This article discusses the ways in which the ambiguous concept of equality has been used in the British debate regarding the financing of political election campaigns. It identifies three concepts of equality commonly used in that debate: ‘equality of arms’ between political parties, ‘equality of influence’ between citizens, and ‘equality of access’ to the so‐called ‘marketplace of ideas’. The article than discusses each of these concepts of equality in greater detail, and, in doing so, identifies four broader principles underlying the (...) use of these concepts in the election financing debate. The article concludes that, although the language of equality is used often and with great effect in the election financing debate, the concepts of equality being invoked are rarely independently valuable concepts. Instead, the concepts of equality used are valued in the election financing debate because they promote one of the four underlying principles. These principles themselves, however, involve complex questions of democracy and distributional fairness, and are not uncontroversial. I thus suggest that future debates regarding election financing could be enhanced by a more direct discussion of the merits of these underlying principles. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 39.2 (2005) 36-57 [Access article in PDF] "Being With": The Resonant Legacy of Childhood's Creative Aesthetic Lori A. Custodero Teachers College, Columbia University Introduction...enrichment of the present for its own sake is the just heritage of childhood....1In this paper, the qualities of artistic pursuit exemplified in the musical play of children and the compositional processes of adults provide a context for exploring how (...) "being with" influences teaching and learning. Specifically I propose that "being with" music generates a sense of the aesthetic as we both transform musical materials — timbres, pitches, rhythms, phrases, harmonies — and are transformed by our experiences with them, and that "being with" others as we partake in musical activity often broadens and deepens that experience. In many ways, this is an exploration into why childhood matters, how it functions as a mirror for our adult lives as we experience and revel in the seemingly miraculous moments of aesthetic insight, where the familiar is welcomed with fresh perception and the addition of novelty is greeted as the solution to a previously unfathomable problem. It is also about why children matter, as our responses to their ways of being connect and transform us as adults. In this piece, recorded observations of children's musicality are juxtaposed with first-person accounts of adults' creative processes, revealing contributions to our understanding of artistry-in-action as it is manifested in both the musical and the pedagogical. The Aesthetic in Childhood and Adulthood To be "in the moment" is to encounter the aesthetic — fully engaged in an activity for which one's individual contributions are perceived as vital, aware of surprise relationships between seemingly disparate phenomena, and enveloped by sensory messages of color, sound, and movement meeting personal criteria for beauty. Such experiences exemplify features of artistry, an approach defined by openness to possibility and orientation toward discovery, where cues emanating from involvement in activity are clearly interpreted and utilized, and reflection is an ongoing process informing action. Characterized by a sense of wonder and ability to imagine and invent, the creative worlds of young children have provided a source of artistic genesis cited by composers, performers, psychologists, and educators.2Edith Cobb's thoughtful, groundbreaking account of the relationship between childhood and artistry, The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood, was introduced by Margaret Mead, who highlighted the work's thesis: "that in the imaginative experiences of childhood could be found the essential kernels of the highest forms of human thought."3 The legacy of childhood is universal to our existence; in acknowledging its contributions to ontological and cultural artistry, we can both connect personal histories across the [End Page 36] lifespan and identify characteristic trends across a spectrum of aesthetic rendering.4One trait common to both the child and the creative adult is a focused attentiveness to perceived affordances, that is, materials and human resources accessible in the environment. Acting upon and with these resources,children and artists become aesthetic agents as sensitivity to both experience and milieu combine to produce relevant and innovative outcomes.5 These two interactive dimensions have been described in interviews with composers I have interviewed as "being with the moment" and "being with yourself and at the same time with another" and are operating in the musical play of children, as noted in this description recorded by a mother/student: On Thanksgiving Day, we had a family gathering of sixteen people, five of whom are under the age of eight years. Three-year-old Louise is thrilled to be with her female cousins, who all dress up in ballet-type frilly costumes in order to put on a "show" for the family. Cousin Lily, now eight years old, assumes the role of pianist, while Louise, and five-year-old cousin Amy creatively dance to Lily's improvised accompaniment. Their movements are directly related to Lily's playing, in her fluidity and well as "jumps!" Here, family members serve as catalysts for creative activity — costumes and musical instruments in the environment... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:IntroductionLori A. Custodero and Anna NeumannIn this symposium, three scholars present the genesis, meaning, and artfulness of creative work and its realization as aesthetic experience within three educational fields. Lori A. Custodero, working out of music education, provides a perspective emanating from an aesthetic of childhood wonder and playfulness; David T. Hansen, writing out of philosophy of education, discusses how being fully present in the teaching moment leads (...) to meaningful experience; and Anna Neumann, who writes out of the field of higher education studies, represents scholars as engaged in intellectual pursuits, often framed aesthetically, and as struggling to hold on to precious time for creation. Aware of the inherent tensions in learning environments from child care centers to graduate schools, we address ways in which our research has revealed people's sustained pursuit of imagined possibilities, oftentimes amidst perceived impediments.Creative work involves imagining possibilities whereby individuals, alone and together, pose personally relevant questions and pursue fluent pathways of inquiry within the shared meanings of cultural context. At its finest, such work is artful, simultaneously responding to and emanating from immediate circumstance and past experience. It is malleable and vulnerable and compelling, fusing familiar images and surprising perceptions into new "equilibria... stable, even though moving" whereby "changes interlock and sustain one another."1 As scholars and teachers committed to learning, we strive to create and discern meaning between established understandings and emerging ideas and images. As we dance between reception and action, between insight and "onsight,"2 fully attentive to the perceived potentials in our work, we move toward synchrony, experiencing the aesthetic. The realizations that arise from experiences such as these — new or newly reconfigured words, sounds, images, movement, and ideas — express new balances of sense and feeling and, sometimes, beauty. Whether in the shared, artfully expressive vocalizations between the newborn infant and mother or in the scientist's finessing patience with elegant mathematical imagery, creative work invites a drawing together of what we know and what we struggle to know. Over time, the interplay of this work and its realization, [End Page 33] what Dewey refers to as "movement and culmination,"3 creates a momentum that serves to define lives as aesthetic.We have created this symposium as a space for considering the meanings of the aesthetic in lives — from its earliest instantiations in the experiences of infants and young children, to its developed expression in the professional (in this case, intellectual) efforts of adults pursuing scholarly careers, to its representation in teaching as intergenerational fusions of knowledge, learning, and lives. We see the aesthetic as both native and learned; as individually held and formed and felt, and as collectively created and voiced, the product of lives in intersection; as marking bounded moments in time (those instants of compelling "present-ness") and as spreading through years, well beyond bounded present-ness, perhaps as memory. Yet while striving to define the aesthetic in lives, we also strive to understand lives, individually and interactively, as lodgings for the aesthetic, as locations that give shape, form, and voice to beauty and insight, to creativity and learning. As we explore the lives in which the aesthetic finds its home, and within which it forms, we wonder about the extent to which the aesthetic may, in its turn, illuminate the strivings of those lives, including human desires to create, know, learn, understand, sense. We are then collectively concerned with the meanings of the aesthetic in lives and about the lives themselves as "moving spaces" within which the aesthetic can grow.We pursue this theme, centered on the power of the aesthetic to illuminate human lives, out of a realization that current understandings of what it means to be human — and especially what it means to learn and create — have been framed within the rubrics of the social sciences, certainly in productive ways. And yet we suggest that the artful, though powerful in its abilities to voice emotion and beauty, has not been employed as intensively as it might in efforts to understand what it means to create and learn as virtues of human existence, as perhaps the ultimate of human strivings. We hope that these symposium papers will help invigorate such... (shrink)

