Drawing its strength from the UN Charter and UDHR, human rights ethics is a beacon of hope and a promise that requires continuous reaffirmation during these turbulent times. These two documents, with their unwavering faith in ‘fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small,’ have shaped our understanding of human rights as global and universal ethics. However, this faith is now being severely (...) tested by four countercurrents: extremism, exclusionism, selectivism, and populism. These countercurrents pose significant and urgent human rights threats that activists, academics, and policymakers must confront by reasserting the basic core values of the UN Charter and UDHR. (shrink)

Sanitizing Justice Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-5 DOI 10.1007/s11158-011-9174-y Authors Oliver Dowlen, 62 Brockswood Lane, Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire AL8 7BQ, UK Journal Res Publica Online ISSN 1572-8692 Print ISSN 1356-4765.

Folkbiology refers to people’s everyday understanding of the biological world. The early twentieth-century pioneers of public health C.-E.A Winslow (1877–1957), and his mentor H. Biggs (1859–1923), conceptualized public health as the ‘purchasable’ science of preventing disease and death from unfavorable economic and living conditions. Their ideas were foundational in shaping public health’s strategy of a ‘war against disease’ (Winslow, 1903), a strategy that was very successful in preventing the early-life mortality risks from infectious diseases, and was eventually extended to combating (...) the chronic diseases of late life (like cancer). However, the initial framing of public health, through the lens of sanitation science, was predicated upon folkbiological premises that geroscience must abate in order to direct public health interventions toward the goal of improving the quality of life for older persons in the twenty-first century. Three folkbiological premises of sanitation science’s ‘war against disease’ are identified and critiqued: (i) the belief that health is the ‘normal’ condition of the human mechanism and disease ‘unnecessary’; (ii) the belief that the proximate causes of disease are the only modifiable risk factors public health interventions can alter; and (iii) the belief that the rate of biological aging is universal. (shrink)

The human rights that are enshrined in most western democracies are based on enlightenment ideals of freedom, equality, and justice. Although these core principles are inspirational, their application has not necessarily been equitable or complete enough to provide for the stability, safety, health, and security of all citizens. A more modern understanding of human rights encompasses that which is needed to establish human flourishing, including guaranteed access to water, particularly the clean water provided by adequate sanitation. Without confidence in (...) broad safety and health, and established norms for individual protections, it is difficult for a society to be stable and flourish. Although this argument begins with political philosophy, it ends with a case study in Alabama, one of the poorest states in the United States. This study evaluates the dysfunction caused to local communities and greater society when governmental organizations fail to provide sanitation and guarantee public health for their communities. (shrink)

Using Demographic and Health Survey datasets from Ghana and Nigeria, this study examined whether the protective effects of breast-feeding are greatest where the poorest sanitation conditions prevail. It was found that mixed-fed infants aged between 0 and 11 months tend to have a higher risk of diarrhoea than fully breast-fed children, while the risk of diarrhoea among weaned infants is twice that of mixed-fed infants. The probit regression models employed in the analysis were used to predict the probability of (...) diarrhoea associated with each breast-feeding pattern for both ‘poor’ and ‘good’ sanitation areas. It was found that the risk of diarrhoea among mixed-fed infants in the poor sanitation areas tends to be high while the same risk among fully breast-fed infants tends to be minimal. In essence, the health risks of mixed feeding are real, particularly for infants aged less than 7 months, and are even worse for those weaned before 6 months of age. (shrink)

The development of a human right to water and sanitation under international law has created an imperative to implement human rights in water and sanitation policy. Through forty-three interviews with informants in international institutions, national governments, and non-governmental organizations, this research examines interpretations of this new human right in global governance, national policy, and local practice. Exploring obstacles to the implementation of rights-based water and sanitation policy, the authors analyze the limitations of translating international human rights into (...) local water and sanitation practice, concluding that system operators, utilities, and management boards remain largely unaffected by the changing public policy landscape for human rights realization. To understand the relevance of human rights standards to water and sanitation practitioners, this article frames a research agenda to ensure that human rights aspirations lead to public policy reforms and public health outcomes. (shrink)

