Political theorists, increasingly, are realizing the virtues of contextuality to conceptual analysis. Just as theory may provide useful standards for the assessment of political practices, so may application of theoretical constructs within particular contexts provide a critical corrective to theory. This essay relates work undertaken within sociolegal studies applying a constitutive methodology to such efforts to contextualize political theorizing. The essay describes how the emphasis placed by constitutive theory on locality and meaning entails a contextual analysis. The essay then demonstrates (...) how a constitutive and contextual approach can enhance our understanding of the moral issues surrounding differentiated citizenship policy. While the most obvious cost associated with differentiated citizenship policy is a loss in formal equality, a contextual assessment demonstrates the prospect of an even deeper, though ultimately contingent, moral loss in self-invention. (shrink)

Prevailing accounts of the relationship between rights and identity impose a false choice between conceptions of rights as the instrument of self-invention or the foil to collective virtue. This article proposes an alternative conception of rights as constitutive of social relations and aspects of individual identity. To do so, it draws on H. L. A. Hart's famous distinction between special and general rights, and it describes the exclusionary and inclusionary conditions under which these forms of right constitute social groups and (...) self-meaning. Further, it specifies a pure form of «constitutive right», overlooked in Hart's typology, but extant in modern liberal, pluralistic societies, that inherently differentiates among persons and so directly constitutes aspects of human identity. (shrink)

The theory and practice of history and its relevance to the modern world, by Britains greatest radical historian.

" Dr. Cassell discusses the world of the sick, the healing connection and healer's battle, the role of omnipotence in the healer's art, illness and disease, and ...

Debates concerning the relationship between Tridentine Catholicism and Catholicism after Vatican II dominate theological conversation today, particularly with regard to understandings of the Church and its engagement with the world. Current historical narratives paint ecclesiology after the Council of Trent as dominated by juridical concerns, uniformity, and institutionalism. Purportedly neglected are the spiritual, diverse, and missional aspects of the Church. This book challenges such narratives by investigating the Spanish Jesuit Francisco Suárez's theology of ecclesial unity and catholicity. Analyzing standard as (...) well as overlooked sources of Suárez's ecclesiology, the author shows how Suárez wrestles with the new demands of his time and anticipates later ecumenical developments in twentieth-century Catholic ecclesiology. Early modern expansion prompted theologians after Trent to reckon with the ecclesial status of baptized Protestants, the Greek Orthodox, and non-believers in the New World. It further prompted reflection on the universality, or catholicity, of the Church, and how the Church's mission to the nations serves her greater unity in Christ. Throughout this exposition, the author reveals Suárez's vision of the Church to be deeply spiritual, diverse, and missional-not at the expense of the institutional, but as it's necessary and life-giving source. The Church, for Suárez, is primarily a way of life. This book explores not only Suárez's speculative ecclesiology, but how the unity and catholicity of the body of Christ is lived out in practice, that is, in the worship and works of the faithful, and, most notably, in the charism of his own religious order, the Society of Jesus. Suárez thus shows his readers what the spiritual dynamic between Christic unity and missional catholicity should look like in the Church. (shrink)

Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) is currently reserved predominantly for bridging patients to a different destination therapy, but the use of ECMO as a destination therapy itself (ECMO-DT...

The organization of the modern police is a contingent social choice about how to engage in the process of governance when regulating public order on the street. The police are the agency authorized to act upon the state’s duty to govern in response to public emergencies. The duty to govern exists when there is some urgent social need that could be resolved by acting, and some person or institution has the resources and ability to do that act. The duty is (...) impersonal: anybody with the relevant skill set is obligated to act to address the relevant need. Problems can arise, however, when too few individuals respond or too many compete to resolve the need. A core feature of governance, then, is to create publicly recognized institutions with special authority, resources, and abilities to address the demand for public services when someone needs to step in and do something to the exclusion of ordinary members of the public. Police agencies are further characterized by various powers and duties. These powers are normative powers to change the legal status of the people with whom the police interact, rather than physical powers to use some amount of violence to coerce individuals to comply with police demands. The core powers of the police include the powers to make authoritative determinations about how to respond to an emergency, to detain individuals, and to trespass upon their person or property, along with conjoined duties to govern, to protect, and to intervene at risk to themselves. The dominant approach attempts to distinguish the police from other institutions using the police ability to use violent to respond to public emergencies. On the governance based model of the police, however, the ability to use force is simply one of the resources available to the police, and does not mark them off as different from other public governance agencies. (shrink)

Much of the recent work on oncogenes has been interpreted as signifying that the cancerous phenotype is caused by the direct expression of ‘dominantly‐acting’ oncogenes. On the other hand, numerous somatic cell hybridization experiments suggest that there are potent tumour‐suppressor genes in the genome. The conflict between the observations and the possible nature of the relationships between oncogenes and tumour‐suppressor are discussed.

