A longitudinal perspective on motherhood that spans the experience of gestation, birthing, the care of young children, and the mother’s relation to her grown children makes way for a conception of the mother as essentially plural. It shall be argued in this paper that maternity is necessarily tied to surrogacy, that it is divided into a multiplicity of tasks inevitably parceled out to multiple agents. In this essay, the analysis of maternal surrogacy is focused on the phenomenon of mothering (...) from a distance, a maternal practice engendered by the feminization and globalization of labor markets. By both affirming the value of maternal surrogates and questioning the limits of surrogacy, this analysis of motherhood challenges both the economic exploitation that engenders and sustains distant mothering and the gendered division of care labor that supports the global economy of care. (shrink)

In a host surrogate motherhood arrangement, the surrogate agrees to be implanted with, and carry to term, an embryo created from the commissioning couple9s gametes. When the surrogate child is born, it is the surrogate mother who, according to UK law, holds the legal status of mother. By contrast, the commissioning mother possesses no maternal status and she can only attain it once the surrogate agrees to the completion of the arrangement. One consequence of this is that, in the (...) event that a host arrangement fails, the commissioning mother is left without maternal status. In this paper, I argue that this denial of maternal status misrepresents the commissioning mother9s role in the host arrangement and her relationship with the surrogate child. Consequently, I suggest that commissioning mothers participating in host surrogacy arrangements ought to be granted the status of mother in the event that the arrangement fails. (shrink)

This article examines pregnancy as a dyadic body-project within surrogate motherhood arrangements. In gestational surrogacy arrangements, the surrogate mother agrees to have an embryo that has been created using IVF, with the genetic materials of the intended parents or of anonymous donors, surgically implanted in her womb. Based on anthropological fieldwork among Jewish-Israeli surrogates and intended mothers involved in these arrangements, this article focuses upon the interactive identity management practices that the women jointly undertake during the pregnancy. For each (...) side, creating an unambiguous definition of motherhood was central to their individual identity-work. For surrogates, the possible imputations of immorality required redefining pregnant embodiment as separate from maternal identity, while for intended mothers, the surrogate’s embodiment of the pregnancy represented competing claims to their own maternity. Through verbal communication and through practices of disembodiment and vicarious embodiment, the women construct a ‘shifting body’ which they use to designate the social label of pregnancy, identity-building processes associated with pregnant embodiment, and even the lived experience of pregnancy. This example of a dyadic body-project contributes to the existing scholarship on the role of the body in the management of identity. While previous works have examined projects of the body as individualistic pursuits, the shifting body exemplifies that body-projects can be collaborative, dual forms of identity-work and that pregnancy can be the site of these projects. (shrink)

Surrogacy is one of the desired reproductive technologies for family formation, yet surrogate mothers are subjected to unethical treatments and unbalanced power relations in India. Such treatment obscures women’s free decision-making and can be detrimental to their maternal self. Recently, the Surrogacy Act, 2021, has received the President’s approval to regulate surrogacy practices by limiting them for the altruistic motives which have again provoked the burning debates regarding reproductive technologies, women’s emancipation and procreative labour. The paper thus explores women’s (...) agency, maternal freedom and surrogate arrangements in Indian society. The complexity of the implementation of the law, vulnerability of surrogate labour, woman’s bodily autonomy and reproductive choices have been analysed. This has been done through comprehensive feminist discussions on motherhood experience in terms of enforced vs. voluntary to find the way to protect women’s freedom and subjectivity in the task of ‘mothering as empowerment’. (shrink)

The paper critically engages with Simone de Beauvoir’s promising claim that reproductive technology is the emancipatory tool for women and the Indian problem of surrogacy. Beauvoir believes in voluntary motherhood in which reproductive technologies play a significant role in empowering women. Although in India, surrogacy is seen as a choice-based job, surrogate mothers are subjected to exploitation, commodification, poor living conditions, and unethical treatment. I argue that Beauvoir’s description of technology and motherhood needs further revision in today’s world where surrogacy (...) is not only disempowering women but also crushing their maternal self by viewing them merely as machines for fulfilling societal values. Recently, the Indian government has taken strong majors to regularise surrogacy will be further explored. In doing so, an attempt will be made to critically analyse the meanings of women’s choices in relation to the use of reproductive technologies within the existentialist framework of Beauvoir. (shrink)

