First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The emergence of Abstract Expressionism as a predominant artistic style in the early 1950s was accompanied by a new critical image of the artist as a heroic individualist. This myth, according to which the artist created great works primarily by looking into the profound depths of his own soul rather than by responding to the world and society around him, has become the standard description of the Abstract-Expressionist artistic process. By such an account, the Abstract-Expressionist artist was an apolitical being, (...) unconcerned with the conflicts in society due to his overriding concern with the explorations of the self. This treatment of Abstract Expressionism began with the writing of two critics, Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg. (shrink)

The role of power in healthcare can raise many ethical challenges. Power is ownership, whether given, ceded, or taken of another person’s autonomy. When a person has power over someone else, they can control or strongly influence the decision-making freedom of that person. From the principalist perspective1,2 of healthcare ethics, denying a person their freedom to choose, should only occur when justifying conditions related to beneficence and nonmaleficence are sufficiently satisfied. In healthcare, it is rare to be able to identify (...) situations where paternalism is justified. However, experience suggests that abusive power in healthcare is used too frequently without justifying criteria. (shrink)

: Prenatal and preconceptual testing and screening programs provide information on the basis of which people can choose to avoid the birth of children likely to face disabilities. Some disabilities advocates have objected to such programs and to the decisions made within them, on the grounds that measures taken to avoid the birth of children with disabilities have an "expressive force" that conveys messages disrespectful to people with disabilities. Assessing such a claim requires careful attention to general considerations relating meaning, (...) intention, and social practices; it has only begun to receive such attention. Building on work by Allen Buchanan, who has challenged this claim, I further consider the disabilities advocates' objection, ultimately concluding that it is misplaced; neither individual actions nor general practices of this type necessarily express disrespectful messages. (shrink)

: Bioethical discussion of justice in health care has been much enlivened in recent years by new developments in the theory of rationing and by the emergence of a strong communitarian voice. Unfortunately, these developments have not enjoyed much in the way of close engagement with feminist-inspired reflections on power, privilege, and justice. I hope here to promote interchange between "mainstream" treatments of justice in health care and feminist thought.

The Patient in the Family diagnoses the ways in which the worlds of home and hospital misunderstand each other. The authors explore how medicine, through its new reproductive technologies, is altering the stucture of families, how families can participate more fully in medical decision-making, and how to understand the impact on families of medical advances to extend life but not vitality.

Evidence does not support the claim that observers universally recognize basic emotions from signals on the face. The percentage of observers who matched the face with the predicted emotion (matching score) is not universal, but varies with culture and language. Matching scores are also inflated by the commonly used methods: within-subject design; posed, exaggerated facial expressions (devoid of context); multiple examples of each type of expression; and a response format that funnels a variety of interpretations into one word specified by (...) the experimenter. Without these methodological aids, matching scores are modest and subject to various explanations. (shrink)

This book presents the issues, controversies, and key players that formed and enabled the American college and university to endure as a critical institution of the nation and society.

In September 2010 at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, one of the nation's elite academic hospitals located in East Baltimore, Maryland, Paul Warren Pardus entered the facility to visit his mother, a patient. During a discussion with her doctor in a hospital hallway, Pardus became “overwhelmed” about the care and condition of his mother, pulled a handgun from his waistband, and shot the doctor in the chest. Pardus then locked himself and his mother in her room, shot and killed her, and (...) committed suicide.Dr. Gabe Kelen, a national expert on emergency preparedness and director of the Johns Hopkins emergency department, admitted several years later that this tragic event “really got us thinking in a very serious way.” Together with colleagues at the Johns Hopkins Office of Critical Event Preparedness and Response, Kelen conducted research on the threat and impact of “active shooters” in health care settings. (shrink)

