Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal最新文献

Ethics can be envisioned as a process where human beings move from a more passive stance in their moral lives to a more active one, in which the moral aspects of their lives become the basis of a project to best live one's life. Participatory research and methods would appear essential to ethics in this light, yet they remain rather marginally used in bioethics. In this article, I argue that participatory research methods are particularly compelling means of ethical enactments because of their ability-when carried out properly-to help promote self-actualization. Although I cannot review in detail the vast array of participatory research undertaken in management, education, communication, and so on, I pinpoint the advantages of this orientation to research, especially in light of a pragmatist and deliberative form of ethics that aims to help understand and enact human flourishing. These advantages include: (1) the co-understanding and co-reconstruction of problem situations and responses; (2) the importance attributed to meaning and intersubjectivity; (3) mutual learning (moral co-learning); (4) empowerment for effective eudemonistic change; and (5) opening the evaluation of outcomes to human flourishing. I also explain that these attributes of participatory research and methods do not preclude the use of non-participatory methods and approaches in ethics.

There are many proposals in the literature on how to "manage values." Many of these proposals have in common the assumption that the relevant values in science can be "packaged for transfer": they can be put in an envelope for scientists to hand to stakeholders or policymakers, or for members of the public or ethical experts to hand to scientists. The central aim of this paper is to argue that packaging values for transfer is a practical impossibility. The central argument of the paper concerns the best stance to take on how values in science should be conceptualized. Specifically, I argue that we need to return to a decision-theoretic definition of values (as, I argue, is strongly suggested by a close reading of Rudner, Jeffrey, and Hempel.) Further, I argue for a picture of these values that is nonpsychologistic, stance relative, and always and everywhere entangled with credences. I call my account of the nature of values in science the Putnam-Hempel account. Unfortunately, the Putnam-Hempel account forces us to see that any proposal that depends on packaging values for transfer will ultimately suffer from great difficulties.

Many technologies that are purportedly developed to improve the lives of disabled people reflect an ableist ideology that devalues rather than supports disabled bodyminds. In this paper we attribute this tendency to a neurotypical form of perception that obscures disabled people's moral visibility, understood as their visibility as richly expressive and interaction-worthy sense-making individuals. Relying heavily on examples drawn from scholarship on and community with augmentative and alternative communication technology (AAC tech)-that is, communication technology designed for and used by nonspeaking people-we take the expressive bodies and voices of disabled people as well as technology's role in forming expressivity and voice as important loci for redressing neurotypical ableist perceptions widely embedded in practices of engineering and science. Through our AAC tech discussion, we map different modes and degrees of moral (in)visibility, offering this mapping as an analytic resource for technologists committed to anti-ableist technology. Additionally, we also trace how technologies can be used and tinkered with in ways that can open up more (neuro)expansive, diversity-embracing ways of perceiving disabled lives. Ultimately, our account aims to motivate technologists to embrace such an expansive approach. We conclude by tentatively indicating some ways in which this approach can be operationalized in engineering and science practices.

In this paper, I examine the life and works of Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) through the lenses of madness, neurodivergence, and disability. While many scholars readily think of Rousseau as eccentric, overly emotional, and "melancholic," they do not attempt to situate him as explicitly disabled, or to interpret his work as informed by madness.Using my own disabled, autistic, and mad identity as a point of potential reparative reading and kinship (although not as a direct diagnostic analogue or an uncritical approach), I argue that reading Rousseau explicitly as disabled, and further as experiencing traits consistent with modern descriptions of mental disability, opens up a new way of looking at his philosophical and musical works. By applying disabled, neurodivergent, and mad lenses to Rousseau. I provide a framework to understand the tensions between authenticity and falsehood, belief in mankind and misanthropy, and understanding and misunderstanding in his work.

Efficiency is often overlooked as an ethical value and seen as ethically relevant chiefly when it conflicts with other values, such as equality. This article argues that efficiency is a rich and philosophically interesting concept deserving of independent normative examination. Drawing on a detailed healthcare case study, we argue that making assessments of efficiency involves value-laden, deliberative judgments about how to characterize the functioning of human systems. Personal and emotional resources and ends are crucial to system functioning but are often discounted in favor of a relatively narrow set of financial inputs and institutional or procedural outputs. Judgments about efficiency tend to advantage (or disadvantage) different parties, depending on the resources and ends considered. Different constructions of efficiency can therefore promote or neglect the perspectives and interests of differently placed actors. Models of efficiency do not merely embody contestable ethical standpoints but-put to use-can unwittingly reify and reproduce them.

Generally speaking, BPD is a cognitive-affective disposition that shapes one's conception and experience of herself, and also her experiences of interrelationality. Many BPD symptoms relating to affect regulation are spurred by psychosocial complications that can then exacerbate psychosocial complications in future relationships. One consequence of affective dysregulation due to abuse-induced trauma can be persistent interpersonal breakdowns. Such breakdowns can be caused by the inability of two differently affectively disposed persons to harmonize according to what person each needs based on a set of supposedly shared norms and expectations. Attempting to identify specific ethical issues related to affective disruptions in interrelational harmonizing requires that one pull together the embodied experiences of BPD and the effects of those experiences on interpersonal relationships and then position that distinctive dynamic within an ethico-epistemological framework. I believe that one critical trigger for BPD affective dysregulation comes from the role of abuse-induced trauma in the cultivation of the BPDer's body memory. I offer a description of this phenomenology, which I ground in the philosophy of embodied cognition. The relationship between trauma and the embodied memory matters to ethical conversations about BPD because it is crucial to see how trauma that manifests as a specific kind of affective disposition can influence the ethical harmonizing of interpersonal interactions.I write this analysis from my own first-person experience of someone diagnosed with severe BPD.

In this paper, I discuss bipolar disorder (BD) and identity. My general goal is to argue that working on BD and identity from a philosophical, interdisciplinary perspective has promise to be beneficial for empirical research on the topic, for people with BD, and for philosophical treatment of identity. I first argue that both people with BD and empirical researchers on the topic of BD and identity implicitly understand "identity" as it is understood in (some areas of) philosophy. Namely, as identity in the characterization sense and, often, specifically as practical identity. I call this conception of identity "characterization-identity". If this is the case, then empirical researchers have more data to work with when trying to understand why people with BD experience particular difficulties with identity: they can appeal to the extant work on characterization-identity. Having argued that the researchers and people with BD understand "identity" in this way, I move to making the case that, insofar as we have a sound account of characterization-identity, this method of research has the potential to be mutually beneficial: (1) Work on characterization-identity can explicate the empirical work on, and first-hand experience of, BD and difficulty with identity. (2) The empirical work and first-hand accounts suggest a desideratum for a good account of identity. And (3) the interdisciplinary treatment of the topic could generate therapeutic interventions for people with BD.