Care of the critically ill newborn includes support for the birth mother/parents with regular updates around the clinical condition of the baby, and involvement in discussions around complex decision-making issues. Discussions around continuation or discontinuation of life-sustaining are challenging even in the most straightforward of cases, but what happens when the birth mother is critically unwell? Such cases can lead to uncertainty around who should assume the parental role for these difficult discussions. In this round table discussion, we explore the (...) ethical, moral and legal uncertainties raised by coincident severe maternal and neonatal illness in the context of surrogacy. (shrink)

The feminist movement remains fundamentally divided over the issue of surrogacy. Within the confines of this article it is argued that the inadequacy of positions on both sides of the debate rests upon their common tendency to deal with the ethical consequences of surrogacy for isolated agents, without sufficient concern for the broader social implications for all pregnant women in society. In order to clarify the issues involved, feminist theorists must consider the implications of surrogacy in a broader social spectrum. (...) Such an analysis will illustrate that the two-person dichotomous model of the maternal-foetal relationship proposed by the surrogacy arrangement has hugely prejudicial effects on the treatment received by non-contract mothers when they interact with agents of certain social institutions whose prior contact with surrogate mothers has made them more susceptible to conceiving the maternal-foetal relationship as fundamentally disconnected. In a climate of increased medical surveillance and intervention in the non-clinical context of pregnancy, the dangers of adopting this dichotomous model are palpable. Given the oppressive physical and psychological effect that this would have upon the liberty of the majority of pregnant women in society, this article argues that the feminist movement must abandon any promotion of the abstracted model of the mother-foetus relationship that is implicit in its arguments in favour of surrogacy. (shrink)

Next SectionReproductive medical tourism is by some accounts a multibillion dollar industry globally. The seeking by clients in high income nations of surrogate mothers in low income nations, particularly India, presents a set of largely unexamined ethical challenges. In this paper, eight such challenges are elucidated to spur discussion and eventual policy development towards protecting the rights and health of vulnerable women of the Global South.

Studies on surrogate motherhood have mostly explored paid arrangements through the lens of a contract model, as clinical work or as a maternal identity-building project. Turning to the under-examined case of unpaid, so-called altruistic surrogate motherhood and based on an analysis of interviews with women who had been unpaid surrogate mothers in a full gestational surrogacy with a friend or relative in Canada, the United States or Australia, this article explores altruistic surrogate motherhood as relational work. It argues that (...) this form of surrogate motherhood within close interpersonal relations can be conceptualised through the relational work involved in hosting a child for the intended parents. The article explores how relational work in this context implies an embodied, asymmetrical and far-reaching sense of responsibility that surrogate mothers describe as characteristic of their surrogacy experience. In this way, the article sheds light on feminist concerns about surrogacy as an embodied and objectifying work of women while at the same time illuminating how surrogate mothers respond to the intended parents in light of their pre-surrogacy relationship, how meanings are negotiated by them and how relationships are managed during the pregnancy. (shrink)

The law ordinarily recognises the woman who gives birth as the mother of a child, but in certain jurisdictions, it will recognise the commissioning couple as the legal parents of a child born to a commercial surrogate. Some commissioning parents have, however, effectively abandoned the children they commission, and in such cases, commercial surrogates may find themselves facing unexpected maternal responsibility for children they had fully intended to give up. Any assumption that commercial surrogates ought to assume (...) maternal responsibility for abandoned children runs contrary to the moral suppositions that typically govern contract surrogacy, in particular, assumptions that gestational carriers are not ‘mothers’ in any morally significant sense. In general, commercial gestational surrogates are almost entirely conceptualised as ‘vessels’. In a moral sense, it is deeply inconsistent to expect commercial surrogates to assume maternal responsibility simply because commissioning parents abandon children for one reason or another. We identify several instances of child abandonment and discuss their implications with regard to the moral conceptualisation of commercial gestational surrogates. We conclude that if gestational surrogates are to remain conceptualised as mere vessels, they should not be expected to assume responsibility for children abandoned by commissioning parents, not even the limited responsibility of giving them up for adoption or surrendering them to the state. (shrink)