In the portion of their reply directed to me, Professor Asch and Dr. Wasserman helpfully develop the synecdoche argument by highlighting its connections to stigma. I understand them to distinguish the situation of a woman making a decision concerning her pregnancy informed by prenatal testing from a woman making a similar decision informed by considerations of, for example, poverty, like so: In testing contexts, it will characteristically be the case that the woman's decision will be distorted by the stigma associated (...) with impairment: She will consider only the fact that, should her pregnancy come to term, the child would be impaired; she will not be able to attend in a satisfactory manner to a fuller range of possible features, both good and bad, that may characterize the child's life and her experience of being the child's parent. The woman considering whether to terminate her pregnancy due to, say, poverty will, in contrast, typically be able to deliberate in ways more responsive to a broader range of relevant matters, as the possible child's poverty will not be the only thing she is in a position to take into account about her or his life and their life together. Further, even where poverty or some other factor influencing decisions about terminating or continuing pregnancy are stigmatizing, they are not as thoroughly stigmatizing as are impairment-related conditions, due to prevalent confusions about the immutability of traits seen as biological rather than social. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider what kind of normative work might be done by speaking of ecosystems utilising a 'medical' vocabulary – drawing, that is, on such notions as 'health', 'disease', and 'illness'. Some writers attracted to this mode of expression have been rather modest about what they think it might purchase. I wish to be bolder. Drawing on the idea of 'thick' evaluative concepts as discussed by McDowell, Williams and Taylor, and resorting to a phenomenological argument for a kind (...) of moral realism, I argue that the project of developing a robust understanding of the moral significance of recognising the health or illness of ecosystems is definitely a starter. (shrink)

Medical decisionmaking would be a messier but better thing if it honored what is morally valuable about patients' families. The concerns of intimates have a legitimate call upon us even when we are ill.

The leading accounts of the ethics of proxy decision making implicitly draw on internalist conceptions of the philosophy of mind, or so this essay tries to demonstrate. Using the views of Ronald Dworkin as its jumping‐off point, the essay argues that accepting the sort of externalism associated with writers such as Putnam and Burge would alter Dworkin's conclusions concerning how we should respond to the current or precedent decisions of people suffering from dementia. Building on the views of Agnieszka Jawarska, (...) it argues that accepting “active” externalism à la Clark and Chambers would provide currently competent people with new resources for establishing the authority of their present values over inconsistent values they might come to entertain should they become demented. (shrink)

Most people accept that if they can save someone from death at very little cost to themselves, they must do so; call this the ‘duty of easy rescue.’ At least for many such people, an instance of this duty is to allow their vital organs to be used for transplantation. Accordingly, ‘opt-out’ organ procurement policies, based on a powerfully motivated responsibility to render costless or very low-cost lifesaving aid, would seem presumptively permissible. Counterarguments abound. Here I consider, in particular, objections (...) that assign a moral distinctiveness to the physical boundaries of our bodies and that concern autonomy and trust. These objections are singled out as they seem particularly pertinent to the stress I place on a distinctive benefit of the particular policy I defend. An opt-out system, resting not on the authority of ‘presumed consent’ but on the recognition of a duty to one another, has the prospect of prompting people to understand more richly the ways in which they are both physically embodied and communally embedded. (shrink)

: A fascinating criticism of abortion occasioned by prenatal diagnosis of potentially disabling traits is that the complex of test-and-abortion sends a morally disparaging message to people living with disabilities. I have argued that available versions of this "expressivist" argument are inadequate on two grounds. The most fundamental is that, considered as a practice, abortions prompted by prenatal testing are not semantically well-behaved enough to send any particular message; they do not function as signs in a rule-governed symbol system. Further, (...) even granting, for the sake of argument, the expressive power of testing and aborting, it would not be possible, contra the argument's proponents, to distinguish between abortions undertaken because of beliefs about the disabling conditions the fetus might face as a child and abortions undertaken for many other possible reasons--e.g., because of the poverty the fetus would face or the increase in family size that the birth of a new child would occasion. Here, I respond to criticisms of those arguments, and propose and defend another: the expressivist argument cannot, in general, distinguish successfully between abortion and therapy as modalities for responding to disabilities. (shrink)

On the usual account of moral reasoning, social science is often seen as able to provide “just the facts,” while philosophy attends to moral values and conceptual clarity and builds formally valid arguments. Yet disciplines are informed by epistemic values—and bioethics might do well to see social scientific practices and their attendant normative understandings about what is humanly important as a significant part of ethics generally.