Hastings Center Report最新文献

This letter responds to “‘Please Baptize My Son’: The Case against Baptizing a Dying, Unconscious Atheist,” by Tate Shepherd and Michael Redinger, and “The Case for Baptizing a Dying, Unconscious Atheist,” by Abram Brummett and Nelson Jones, in the January-February 2025 issue of the Hastings Center Report.

John Z. Sadler's Vice and Psychiatric Diagnosis (Oxford University Press, 2024) explores the profound influence of moral and cultural values on the diagnoses that excuse criminal behavior. Recognizing the overlap of legal and clinical frameworks that society uses to make sense of sex, violence, and general accountability, Sadler dissects the diagnoses that contain more values than validation, exploring the divisions that result as health care and criminal legal systems struggle to manage justice-involved persons. His analysis is a response to criminalizing mental illness and using the legal system rather than rehabilitative services and diversion into treatment. The appeal for a rehabilitative model that emphasizes humanistic values is a call for criminal justice reform alongside diagnostic clarity.

On the cover: Between a Thing and a Thought, by Susan Aldworth, 2002, collagraph print, 20 × 20 cm.

Private Collection © Susan Aldworth. All Rights Reserved 2025/Bridgeman Images

One of the many arguments against the genetic enhancement of children is that the children enhanced in this way would have restricted freedom by being controlled by the design of their parents. These normative arguments are based on empirical assumptions about the experience of such children, but these assumptions have never been tested. In this paper, I first discuss the mechanisms by which such a loss of freedom would occur. I then produce a test of these assumptions using a survey experiment from a U.S. nationally representative survey with 3,401 adult respondents. The results suggest that the empirical assumptions in the literature are correct and that an enhanced child will experience less freedom than would an unenhanced child.

Chronic diseases impose enormous health and economic burdens in the United States, especially on marginalized populations, and demand evidence-based, equity-focused interventions. To combat chronic disease, the Trump administration established the Make America Healthy Again Commission, chaired by Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. However, the MAHA Commission appears to be both ideologically driven and scientifically unsound, and as a consequence, its prospects of proposing policies that meaningfully address chronic disease are exceedingly low. Instead of adopting an evidence-based approach, in his actions and comments to date, Secretary Kennedy has undermined established science, particularly on vaccines; gutted U.S. science and public health infrastructure, including segments responsible for addressing chronic disease; and prioritized concerns that have little basis in science. This essay describes the burden of chronic diseases in the United States, digs deeper into the MAHA agenda, discusses the ethics of chronic disease prevention, and identifies evidence-based policies that would actually be effective in combatting chronic diseases.

About ten years ago, Ezekiel Emanuel wrote an article extolling the benefits of dying at seventy-five. Since then, longevity and aging interest, research, and funding have exploded. Much of the public is supportive of aging biology research, and books on extending the human lifespan populate bestseller lists. However, the issue remains hotly debated, and many articles published in the lay press spin the research in a negative light. Yet, if we collect these arguments and address each one logically, we see that each implies untenable conclusions. More to the point, there are strong arguments that human health and life have fundamental value and that incremental gains in health and in years of life will benefit us. For both ethical and practical reasons, we should support aging research.

On the cover: Chatbot, by Tage Fredheim, oil on canvas, 135 × 110 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

This commentary explicates the social and cultural work of the word “disability” by reviewing the history of the civil and human rights movements and of legislation establishing people with disabilities as a social group protected from discrimination and entitled to the right to request reasonable accommodations—a legislative initiative that has shifted “disability” from a predominantly medical label to a social and political identity.