Refusing treatment for potentially curable childhood cancers engenders much discussion and debate. I present a case in which the competent parents of a young Amish child with acute myeloid leukemia deferred authority for decision making to the child’s maternal grandfather, who was vocal in his opposition to treatment. I analyze three related concerns that distinguish this case from other accounts of refused treatment.First, I place deference to grandparents as decision makers in the context of surrogate decision making more generally.Second, (...) the maternal grandfather’s ardent refusal of treatment and his rationale appeared to be inconsistent with the beliefs expressed by other family members and by members of the same Amish community, leading members of the medical team to question whether refusal of treatment should be treated differently when it appears to be based on the idiosyncratic beliefs of an individual rather than on community-wide values.Third, the medical team perceived tension and dissension between the nonverbal behavior of some family members and the verbal statements made by the maternal grandfather, leading the team to question the parents’ true wishes and debate how to weigh nonverbal and indirect forms of communication.Finally, building upon the conclusions of these queries, I explore whether, if the child’s prognosis was less favorable or if he were to relapse later, the maternal grandfather should have been permitted to drive a decision to refuse further treatment. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:This Birth and ThatSurrogacy and Stratified Motherhood in IndiaAmrita PandeIn 2006, i came across a short newspaper article about the emergence of a new industry in India—the industry of paid birth or commercial surrogacy. People from all over the world could now hire Indian women to give birth to babies for them, for a fraction of the cost of surrogacy elsewhere and with no government regulations. After some digging (...) around, I quickly realized that there was scarcely any objective, academic research about this new industry, and so began my ethnographic journey to the first clinic in not just India but in fact in the entire Global South to have a flourishing trade in both national and transnational surrogacy.1Academic inquiry into surrogacy arrangements is adequately interdisciplinary and has generated feminist, ethical, legal, and social debates for more than three decades (see, for example, Andrews 1987; Anderson 1990; Bailey 2011; Brennan and Noggle 1997; Hochschild 2012; Markens 2007; Oliver 1989; Ragoné 1994; Pande 2011; and Teman 2010). While defenders of surrogacy advocate it as a manifestation of women’s freedom and choice, much of the scholarship has displayed intense anxiety about this practice (Corea 1986; Dworkin 1983; Harding 1991; Neuhaus 1988; Raymond 1993; Roberts 1998b; and Rothman 1988). One view is that surrogacy reduces women to a mere breeder class, to the class of prostitutes, and another is that it is just another form of baby selling. Others consider the development of such reproductive technologies as a form of class and gender-based exploitation of women’s bodies. Two additional trends in this scholarship are worth emphasizing. First, [End Page 50] much of the debating takes place in abstraction and is rarely based on the actual experience of surrogates.2 Second,much of this work is about surrogacy in the Global North. This is not altogether surprising, since commercial surrogacy is a very recent phenomenon outside of the Global North.In this essay, I address these two gaps in the literature by analyzing the birthing narratives of surrogates in a clinic in India. As the surrogates compare their experiences of giving birth as a surrogate mother to their previous pregnancies, they underscore the paradox of an industry based on pro-natal technology in an otherwise anti-natal state. As importantly, these narratives are a clear manifestation of a global trend of “stratified motherhood”—“the hierarchical organization of reproductive fecundity and birth experiences that supports and rewards the maternity of some women while despising or outlawing the mother-work of others” (Rapp 2001, 469).Surrogacy in IndiaThe moral and ethical ambiguity surrounding surrogacy has made many countries, including China, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Turkey, and some U.S. states ban surrogacy altogether. Some countries have imposed partial bans, for instance Australia (Victoria), Brazil, Hong Kong, Hungary, Israel, South Africa, and the UK. Canada, Greece, South Africa, Israel, and the UK permit gestational surrogacy, subject to regulations. Then there are other countries with no regulations at all, such as Belgium, Finland, and India (Markens 2007; Teman 2010). Apart from the recent spurt of surrogacy in India, commercial surrogacy is most prevalent in California, USA, and Israel, where surrogacy is tightly controlled by the state and restricted to Israeli citizens. The Indian structure is closer to the liberal market model of surrogacy in California, where surrogacy births are primarily managed by private, commercial agencies that screen, match, and regulate agreements according to their own criteria (Pande 2009).India is not the only country to experience a rise in transnational surrogacy. Couples from countries such as the UK, Japan, Australia, and Kuwait, where surrogacy is either illegal or restricted, have hired surrogates in the United States to bear babies for them. However, while the total cost of such transnational packages is roughly between $100,000 and $120,000, in India the package costs one-third of that amount. Another factor that explains the popularity of India as a destination for transnational surrogacy is the informality of the market. Although commercial surrogacy is not illegal in India in 2002, currently there are no laws regulating surrogacy in clinics. Fertility clinics... (shrink)