The right to water and sanitation has emerged from the penumbra of associated rights in the past few decades and now plays an important role in international debates. This right has emerged “from below”, through the efforts of social movements seeking transformation in the lives of the world’s poor, and it has been recognized “from above”, with major international actors such as the United Nations, international financial institutions, and even large corporate actors affirming its existence. As the obligations and (...) entitlements inherent in this right are increasingly clarified, the role of interdisciplinary collaboration has never been more important. This short Commentary examines one such collaborative effort, led by the United Nations Joint Monitoring Programme, to devise post-2015 goals, targets, and indicators for water, sanitation, and hygiene. The Commentary calls for renewed partnerships to advance human rights-based policy among advocates, development practitioners, and water and sanitation experts from diverse scientific fields. (shrink)

In 1878, amid a rapidly proliferating social interest in public health and cleanliness, a group of sanitary scientists and reformers founded the Parkes Museum of Hygiene in central London. Dirt and contagion knew no social boundaries, and the Parkes's founders conceived of the museum as a dynamic space for all classes to better themselves and their environments. They promoted sanitary science through a variety of initiatives: exhibits of scientific, medical and architectural paraphernalia; product endorsements; and lectures and certificated courses in (...) practical sanitation, food inspection and tropical hygiene. While the Parkes's programmes reified the era's hierarchies of class and gender, it also pursued a public-health mission that cut across these divisions. Set apart from the great cultural and scientific popular museums that dominated Victorian London, it exhibited a collection with little intrinsic value, and offered an education in hygiene designed to be imported into visitors’ homes and into urban spaces in the metropole and beyond. This essay explores the unique contributions of the Parkes Museum to late nineteenth-century sanitary science and to museum development, even as the growth of public-health policy rendered the museum obsolete. (shrink)

For almost two years now the COVID-19 pandemic impacted in most different forms habits, models of organization, socio-political dynamics and economic assets. Arrangements and orders taking decades to reach stabilization have demonstrated an unsuspected precarity, demanding a profound reorganization of dynamics we had been long accustomed to. As the distant, sanitized character of interaction, transmission, fruition and creation processes has turned from a contingent measure into the unamenable norm of these days’ routine, every aspect of social interaction is changing accordingly. (...) “Contact”, “contagion”, “proximity” and “distance” are not features of a transient period anymore: they are keywords of today’s experience. Indeed, while these concepts were already at stake in masscommunication and social media, it was not before nowadays that their precipitate on art forms could be taken into account more pristinely, for especially performative arts never had to amend their “familiar ground” in order to pursue their goals. Hence, how did artforms adjust themselves to wholly new forms of participation? What are we supposed to expect next? The main aim of this paper is to sketch out, relying on some classical loci of the history of Western aesthetics such as Plato, Aloïs Riegl, Walter Benjamin, this new, re-configured notion of aesthetic and artistic experience in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic. (shrink)

The expansion of the corpus of international human rights to include the right to water and sanitation has implications both for the process of recognizing human rights and for future developments in the relationships between technology, engineering and human rights. Concerns with threats to human rights resulting from developments in science and technology were expressed in the early days of the United Nations (UN), along with the recognition of the ambitious human right of everyone “to enjoy the benefits of (...) scientific progress and its applications.” This comment explores the hypothesis that the emerging concepts most likely to follow recognition of the human right to water primarily involve issues of science and technology, such as access to medicines or clean and healthy environment. Many threats to human rights from advances in science, which were identified in the past as potential, have become real today, such as invasion of privacy from electronic recording, deprivation of health and livelihood as a result of climate change, or control over individual autonomy through advances in genetics and neuroscience. This comment concludes by urging greater engagement of scientists and engineers, in partnership with human rights specialists, in translating normative pronouncements into defining policy and planning interventions. (shrink)

