This article discusses when it is ethically acceptable to withdraw consent for the storage and use of embryos and gametes. Currently, the law in the UK states that consent to use of a gamete or embryo can be withdrawn up to the point of the embryo's transfer to the recipient's uterus or when the gamete is used in providing treatment services; that is, the ‘point of no return’. In this article, we will consider other points of no return and argue (...) that having a single point of no return, a one size fits all form of consent can, in some cases, lead to restrictions on individuals’ autonomy and cause particular types of harm. Therefore, having different points of no return that fit different circumstances could extend autonomy and allow people to enter into agreements that are tailored more to their own particular needs and circumstances. (shrink)

There are substantial numbers of frozen embryos in storage that will not be used by those who produced them for their own fertility treatment. One option for such embryos is to donate them to others to use in their fertility treatment. There has been considerable debate about how this process should be organized. In the US, there are embryo adoption programmes that mediate between those relinquishing embryos and potential recipients. This is a form of conditional embryo donation, where the relinquishing (...) couple can choose the recipient of their embryo. This article examines the ethical debate over conditional embryo donation for family building and explores the question of whether those who have unused frozen embryos should be able to determine who receives their embryos. The main objections to conditional embryo donation are examined: first, the embryo is not a person and therefore such concern over the placement of an embryo is unwarranted; secondly, potential donors might impose morally problematic conditions on who should receive their embryo; and thirdly, there are practical difficulties regarding organizational arrangements and the associated costs involved. It will be concluded that these objections can be countered and that if people wish to donate and receive embryos in this way there is no ethical objection to them doing so. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Daoism, Practice, and Politics:From Nourishing Life to Ecological PraxisEric S. Nelson (bio)I. Daoism's Multiple ModelsManhua Li, Yumi Suzuki, and Lisa Indraccola have offered evocative insights, questions, and alternatives in their contributions concerning the arguments of Daoism and Environmental Philosophy: Nourishing Life (Nelson 2021). The present brief response and sketch of the book will not address every point in their essays, but I will strive to reply, directly and indirectly, (...) to their primary concerns.First, it should be noted that I take a pluralistic conception of 'Daoisms' as my point of departure. This is necessary since Daoist studies have been hampered by overly ahistorical and one-sided definitions that prioritize one philosophical or religious moment (such as skepticism or mysticism) in historically complex and varied transmissions that encompass a multiplicity of texts and perspectives. Due to the fact of the plurality of incompatible kinds of Daoism in Chinese antiquity and in subsequent history, my text considers a range of early Daoist and Daoist-related perspectives in the context of their potential consequences for environmental philosophy, ethics, and politics. Consequently, my approach is primarily philosophical without limiting any text to being exclusively philosophical, religious, or rigidly committed to one perspective, which would be untrue to the sources themselves.Second, examining distinctive tendencies (modifying Graham 1989 and Liu 1994) in the Daodejing 道德經, the Zhuangzi 莊子, and related texts enables us to articulate distinctive and conflicting ecological, ethical, and political paradigms. In place of constructing a mythologizing ideological construction of 'Chinese culture' and Daoism as intrinsically 'Green', a familiar essentializing tendency that has provoked skepticism regarding the very possibility of Daoist environmental philosophy, my book provides a different 'critical Daoist' strategy. This alternative entails that Daoist exemplars can be deployed as therapeutic models in the present, while at [End Page 792] the same time confronting their ideological codifications and uses. Early Daoist sources have roamed on long intercultural journeys. The Daodejing and the Zhuangzi have provided elements for European thinking about civilization, technology, and nature from Martin Buber and Martin Heidegger (Nelson 2017) to Peter Sloterdijk's 'Euro-Taoism' (Sloterdijk 1989) to contemporary progressive Green movements (Joshi 2022) and even ecofascism (Lubarda 2020). Similarly, in the current Chinese context, Green Daoism has both critical and authoritarian ideological functions in visions of 'ecological civilization' (shengtai wenming 生態文明) (Schönfeld and Chen 2019) and fears of a 'green leviathan'. Accordingly, it is not accidental that my anarchistic and participatory democratic interpretation of one key thread, which I call 'ziranist' and clarify below, in early Daoist and Wei-Jin mysterious-learning (xuanxue 玄學) discourses, has led to the most intense discussions and controversies about this book. These include the contributions by Li, Suzuki, and Indraccola that propose questions and alternative possibilities concerning agency and responsiveness, authority and self-determination, freedom and fate, and adaptation and intervention, as well as purposive techniques and anti-purposive uselessness.Third, this hermeneutical strategy points toward the tertiary aspect of our preliminary definition of Daoism. It does not primarily name a philosophical theory or a religious worldview. It concerns shifting, overlapping, and diverging ensembles of discourse and practice. This is not the vague ahistorical idea of 'a way of life' but rather refers to how philosophy is enacted through a specific configuration of—to adopt early Greek expressions—logos as dis-course (e.g., argumentation, hermeneutics, logic, rhetoric), ethos (e.g., comportment, orientation, a way of dwelling), and praxis (practices of the self, with others, and with things and nature). Thus, the Laozi 老子 and Zhuangzi collections can be analyzed textually and conceptually as having multiple threads (drawing on a variety of authors and sources) that form constellations in the received texts with better and worse historical, practical, and conceptual readings. My interpretive strategy in this discussion, which does not exclude other approaches, is that these texts express forms of practical instead of merely speculative philosophy. They are suggestive of an ethos of relational freedom, irreducible to rules and techniques, which dismantles hypostatized experiential and linguistic fixations, including moralistic fixations, in order to freely encounter the myriad things and enact and practice the dao in one's own singular way.'Critical Daoism', therefore, serves as a pluralistic, diagnostic, and practical designation... (shrink)