The mother–adult daughter relationship has been highlighted in both the social sciences and the public health literature as an important facet of social support networks, particularly as they pertain to maternal and child health. Evolutionary anthropologists also have shown positive associations between support from maternal grandmothers and various outcomes related to reproductive success; however, many of these studies rely on proximity as a surrogate measure of support. Here I present data from the Puerto Rican Maternal and Infant (...) Health Survey (PRMIHS) comparing geographic proximity of mother and daughter with a self-reported measure of mother-to-daughter support. These two measures were used to predict infant health outcomes as well as various measures of instrumental and emotional aid provided during pregnancy and after birth. Primary support was shown to have a positive effect across the analyses, whereas geographic proximity was associated with an increased risk of infant mortality and low birth weight as well as reduced odds of receiving support. This paradox was then examined using a combination variable that teased out the interactions of maternal support and proximity. Women who were geographically close to their mothers but who did not consider them a primary source of support had increased odds of infant death and low birth weight, and were less likely to receive either tangible or intangible forms of aid, while women whose mothers were both close and primary showed uniformly positive outcomes. These results place the role of propinquity within the larger context of social support and highlight the need for more detailed studies of social support within evolutionary anthropology. (shrink)

It has been a common claim that surrogacy is morally problematic since it involves harm to the child or the surrogate—the harm argument. Due to a growing body of empirical research, the harm argument has seen a decrease in popularity, as there seems to be little evidence of harmful consequences of surrogacy. In this article, two revised versions of the harm argument are developed. It is argued that the two suggested versions of the harm argument survive the current criticism against (...) the standard harm argument. The first version argues that the child is harmed by being separated from the gestational mother. The second version directs attention to the fact that surrogacy involves great incentives to keep the gestational mother’s level of maternal-fetal attachment low, which tend to increase the risk of harm to the child. While neither of the two arguments is conclusive regarding the moral status of surrogacy, both constitute important considerations that are often ignored. (shrink)

This thesis aims to determine whether international gestational surrogacy contracts are exploitative, and whether they should be prohibited. I chose a group of women working as surrogates at Kaival Maternity Home and Surgical Hospital, in Anand, Gujarat, India as a study group. After examining their life circumstances, I argue that these women live in unjust circumstances caused by institutional sexism and poverty. I critically assess arguments launched against surrogacy, organ trade, and prostitution and find that none of these are (...) sufficient for demonstrating that contracts involving the sale of the body are necessarily exploitative. I find that surrogacy is exploitative because of a complex set of social conditions. Further, the contracts are beneficial to both the woman acting as surrogate and to the couple hiring her. I conclude that international gestational surrogacy is exploitative yet mutually beneficial, and prohibiting surrogacy would be harmful unless accompanied by drastic social change. (shrink)

Some commentators maintain that gestational surrogates are not ‘mothers’ in a way capable of grounding a claim to motherhood. These commentators find that the practices that constitute motherhood do not extend to gestational surrogates. We argue that gestational surrogates should be construed as mothers of the children they bear, even if they fully intend to surrender those children at birth to the care of others. These women stand in a certain relationship to the expected children: they live (...) in changed moral circumstances by reason of their pregnancy, and they engage in the practices said to define motherhood in the post‐birth context. By contrast, ovum donors and embryo donors are not similarly ‘mothers’ because they do not find themselves involved in these circumstances. Not all women involved in three‐parent in vitro fertilization qualify as mothers either. Given this analysis of mothering, we note that transmen who gestate children are engaged in mothering activity even if they otherwise function as a father to those children. By itself, this defence of the maternity of gestational surrogates does not confer moral title to the children they bear; gestation would not by itself override the contractual arrangements gestational surrogates have made regarding the disposition of their children. This interpretation of gestational surrogates as mothers does, however, undercut cultural understandings of these women as mere ‘vessels’, devoid of entitlement to respect as persons and parents. We also consider the meaning of mothering for ‘brain‐dead’ women kept alive to give birth and for the prospect of extracorporeal gestation. (shrink)

