the fact that happiness is desired it does not follow that it ought to be. This received wisdom applies to neuroethics in the following way: whereas neuroscience might be able to identify the neurophysical correlates for evaluative notions such as preferences and attitudes,1,2 lying,3 and the distinction between in control and out of control behaviour,4 neuroscience cannot, in and by itself, provide the basis for their evaluation. The reason for this is that, in the absence of factors external to these neurophysical states, one neurophysical state is no better or worse than another—internal neurophysical states are logically …. (shrink)

One of four laws passed by Clodius early in 58 b.c. in some way modified the regulations governing obnuntiatio, the right possessed by magistrates and augurs to obstruct proceedings of the popular assemblies through announcement of unfavourable omens. The precise nature of the change is obscured by the fact that our main source, Cicero, describes it, as he does all of Clodius' legislation, in hyperbolic and polemical terms, alleging that it wholly abolished the right of obnuntiatio, a claim contradicted by (...) other evidence in his writings, which provide many examples of its continuing use. The later ancient sources repeat the substance of Cicero's main allegations and, accordingly, do little to help disentangle the facts from the hyperbole. Inadequate information about the earlier regulations relating to obnuntiatio, which were contained in two laws of the mid-second century, the Leges Aelia et Fufia, further hampers the search for the precise terms of Clodius' amendment. None of this, however, has discouraged speculation. The problem has exerted a peculiar fascination and has generated a succession of careful studies. Five main hypotheses have emerged: that the right of obnuntiatio was taken from curule magistrates; that it was taken from curule magistrates, but only in relation to legislative comitia; that it was taken from both curule magistrates and tribunes, but only in relation to legislative comitia; that it was abolished entirely, but soon restored by senatorial annulment of the reform; that it was left intact, but the assemblies were empowered to disallow it on any given occasion. (shrink)