Resolutions in the United Nations Human Rights Council and General Assembly provide clarification of economic, social, and cultural (ESC) rights, and most of these resolutions pass by consensus. Yet these resolutions are more contentious than they appear. This article analyzes a case study of contestation over resolutions on two ESC rights: water and sanitation. Drawing from theories of norms contestation, this article analyzes how the USA, UK, and Canada challenged the creation of the rights to water and sanitation (...) as rights and as norms. An analysis of all resolutions, archival research, and interview data reveals that while challengers failed to stop water and sanitation from becoming legal human rights, they successfully delayed the process and weakened the normative aspect of the rights. The findings show that while powerful actors may not be opposed to ESC rights in theory, they worked to keep these rights weak and aspirational. (shrink)

For well over a millennium, public institutions have sought to limit the spread of disease. This article claims that shared political narratives about collective solidarity and belonging expressed in ideas about citizenship shape and constrain public health interventions. While a Sanitarian medical paradigm fit the mid-nineteenth-century British citizenship regime better than one based on limiting contagion by quarantine, full implementation of the “sanitary idea” had to wait upon adjustments after 1870 in the predominantly liberal citizenship regime, and particularly in the (...) institutions of governance and ideas about the responsibility mix. (shrink)

Willingness to collaborate across disciplinary boundaries is necessary but not sufficient for project success. This is a case study of a transdisciplinary project whose success was constrained by contextual factors that ultimately favoured technical and scientific forms of knowledge over the cultural intelligence that might ensure technical solutions were socially feasible. In response to Alaskan Water and Sewer Challenge, an international team with expertise in engineering, consultative design and public health formed in 2013 to collaborate on a two-year project to (...) design remote area water and sanitation systems in consultation with two native Alaskan communities. Team members were later interviewed about their experiences. Project processes are discussed using a ‘Knowledge Ecology’ framework, which applies principles of ecosystems analysis to knowledge ecologies, identifying the knowledge equivalents of ‘biotic’ and ‘abiotic’ factors and looking at their various interactions. In a positivist ‘knowledge integration’ perspective, different knowledges are like Lego blocks that combine with other ‘data sets’ to create a unified structure. The knowledge ecology framework highlights how interactions between different knowledges and knowledge practitioners are shaped by contextual factors: the conditions of knowledge production, the research policy and funding climate, the distribution of research resources, and differential access to enabling infrastructures. This case study highlights the importance of efforts to negotiate between different knowledge frameworks, including by strategic use of language and precepts that help translate social research into technical design outcomes that are grounded in social reality. (shrink)

Child mortality differentials according to water supply and sanitation in many urban areas of developing countries suggest that access to piped water and toilet facilities can improve the survival chances of children. The central question in this study is whether access to piped water and a flush toilet affects the survival chance of children under five in urban areas of Eritrea. The study uses data collected by the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) project in Eritrea in 1995. The results (...) show that while the unadjusted effect of household environment (water supply and toilet facility) is large and statistically significant during the post[hyphen]neonatal and child periods, it is relatively small and statistically insignificant during the neonatal period. The effect of household environment remains substantial during the post[hyphen]neonatal and child periods, even when other socioeconomic variables are held constant. However, the household environment effect totally disappears during the neonatal period when the socioeconomic factors are controlled for. (shrink)