Background: Treatment of psychotic disorders in pregnancy is often ethically and clinically challenging, especially when psychotic symptoms impair decision-making capacity. There are several competing ethical obligations to consider: the ethical obligation to maternal autonomy, the maternal and fetal beneficence-based obligations to treat peripartum psychosis, and the fetal beneficence-based obligation to minimize teratogenic exposure. Objective: This article outlines an ethical framework for clinical decision-making for the management of chronic psychosis in pregnancy, with an emphasis on special considerations in the (...) previable and periviable period. Case Presentation: A 31-year-old gravida 2, para 1 with intrauterine pregnancy at 12 weeks and 4 days gestation was brought to the emergency department by her husband seven months after delivering her first child, due to sudden onset of behavioral changes that included self-isolation, not eating, and not taking care of her child. Her past medical history included hypothyroidism and inflammatory bowel disease, but no prior psychiatric illness. After being admitted to the psychiatric hospital, she continued to have poor oral intake and weight loss despite initial inpatient treatment with antipsychotics, levothyroxine, and discontinuation of corticosteroids. Her pregnancy was also complicated by the diagnosis of multiple fetal anomalies at 20 weeks gestation, when the fetus was periviable. Conclusions: For previable or periviable pregnancies, the patient and/or surrogate should decide whether to pursue prenatal genetic screening and invasive diagnostic testing, as well as whether to continue or terminate the pregnancy. When the choice is made to continue the pregnancy, initiation of long-term psychiatric treatment (including medications with potential adverse fetal effects) should be based on shared decision-making between the physician and the patient and/or surrogate. Although some pharmacologic interventions may have potential adverse effects on the developing fetus, the use of psychotropic medications can be ethically justified, even if the patient herself does not have the capacity to consent and requires a surrogate, when the goal is to restore maternal autonomy and minimize the risks of maternal and fetal harm from untreated psychiatric illness. (shrink)

An Irish surrogacy case from 2013 illustrates how negotiations of the mother’s identity in a given national and legal context are drawing on novel scientific perspectives, at a time when the use of new biotechnological possibilities is becoming more widespread and commonplace. The Roman dictum, ‘Mater Semper Certa Est’ is contested by the finding of this Irish court, in which the judge made a declaration of parentage stating that the genetic parents of twins born using a surrogate were the parents. (...) This article critically examines the normative background assumptions involved in this ruling. It will argue that the particular deployment of arguments from genetics and epigenetics in this court case produces a naturalization of the mother’s identity that is inherently reductive. A second surrogacy case is also examined, this time regarding the rights of a woman of Irish nationality to receive paid maternity leave or paid leave similar to adoptive leave after the birth of her daughter to a surrogate mother in the US state of California. This case, which was brought to the Equality Tribunal in Ireland and decided by the Court of Justice of the European Union, is used to illustrate the possible ramifications of conflicting definitions of motherhood in the legal system. In concluding, this article argues for the development and deployment of a more complex understanding of the evolving state of motherhood within the courts, in keeping with developments in the IVF industry and the various new mother-relations it makes possible. (shrink)

Much more than their machinic reality, current iterations of AI rely on imagined divisions of human and non-human properties and skills that have genealogical ties to colonization. For this reason, research efforts have recently been made to historicize these imaginaries, connecting them to colonial ideals that delegate black and brown colonized people into the realm of the non-human. Atanasoski and Vora (Surrogate humanity. Race, robots and the politics of technological futures, Duke, Durham and London, 2019) have called this a “surrogate (...) humanity”, where narratives of autonomous technologies function to disappear precisely the formerly colonized peoples that are enveloped in its production process. At the same time, the gendered and racialized roots of this maternal figure represents an opportunity to uncover and critique the invisibilization of embodied resources necessary to produce AI, precarious bodies labouring to produce algorithmic infrastructures in a manner that can be considered in a genealogy of carework and reproduction. These genealogies complicate the detachment suggested by the surrogate figure and go beyond it to proclaim a more generative function of the relationship between the black maternal figure and AI. The article analyses Tabita Rezaire’s multi-media artwork Sugar Walls Teardom to think through decolonial and queer renderings of the black female bodies upon which technological imaginaries rest, to extend beyond AI surrogacy and towards notions of kinship, care and world-making by producing an AI aesthetics that is relational, embodied, and celebratory of other ways of liveness. (shrink)

Kant's contribution to modern Protestant theology is as unmistakable as it is controversial. The authors of this volume are investigating a new perspective on the work of theology and the effects of Kant's philosophy of religion concentrated on biblical hermeneutics and dogmatic theology.