We show that if N and M are transitive models of ZFA such that N M, N and M have the same kernel and same set of atoms, and M AC, then N is a Fraenkel-Mostowski-Specker (FMS) submodel of M if and only if M is a generic extension of N by some almost homogeneous notion of forcing. We also develop a slightly modified notion of FMS submodels to characterize the case where M is a generic extension of N not (...) necessarily by an almost homogeneous notion of forcing. (shrink)

Medicine and ethics alike must learn properly to attend to suffering. We can never truly experience another's distress. We can, however, learn to recognize the particular purposes, values, and aesthetic responses that shape the sense of self whose integrity is threatened by pain, disease, and the mischances of life.

Let X be an infinite set and let and denote the propositions “every filter on X can be extended to an ultrafilter” and “X has a free ultrafilter”, respectively. We denote by the Stone space of the Boolean algebra of all subsets of X. We show: For every well‐ordered cardinal number ℵ, (ℵ) iff (2ℵ). iff “ is a continuous image of ” iff “ has a free open ultrafilter ” iff “every countably infinite subset of has a limit point”. (...) implies “every open filter on extends to an open ultrafilter” implies “has an open ultrafilter” implies It is relatively consistent with that (ω) holds, whereas (ω) fails. In particular, none of the statements given in (2) implies (ω). (shrink)

William Lawrence Tower’s work on the evolution of the Colorado Potato Beetle (_Leptinotarsa decemlineata_), documenting the environmental induction of mutation and speciation, made him a leading figure in experimental genetics during the first decade of the 20th century. His research program served as a model for other experimental evolution studies seeking to demonstrate the environmental modification of inheritance. Tower enjoyed the support of influential figures in the field, despite well-known problems that plagued Tower’s earlier academic career. The validity of his (...) genetic work, and other findings reported by Tower, were later challenged. The Tower affair illustrates how questionable and possibly fraudulent scientific practices can be tolerated to explore certain experimental directions and theoretical frameworks, particularly at the frontier of expanding disciplines. When needed, those explorations can be forestalled or extinguished by exploiting conspicuous vulnerabilities of rogue practitioners. In Tower’s case, both unrefuted allegations of scientific misconduct and personal problems dissolved his institutional support, leading to a swift ouster from academic science. Tower’s downfall discredited soft inheritance and neo-Lamarckian conceptions in the field of experimental genetics, facilitating the discipline’s embrace of a hard inheritance model that featured a hereditary material resistant to environmental modification. (shrink)

Sound is key to our lives, and is the most accessible portal to the vibratory universe. This book takes you there.

At the conclusion of his De lege naturae apodictica methodus, a treatise on the law of nature, how it is grasped by the human mind, and how it coheres with the Decalogue, Niels Hemmingsen claims to have eschewed the use of theological sources in his argument, claiming instead to have demonstrated ‘how far reason is able to progress without the prophetic and apostolic word’. Yet the reader of the treatise will notice several citations of theologians alongside those of pagan poets (...) and philosophers. This essay demonstrates that there is less here than meets the eye, that is, that Hemmingsen quotes theologians only to buttress what one can know from natural reason or the classical tradition, even when he is discussing God, and thus he does not violate his own stated principle. (shrink)

The cell division and differentiation events that occur during the development of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans are nearly identical between different individuals, a feature that distinguishes this organism from larger and more complex metazoans, such as humans and Drosophila. In view of this discrepancy, it might be expected that the regulation of cell growth, division and differentiation in C. elegans would involve mechanisms separate from those utilized in larger animals. However, the results of recent genetic, molecular and cellular studies indicate (...) that C. elegans employs an arsenal of developmental regulatory mechanisms quite similar to those wielded by its arthropod and vertebrate relatives. Thus, the nematode system is providing both novel and complementary insights into the general problem of how growth and patterning events are integrated in development. This review offers a general perspective on the regulation of cell division and growth in C. elegans, emphasizing recent studies of these crucial aspects of development. BioEssays 24:38–53, 2002. © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

This collection features essays from top experts in ethics and philosophy of love that offer varying perspectives on the value of a contemporary secular virtue of chastity. The virtue of chastity has traditionally been portrayed as an excellent personal disposition concerning the ideal ordering of sexual desire such that the person desires that which is actually good for both the self and others affected by his or her sexual desires and actions. Yet, for roughly the past half century chastity has (...) been increasingly portrayed as an unnecessary ideal with few secular benefits that could not be otherwise obtained. Instead, chastity is sometimes portrayed as an odd kind of religious asceticism with few secular benefits. The essays in this volume ask whether there may be advantages to reconsidering a contemporary virtue of chastity. A recovered and reconceptualized concept of chastity can offer partial solutions to problems associated with externalized sexual desire, including sweeping patterns of sexual harassment, the high divorce/relationship-failure rate, and widespread pornography use. Sexual Ethics in a Secular Age will appeal to researchers and advanced students interested in the philosophy of sex and love, virtue ethics, and philosophical accounts of secularity. (shrink)