Título Ação comunicativa e ética no acesso e uso sustentável da água: a experiência do saneamento rural de Marechal Cândido Rondon - PR (Communicative action and ethics on the access and sustainable use of water: the experience of rural sanitation of Marechal Cândido Rondon – Paraná, Brazil. DOI: 10.5752/P.2175-5841.2013v11n32p1571 Resumo O texto apresenta um estudo/pesquisa sobre a ética e os recursos hídricos, problematizando a relação entre a ética e o uso sustentável da água, tendo como modelo referencial aproximações na (...) experiência do saneamento rural de Marechal Cândido Rondon, PR que, através da organização dos próprios agricultores e com o apoio da autarquia municipal de água e esgoto, atingiu 100% de acesso à água potável na zona rural do município. A discussão propõe uma sinergia entre comunidades, gestores de sistemas e pesquisadores, que possibilite a criação de contextos comunicativos nos quais se partilha e socializa informações para o debate dos temas e situações que defendam um acesso democrático aos recursos hídricos e ao uso sustentável da água. Os fundamentos para este debate se encontram na obra de Lord Selborne, A Ética do Uso da Água Doce: um levantamento . (2001), e no paradigma da Teoria da Ação Comunicativa de Jürguen Habermas (1989), como um instrumento para propor o debate público sobre o acesso democrático aos recursos hídricos e, assim, criar contextos comunicativos que possibilitem a socialização de conhecimentos necessários relativos aos recursos hídricos e potencializar o debate sobre o uso desse bem natural como um direito humano universal. Palavras-chave: Ética. Água. Uso sustentável. Ação comunicativa. Saneamento rural.The text presents a study/research on ethics and water resources, questioning the relationship between ethics and sustainable water use, taking as reference model approaches in the experience of rural sanitation of Marechal Cândido Rondon, PR that, through the organization's own farmers, with the support of a municipal water and sewer, reached 100% access to safe drinking water in the rural area. The discussion proposes a synergy between communities, systems managers and researchers, enabling the creation of communicative contexts in which information is shared and socialized for discussion of issues and situations that advocate democratic access to water resources and the sustainable use of water. The grounds for this debate are the work of Lord Selborne, The Ethics of Freshwater Use: A survey. (2001), and the paradigm of the Theory of Communicative Action by Jürguen Habermas (1989), as an instrument to propose a public debate on democratic access to water resources and thus create communicative contexts that enable socialization of required knowledge of the water resources and enhance the debate on the use of this natural asset as a universal human right. Keywords: Ethics. Water. Sustainable use. Communicative action. Rural sanitation. (shrink)

There are over 800 seventh to tenth grade students at the College d’Enseignment Generale (CEG) School in Azové, Benin. Like most children in the developing world, these students lack access to clean water and basic sanitation facilities. These students suffer from parasitic infection and health ailments which could be directly offset with short term aid to supply water and medical aid. Promoting proper sanitation and providing the technology to implement water and wastewater treatment in the community will decrease (...) childhood and maternal disease and mortality rates in Azové. However, these measures may take several years to implement and will require a significant investment in the infrastructure of the school. Is it ethical to spend $10,000 towards the long-term goals of providing water and sanitation to the students of CEG Azové, compared to spending the same amount on short-term relief efforts? (shrink)

This case study investigates Gram Vikas' innovative social entrepreneurial approach to sustainable rural development through its 'Water and Sanitation Programme'. We explore its key innovation of 100 % inclusion and the process of creating democratic, self-governing management systems. This allows us to demonstrate how a social enterprise tries to realize its vision of "an equitable and sustainable society where people live in peace with dignity", and ultimately, how it contributes to the United Nations Millennium Goals of improving health, empowering (...) women and breaking the vicious circle of poverty. We also discuss the management challenges that the organisation faces in the area of finance, personnel management and scaling up. (shrink)

Moshe Tati, a sanitation worker in Jerusalem, was among the first of more than a thousand mortally sick Israelis who signed up for illicit and clandestine ‘transplant tour’ packages that included: travel to an undisclosed foreign and exotic setting; five-star hotel accommodation; surgery in a private hospital unit; a ‘fresh’ kidney purchased from a perfect stranger trafficked from a third country. Although Tati’s holiday turned into a nightmare and he had to be emergency air-lifted from a rented transplant unit (...) in a private hospital in Adana, Turkey back to Israel, Moshe became a poster-boy of transplant tourism for the next decade. João Cavalcanti was among the first of 38 residents of the slums of Recife recruited by retired military Captain Ivan da Silva and his sidekick Captain Gadddy Tauber to travel to Durban, South Africa to provide a spare kidney to an Israeli transplant tourist in Durban. This article examines the logics and practices through which kidney buyers and kidney sellers, organs brokers, surgeons and their accessories convince themselves that they are engaged in an illegal but still mutually beneficial ‘medical-recreational’ adventure, an ‘extreme medical sport’ of sorts. While life, health and survival motivate ‘transplant tourism’, a euphemism for human trafficking in spare body parts, the freedom to roam, mobility, is an essential feature of transplant tours for kidney buyers and kidney sellers. (shrink)