In den Publikationen der Synthetischen Biologie und in Darstellungen dieser neuen Biotechnologie finden sich häufig Begriffe des Herstellens, Konstruierens, Erschaffens und Kreierens. Im folgenden Beitrag wird dieses Begriffsfeld auf der Basis von technikphilosophischen und kunsttheoretischen Ansätzen systematisiert. Es wird erstens untersucht, inwiefern sich die verschiedenen Forschungsrichtungen in der Synthetischen Biologie mit diesem Begriffsinstrumentarium angemessen beschreiben lassen; zweitens wird analysiert, welche ethischen Fragestellungen mit den unterschiedlichen Begriffen des Herstellens und Erschaffens im Fall der Synthetischen Biologie verbunden sind.

Cet article a pour objectif de montrer l’importance de la réception de la théologie politique de J.B. Metz auprès de certains théologiens soucieux de la dimension politique de la foi chrétienne. L’étude présente les réactions immédiates au projet théologique de Metz pour ensuite se focaliser sur des théologiens contemporains. Premièrement, on trouve J. Milbank, qui apprécie la pensée de Metz en la confrontant à son programme de Radical Orthodoxy. Deuxièmement, on rencontre H.-J. Gagey et J.-L. Souletie, qui évaluent la force (...) politique de la théologie de Metz. Enfin, on découvre la façon dont L. Boeve reprend de façon personnelle certains aspects de la pensée du théologien allemand. Pour terminer, l’article propose une réflexion synthétique et critique sur cette réception, avec le souci de montrer la pertinence de la théologie politique de Metz et sa capacité à stimuler la réflexion sur le rapport foi et société. (shrink)

In Speaking for the Dying: Life‐and‐Death Decisions in Intensive Care, Susan Shapiro attempts to penetrate and organize the chaotic communications between physicians and family members who are making medical decisions for people who have lost the capacity to make their own medical decisions. The work is based on observations undertaken by Shapiro and a coresearcher of one thousand encounters between physicians and the family members of two hundred patients too sick to participate. Their ethnographic work, which is both traditional and (...) innovative, leads to stunning findings. They reveal an inadequacy among surrogates that is undeniable, vast, and potentially tragic—if measured by the questionable standard of adhering to the patient's preferences. Further confirming research would be helpful, but what Shapiro has recognized already should shake the foundations of advance care planning. (shrink)

In this paper, we explore young Polish Catholic mothers' moral reasoning on abortion. We draw on the concept of maternal knowledge and theoretical insights developed within the ethics of care to shed light on the complexities and contradictions experienced by Catholic mothers in the context of reproductive choices. The narratives we gathered through in-depth interviews illustrate how mothers evoke embodied, experience-based maternal knowledge to challenge hegemonic frameworks associated with legal, medical, and religious authoritative knowledges. We show how mothers (...) engage critically with ideologized notions of sacrifice and suffering by placing these concepts in the context of relational maternal care work and argue that mothers adopt a position on the moral permissibility of abortion by reinterpreting religious norms and ideas, such as the protection of the family and vocation of care. (shrink)

This paper attempts to theorise the labour and corporeal carcerability of the non-citizen non-subjects in contemporary democracies of the United States and India. I reappropriate Joy James’ framework of ‘Captive Maternals’ to understand the relationality between the undocumented, racialised, or incarcerated with the neo-liberal states that they inhabit and serve but where they do not belong. James describes Captive Maternals as those bodies subject to consumption by the democratic order in the tradition of slavery. I expand upon her framework to (...) argue that the dehumanisation of illegal ‘aliens’ and racially policed bodies not only challenges the notion of freedom in the modern democratic social organisation but rather manifests the fundamental correlation between democratic sovereignty and its exclusionary violence. This phenomenon internal to the workings of democracies challenges Hegel’s idealisation of the modern rational state as the most advanced form of government characterised primarily by freedom. Democracy also constitutes the exercise of necropolitical sovereignty which I interpret not as the right to kill but as the right to police and incarcerate. Against the Hegelian struggle for recognition (Anerkennung), I deliberate on the possibility of transcending to a less than fully-determined Sittlichkeit that does not rely upon reciprocal recognition. (shrink)

The most popular uniting theme in feminist peace literature grounds women's peace work in mothering. I argue if maternal arguments do not address the variety of relationships different races and classes of mothers have to institutional violence and/or the military, then the resulting peace politics can only draw incomplete conclusions about the relationships between maternal work/thinking and peace. To illustrate this I compare two models of mothering: Sara Ruddick's decription of "maternal practice" and Patricia Hill Collins's account (...) of racial-ethnic women's "motherwork.". (shrink)