The Supremacy of Love advocates an agape-centered vision of virtue ethics, combining traditional Aristotelian ethics with insights from Thomas Aquinas. It shows why virtue is good for the virtuous individual, reimagines impartiality so that it is compatible with close personal relationships, and has pluralistic cross-cultural applications.

To the Editor: Daniel Callahan is correct when, in “Rationing: Theory, Politics, and Passions”, he tells us that the combination of ever-rising medical costs and ever-increasing demand for expensive resources by physicians and their patients will—in the absence of any workable, generally acceptable mode of official rationing—lead to covert rationing. Or, more precisely, it will encourage us to extend the covert rationing that already exists, where those with more get more. As things stand now, this is unavoidable. However..

Book reviewed in this article: Thinking Clearly About Death. By Jay F. Rosenberg.

The Nature of Suffering underscores the change that is taking place in medicine from a basic concern with disease to a greater focus on the sick person. Cassell centers his discussion on the problem of suffering because, he says, its recognition and relief are a test of the adequacy of any system of medicine. He describes what suffering is and its relationship to the sick person: bodies do not suffer, people do. An exclusive concern with scientific knowledge of the body (...) and disease, therefore, impedes an understanding of suffering and diminishes the care of the suffering patient. The growing criticism that medicine is not sufficiently humanistic does not go deep enough to provide a basis for a new understanding of medicine. New concepts in medicine must have their basis in its history and in the development of ideas about disease and treatment. Cassell uses many stories about patients to demonstrate that, despite the current dominance of science and technology, there can be no diagnosis, search for the cause of the patient's disease, prognostication, or treatment without consideration of the individual sick person. Recent trends in medicine and society, Cassell believes, show that it is time for the sick person to be not merely an important concern for physicians but the central focus of medicine. He addresses the exciting problems involved in such a shift. In this new medicine, doctors would have to know the person as well as they know the disease. What are persons, however, and how are doctors to comprehend them? The kinds of knowledge involved are varied, including values and aesthetics as well as science. In the process of knowing the experience of patient and doctor move to center stage. He believes that the exploration of the person will engage medicine in the 21st century just as understanding the body has occupied the last hundred years. (shrink)

Two papers on global morality and ethics—by David Loye and Solomon H. Katz—are hereby placed into an evolutionary context. Simply stated though no less true, ethical evolution will likely be the next great evolutionary leap forward into the future—if humankind is to have a future.

It has become increasingly evident that gene content of the sex chromosomes is markedly different from that of the autosomes. Both sex chromosomes appear enriched for genes related to sexual differentiation and reproduction; but curiously, the human X chromosome also seems to bear a preponderance of genes linked to brain and muscle functions. In this review, we will synthesize several evolutionary theories that may account for this nonrandom assortment of genes on the sex chromosomes, including 1) asexual degeneration, 2) sexual (...) antagonism, 3) constant selection, and 4) hemizygous exposure. Additionally, we will speculate on how the evolution of sex‐chromosome gene content might have impacted on the phenotypic evolution of mammals and particularly humans. Our discussion will focus on the mammalian sex chromosomes, but will cross reference other species where appropriate. BioEssays 26:159–169, 2004. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Originalism as Faith presents a comprehensive history of the originalism debates. It shows how the doctrine is rarely used by the Supreme Court, but is employed by academics, pundits and judges to maintain the mistaken faith that the Court decides cases under the law instead of the Justices' personal values. Tracing the development of the doctrine from the founding to present day, Eric J. Segall shows how originalism is used by judges as a pretext for reaching politically desirable results. (...) The book also presents an accurate description and evaluation of the late Justice Scalia's jurisprudence and shows how he failed to practice the originalism method that he preached. This illuminating work will be of interest to lawyers, law students, undergraduates studying the Court, law professors and anyone else interested in an honest discussion and evaluation of originalism as a theory of constitutional interpretation, a political weapon, and an article of faith. (shrink)

Individual-level research in behavioral science can have massive impact and create system-level changes, as several recent mandates and other policy actions have shown. Although not every nudge creates long-term behavior change, defaults and other forms of choice architecture can not only change individual behavior but also reduce inequities and lead to changes in public policy and norms.