Today's personable, sanitized images of human embryos and fetuses require an audience that is literally and metaphorically distanced from dead specimens. Yet scientists must handle dead specimens to produce embryological knowledge, which only then can be transformed into beautiful photographs and talking fetuses. I begin with an account of Gertrude Stein's experience making a model of a fetal brain. Her tactile encounter is contrasted to the avant-garde artistic tradition that later came to dominate embryo imagery. This essay shows the embryo (...) visualizations portrayed in a contemporary coffee-table book about gestational development to be a remarkable political achievement predicated, in part, on keeping hidden the unsavory details of anatomical technique that transform dead specimens into icons of life. (shrink)

Colonialism, in its many forms and stages is often imposed as being central to the narratives of colonizedpeople and their cultures, as well as the genesis of their knowledge. In colonial discourse, lands and the occupants of these lands were ‘discovered’, further implying that colonized people did not have their own ways of knowing (nor even existence) before colonization. This narrative has been embedded within Euro‐American fields of study, including nursing, in which caring and healing practices that exist outside of (...) a colonial lens are dismissed and complicity with colonialism is downplayed or sanitized. This paper is a reflection on the current discourse on decolonizing nursing shaped by postcolonial, critical and Black feminist philosophies. After examining the decolonization discourse in nursing, I argue that current calls to decolonize nursing lack a clear description of the goals and process of doing so, making it unfeasible to hold those in the process of decolonizing accountable. In addition, the lack of intentionality in reckoning with past and current forms of colonialism embedded in nursing hinders the ability to engage with lessons that could shape the future. I conclude this discourse by discussing practical steps toward centrering diverse ways of knowing, and ensuring this process prioritizes communities and nurse scholars who have historically been silenced. (shrink)

In Norms in the Wild, distinguished philosopher Cristina Bicchieri argues that when it comes to human behavior, social scientists place too much stress on rational deliberation. In fact, she says, many choices occur without much deliberation at all. Two people passing in a corridor automatically negotiate their shared space; cars at an intersection obey traffic signals; we choose clothing based on our instincts for what is considered appropriate. Bicchieri's theory of social norms accounts for these automatic components of coordination, where (...) individuals react automatically to cues that focus their attention on what the norm is in that situation. Social norms thus act as rules for making choices in a social world where people expect others -- often unconsciously -- to follow the same rule. Some norms enable seamless social co-operation, while others are less beneficial to human flourishing.Bicchieri is famous for her interdisciplinary work on game theory and most recently her work on social norms, and Norms in the Wild represents her latest challenge to many of the fundamental assumptions of the social sciences. Bicchieri's work has broad implications not only for understanding human behavior, but for changing it for better outcomes. People have a strongly conditioned preference for following social norms, but that also means that manipulating their expectations can cause major behavioral changes. Bicchieri has been working recently with UNICEF and other NGO's to explore the applicability of her views to issues of human rights around the world. Is it possible to change social expectations around forced marriage, genital mutilations, and public health practices like vaccinations and sanitation? If so, how? What tools might we use? This short book explores how social norms work, and how changing them - changing preferences, beliefs, and especially social expectations - can potentially improve lives all around the world. It will appeal to an unusually broad range of readers including philosophers, psychologists and others in behavioral sciences, and anyone involved in public policy or at NGOs. (shrink)