A case is presented in which the therapeutic interests of the patient conflict with the safety of a community, and in which the surrogate decision maker has very limited knowledge of or concern for the patient’s preferences. The substituted judgment and best interest (or rational patient) standards for surrogate decision making are problematic in this case. It is argued that the interests of even those outside the family ought to be taken seriously when making decisions about such cases, and it (...) is proposed that clinical ethics committees could play a new role here. This case also illustrates the difficulties of making decisions regarding the treatment of a very unlikable patient. (shrink)

Topic modelling is a popular unsupervised method for text processing that provides interpretable document representation. One of the most high-level approaches is additively regularized topic models (ARTM). This method features better quality than other methods due to its flexibility and advanced regularization abilities. However, it is challenging to find an optimal learning strategy to create high-quality topics because a user needs to select the regularizers with their values and determine the order of application. Moreover, it may require many real runs (...) or model training which makes this task time consuming. At the current moment, there is a lack of research on parameter optimization for ARTM-based models. Our work proposes an approach that formalizes the learning strategy into a vector of parameters which can be solved with evolutionary approach. We also propose a surrogate-based modification which utilizes machine learning methods that makes the approach for parameters search time efficient. We investigate different optimization algorithms (evolutionary and Bayesian) and their modifications with surrogates in application to topic modelling optimization using the proposed learning strategy approach. An experimental study conducted on English and Russian datasets indicates that the proposed approaches are able to find high-quality parameter solutions for ARTM and substantially reduce the execution time of the search. (shrink)

Conservative ethical systems, particularly organized religions, are frequently at odds with the means, if not the goals of the new reproductive technologies. Among the most problematic measures adopted in recent years to allow childless women to raise genetically related offspring is surrogate motherhood. Traditional Jewish law, or Halakha, notwithstanding this reluctance, is, nevertheless, more likely than many others to find reasons to justify the practice, given its well-known stance viz procreation and its leniency regarding the new reproductive technologies. In the (...) following article, we ask whether Halakha, which allows abortion to save the life of a mother, would sanction the employment of a surrogacy arrangement in the case where pregnancy threats her life, in order to save the fetus as well. (shrink)

It is usually taken for granted, in discussions about fiction, that real things or events can occur as referents of fictional names . In this paper, I take issue with this view, and provide several arguments to the effect that it is better to take the names in fiction to refer to fictional surrogates of real objects. Doing so allows us to solve a series of problems that arise on the reference-continuity view. I also show that the arguments philosophers (...) usually rely on in order to ban surrogates are not as serious as they have been taken to be. In the first part of the paper, I describe the two conflicting views. In the second part, I discuss several specific arguments in favor of surrogates. In the third part I take up the kind of reasons ordinarily offered against them. (shrink)

Surrogates introduces an important new philosophic topic: the pervasive ways that things stand for one another in nature and human experience. Going beyond semiotic theory, Paul Weiss interprets surrogacy in terms of metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, and religious dimensions of life, integrating the concept into a systematic way of regarding reality. Just as philosophy brings a systematic set of questions to the issue of surrogate reality, Weiss’s investigation of the topic raises new questions for philosophy itself, manifesting his great concern (...) for philosophy’s freedom and creativity. The author concludes each chapter with a provocative set of questions and answers that engage imagined critics in a dialogue. Together with his previous book, Emphatics, Surrogates constitutes a richly textured phenomenology of human experience with important ramifications for contemporary pragmatism. The wit and intelligence of this volume are a delight for any reader. (shrink)

In the natural and social sciences, it is common to use toy models—extremely simple and highly idealized representations—to understand complex phenomena. Some of the simple surrogate models used to understand opaque machine learning (ML) models, such as rule lists and sparse decision trees, bear some resemblance to scientific toy models. They allow non-experts to understand how an opaque ML model works globally via a much simpler model that highlights the most relevant features of the input space and their effect on (...) the output. The obvious difference is that the common target of a toy and a full-scale model in the sciences is some phenomenon in the world, while the target of a surrogate model is another model. This essential difference makes toy surrogate models (TSMs) a new object of study for theories of understanding, one that is not easily accommodated under current analyses. This paper provides an account of what it means to understand an opaque ML model globally with the aid of such simple models. (shrink)