The notion of digital virus covers, in our view, two points: computer viruses that infect our computers and technological solutionism, the unreasonable passion that consists in considering that the solution to all social problems lies in the digital world. Yet the digital world is as vulnerable as the biological world. Moreover, it is dangerous because it pushes us into a digital bondage that undermines democracy. The solution to the crisis is not less democracy, but more democracy. More precisely, we will (...) argue that digital devices do not strengthen democratic communication, they promote a digital connection that hinders deliberation and threatens the very idea of democracy. (shrink)

This article proposes a re-reading of the chromolithographic algorithm on the front cover of Fox Talbot’s seminal photographic work Pencil of Nature, 1844. The wet and dry of analogue and digital photography are proposed to both be in fact unfixed. A third, fluid, intermediary state is identified. The practitioner in this alternate zone is receptive to the isomorphic potential of the elements and is able to utilize a form of remote viewing – or rather remote perception – to both upload (...) and download. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: “You're Right. There's No Earth. It's All a Legend” “I'm Not a Cylon!…Maybe, But We Just Can't Take That Chance” “You Have to Have Something to Live For. Let it be Earth” Notes.

This paper aims to provide an argument for saying that a publicly funded health care system, available to all free at the point of delivery, is morally superior to a market system, and to provide a framework for deciding questions about which forms of health care should be included in such a public system. The argument presents health care as a ‘head’, in the sense of something to which human beings are morally entitled as a necessary condition for a life (...) worthy of human dignity. Alternative arguments for similar conclusions, proposed by Daniels and Buchanan, are critically examined and rejected. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to propose a new design for the presentation of the periodic system of the elements. It is a system that highlights the fundamental importance of elements as basic substances rather than elements as simple substances. Furthermore the fundamental nature of atomic number triads of elements is put to use in obtaining a new perfect triad by relocating hydrogen among the halogens to give the triad H, F, Cl. An unexpected regularity in the period lengths (...) of successive rows is obtained on rearranging the table to start with the halogens on the left-hand side. The relative virtues of this table, as compared with the medium-long form and the left-step table, are discussed. (shrink)

While taking Charles Chihara's metaphysics course as a graduate student at U.C. Berkeley, I wrote an advice columnist to ask about the puzzle at the center of the course. Marilyn Vos Savant writes a weekly column for Parade Magazine , which is included in the Sunday editions of many newspapers. She claims to be listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for "highest IQ".

In this essay, I want to argue that the existence of gender most times translated as gender binary, is a biological fact. What is at stake is a framework for transcending unequal gender binary to gender complementarity. Here, I propose to use Chimakonam’s Ezumezu logic as a mechanism for disclosing gender complementarity. The illogical, irrational and subjective perspectives on lopsided gender differences between men and women will be challenged in this essay. I will analyze the thrust of Ezumezu logic, its (...) major principles, structures, and pillars of thought. I will also demonstrate its global and contextual relevance. I will submit that Ezumezu logic can ground gender complementarity across global cultures. I argue that regardless of the physical differences between males and females, it is illogical to exploit such differences to promote gender stereotype. Keywords: Gender equality, Ezumezu Logic, Gender Complementarity, Jonathan Chimakonam. (shrink)

This English translation of _Sorel’s Study on Vico_ opens the way to a radical re-evaluation not only of Sorel’s trajectory, but of his French intellectual contexts, and the anarcho-syndicalism he is sometimes said to represent.

Two conditions for internal peace : absolutism and identification --Four approaches to Leviathan -- Outline of a new approach -- Reason, natural law, and absolutism -- The role of part 1 in Leviathan -- The metaphysical conception of human nature -- The state of nature -- The argument for absolutism -- Criteria for the identification of the sovereign -- Natural law -- Reason, revelation, and the interpretation of scripture -- Historical background : sola scriptura and biblical criticism -- Hobbes and (...) sola scriptura -- Sola scriptura and revelation -- Principles of biblical interpretation -- Metaphysics and eschatology -- Metaphysics : body and spirit -- The kingdom of God -- Eschatology -- Church and state -- Politics and the problem of double vision -- Politics and metaphysics -- Case A and the kingdom of God -- Case B and the argument for the identification of the true sovereign according to scripture -- The theological-philosophical argument for absolutism -- Hobbes and the kingdom of darkness -- The kingdom of darkness -- Misinterpretations of Scripture -- The false foundations of church tradition -- The kingdom of fairies -- The religious sincerity of Thomas Hobbes. (shrink)