Every time another corporate scandal captures media headlines, the ‘bad apple vs. bad barrel’ discussion starts anew. Yet this debate overlooks the influence of the broader societal context on organizational behavior. In this article, we argue that misbehaviors of organizations (the ‘barrels’) and their members (the ‘apples’) cannot be addressed properly without a clear understanding of their broader context (the ‘larder’). Whereas previously, a strong societal framework dampened the practical application of the Homo economicus concept (business actors as perfectly rational (...) and egocentric utility-maximizing agents without any moral concern), specialization, individualization and globalization led to a business world disembedded from broader societal norms. This emancipated business world promotes a literal interpretation of Homo economicus among business organizations and their members. Consequently, we argue that the first step toward ‘healthier’ apples and barrels is to sanitize the larder, that is, adapt the framework in which organizations and their members evolve. (shrink)

The Covid-19 pandemic has led to severe shortages of many essential goods and services, from hand sanitizers and N-95 masks to ICU beds and ventilators. Although rationing is not unprecedented, never before has the American public been faced with the prospect of having to ration medical goods and services on this scale.

This book argues that contractarianism is well suited as a political morality and explores the implications of deploying it in this way. It promises to revive contractarianism as a viable political theory, breaking it free from its Rawlsian moorings while taking seriously the long-standing objections to it. It's natural to think that the state owes things to its people: physical security, public health and sanitation services, and a functioning judiciary, for example. But is there a theory--a political morality--that can (...) explain why this is so and who the state's people are? This new contractarianism deploys a reversed state of nature thought experiment as the starting point of political theorizing. From this starting point it develops a political morality: a theory of the common ground of the role moralities attached to the various roles within the state. Contractarianism, so understood, can provide a basis for already popular ideas in political theory--such as political and legal liberalism--and overturn conventional wisdom, for example that the state is obligated to secure justice and that animals should have no legal standing. Contractarianism, Role Obligations, and Political Morality will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in moral and political philosophy. (shrink)

Over the past decade there has been a remarkable expansion in the use of ‘imaginaries’ as a guiding concept in and beyond political theory. But the proliferation of this term has gone largely unchecked by critical investigations into its deployment. To correct this I address the work of Charles Taylor, Michael Warner and Chiara Bottici, each of whom has written influential texts on imaginaries and the sites of imaginaries. Interestingly, their reliance on imaginaries does not compel them to do away (...) with older modes of thinking such as ideology critique and dialectical thought. Yet what remains of these enduring modes has been sanitized, their radical commitments scarcely pursued. I proceed by conducting an immanent critique of each author’s work, revealing troublesome pre-critical and instrumentalist features that lead to political phenomena being misrepresented or going unidentified entirely. In addition I elaborate modes of dialectical thought and ideology critique that avoid these difficulties and produce the types of critical insights absent from these texts. (shrink)

Institute for Biomedical Ethics, Geneva University Medical School * Corresponding author: Médecins Sans Frontières (OCG), rue de Lausanne 78, CH-1211 Geneva 21, Switzerland. Tel.: +41 (0)22 849 89 29; Fax: +41 (0)22 849 84 88; Email: philippe_calain{at}hotmail.com ' + u + '@' + d + ' '//--> Abstract Outbreaks of filovirus (Ebola and Marburg) hemorrhagic fevers in Africa are typically the theater of rescue activities involving international experts and agencies tasked with reinforcing national authorities in clinical management, biological diagnosis, (...) class='Hi'>sanitation, public health surveillance and coordination. These outbreaks can be seen as a paradigm for ethical issues posed by epidemic emergencies, through the convergence of such themes as: isolation and quarantine, privacy and confidentiality and the interpretation of ethical norms across different ethnocultural settings. With an emphasis on the boundaries between public health investigations and research, this article reviews specific challenges, past practices and current normative documents relevant to the application of ethical standards in the course of outbreaks of filovirus hemorrhagic fevers. Aside from commonly identified issues of informed consent and institutional review processes, we argue for more clarity over the specification of which communities are expected to share benefits, and we advocate for the use of collective definitions of duty to care and standard of care. We propose new elaborations around existing normative instruments, and we suggest some pathways toward more comprehensive approaches to the ethics of research in outbreak situations. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

The goal of this article is to show that mainstream liberal accounts of civil disobedience fail to fully capture the latter’s specific characteristics as a genuinely political and democratic practice of contestation that is not reducible to an ethical or legal understanding either in terms of individual conscience or of fidelity to the rule of law. In developing this account in more detail, I first define civil disobedience with an aim of spelling out why the standard liberal model, while providing (...) a useful starting point, ultimately leads to an overly constrained, domesticated and sanitized understanding of this complex political practice. Second, I place the political practice of civil disobedience between two opposing poles: symbolic politics and real confrontation. I argue that the irreducible tension between these poles precisely accounts for its politicizing and democratizing potential. Finally, I briefly examine the role of civil disobedience in representative democracies, addressing a series of recent challenges made in response to this radically democratic understanding of disobedience. (shrink)

For familiar reasons, stereotyping is believed to be irresponsible and offensive. Yet the use of stereotypes in humor is widespread. Particularly offensive are thought to be sexual and racial stereotypes, yet it is just these that figure particularly prominently in jokes. In certain circumstances it is unquestionably wrong to make jokes that employ such stereotypes. Some writers have made the much stronger claim that in all circumstances it is wrong to find such jokes funny; in other words that people who (...) laugh at such jokes betray sexist/racist attitudes. This conclusion seems false. There is, as I shall argue, a thin dividing line between being properly sensitive to the rights and feelings of women and of racial groups different from our own, and being excessively sensitive to oversensitivity. Oversensitivity is, in this context, a kind of intolerance, and there is no reason why we should pander to that. One can be opposed to the unchecked dissemination of certain kinds of racist or sexist humor without oneself being a racist or sexist for finding such humor funny. The use of various stereotypes in humor serves the linguistic purpose of facilitating brevity and punch, the cultural purpose of preserving, in a sanitized form traditional rivalries and antipathies, and the psychological purpose of discharging fears. Blanket moral condemnation is inappropriate, though there will, of course, be circumstances under which the promulgation of certain types of humor, or even its enjoyment, ought to be condemned. (shrink)

This paper examines evidence regarding neoliberalization of the social organization of Canadian food safety from a series of documents produced in response to the Canadian listeriosis outbreak in 2008. The outbreak is described, then interpreted within a neoliberal context, where: (1) neoliberalism operates as an ideology (2) that enables a socio-political and economic strategy within (3) a project pursued by coalitions seeking to consolidate power through (4) a process of neoliberalization. Following Gramsci’s work on power, it is argued that food (...) safety serves as an attractor, organizing consent within a neoliberal context. Testimony before a parliamentary subcommittee, official reviews, an independent investigation, food inspection records, and media reports have been examined to identify the key factors associated with the outbreak and the process of neoliberalization. The events associated with the outbreak are described first, as activities and practices in organizational settings (governance, sanitation, and production), and secondly, as components in a food production network where consent is organized around food safety. (shrink)

In recent years, campaigns across the globe have called for the removal of objects symbolic of white supremacy. This paper examines the ethics of altering or removing such objects. Do these strategies sanitize history, destroy heritage and suppress freedom of speech? Or are they important steps towards justice? Does removing monuments and renaming schools reflect a lack of parity and unfairly erase local identities? Or can it sometimes be morally required, as an expression of respect for the memories of people (...) who endured past injustices; a recognition of this history's ongoing legacies; and a repudiation of unjust social hierarchies? (shrink)

These days many gyms and fitness centers are closed to reduce transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in society. The gym is an environment rich in microorganisms, and careful hygiene is a necessity to keep infections at bay. Exercise centers strive for better hygiene compliance among their members. This effort has become essential in light of the current pandemic. Several experimental studies show that others’ physical presence, or the “illusion” of being watched, may alter behavior. This article reports on a natural (...) field experiment testing one specific social nudge intended to increase gym members’ hygienic behavior. The study was conducted before the SARS-COV-2 pandemic. A picture of “observing eyes” was attached to paper dispensers and cleanser spray bottles at two different gyms in Norway. A reversal design, also called an ABA design, with and without the nudge’s presence, was used to investigate the impact on gym members’ hygienic behavior. A follow-up study was conducted in one of the centers to investigate whether the nudge stimuli would function over time. The study included 254 individual choice situations during nine observation sessions conducted over 9 weeks. The results from both centers provide evidence of a strong effect of the nudge. However, the effect decreased during the follow-up study. These findings support previous research indicating that human behavior is influenced by the presence of implicit observation cues – in this case – observing eyes. However, insights into the long-term effect of implicit observation cues are still needed since the salience of the stimuli faded over time. (shrink)

We argue that for theorists with a post-institutional conception of property, e.g., Rawlsians, there is no principled reason to limit the domain of distributive justice to tax and transfer-both tax policy and the rules of the private law are constructed in service to distributive aims. Such theorists cannot maintain a commitment to a normative conception of private law independent of their overarching distributive principles. In contrast, theorists with a pre-institutional conception of property can derive the private law from sectors of (...) morality independent of distributive justice. Nevertheless, we argue, this does not entail that the private law, for pre-institutional theorists, must be sanitized of equity-oriented values. Non-libertarian pre-institutional theorists holding principled commitments to equity-oriented values are free to invoke either tax and transfer or the rules of the private law to attain them. Footnotesa We are grateful to John G. Bennett, Harry Dolan, Edward McCaffery, and Ellen Frankel Paul for written comments on a previous draft and to Eric Mack, Fred Miller, Jeffrey Paul, A. John Simmons, and the other contributors to this volume for valuable discussions. (shrink)

Informed consent, as Alfano (2015) recognizes, has been routinely idealized within philosophical debate: Philosophers typically present a psychologically sanitized formulation of the temporal seque...

This essay asserts freedom as the essence of the prophetic Black Christian tradition that propelled the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Strikes, and largely guided the moral compass of the late-twentieth-century Civil Rights Movement. Sexism, however, is a moral paradox that emerges at the interstices of the prophetic Black Church’s institutional espousal of freedom and its consistently conflicting practices of gender discrimination that bind Black women to politics of silence and invisibility. An exploration of the iconic “I AM a Man” placards (...) worn by strikers during Martin Luther King Jr.’s final campaign in Memphis alongside a contemporary icon of the Black Lives Matter movement illumines how black women continue to be challenged by intracommunal invisibility, even as they are consistently the progenitors, mobilizers, sustainers, and intellectual architects of Black movements for social change. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to bring to the attention of the international nursing community the discrepancy between a pervasive ‘caring’ nursing discourse and a most unethical nursing practice in the United States. In this article, we present a duality: the conflict in American prisons between nursing ethics and the killing machinery. The US penal system is a setting in which trained healthcare personnel practice the extermination of life. We look upon the sanitization ofdeathworkas an application of healthcare professionals’ (...) skills and knowledge and their appropriation by the state to serve its ends. A review of the states’ death penalty statutes shows that healthcare workers are involved in the capital punishment process and shielded by American laws (and to a certain extent by professional boards through their inaction). We also argue that the law's language often masks that involvement; and explain how states further that duplicity behind legal formalisms. In considering the important role healthcare providers, namely nurses and physicians, play in administering death to the condemned, we assert that nurses and physicians are part of the states’ penal machinery in America. Nurses and physicians (as carriers of scientific knowledge, and also as agents of care) are intrinsic to the American killing enterprise. Healthcare professionals who take part in execution protocols are state functionaries who approach the condemned body as angels of death: they constitute an extension of the state which exercises its sovereign power over captive prisoners. (shrink)