Telling stories after a loved one’s death helps surviving family members to find meaning in the experience and share perceptions about whether the death was consistent with the deceased person’s values and preferences. Opportunities for physicians to evaluate the experience of a patient’s death and to expose the ethical concerns that care for the dying often raises are rare. Narrative medicine is a theoretical perspective that provides tools to extend the benefits of storytelling and narrative sense–making to physicians. This case (...) study describes narrative writing workshops attended by physicians who care for dying patients. The narratives created revealed the physicians’ concerns about ethics and their emotional connection with patients. This case study demonstrates that even one–time reflective writing workshops might create important opportunities for physicians to evaluate their experiences with dying patients and families. (shrink)

Spirituality and storytelling can be resources in aging successfully and in dying well given the constraints of modern day Western culture. This paper explores the relationship of aging to time and the dynamic process of the life course and discusses issues related to confronting mortality, including suffering, finitude, spirituality, and spiritual closure in regard to death. And, finally, the role of narrative in this process is taken up.

Fear generalisation, a process by which conditioned fear spreads to similar but innocuous stimuli, is key in understanding why some individuals feel unsafe in objectively non-threatening situations. Both trait neuroticism and lack of predictability about the likelihood of feared consequences are associated with negative affect in the face of ambiguity and may increase the degree to which fear generalises. Undergraduates with varying degrees of neuroticism were randomised to either high- or low-instructional predictability conditions prior to fear acquisition. A fear generalisation (...) test measured risk ratings and attentional bias on a modified dot-probe paradigm. Among individuals with higher neuroticism, providing instructional predictability did not reduce fear; these individuals reported higher risk and increased attentional bias toward ambiguous stimuli. Overall, for individuals with higher neuroticism, predictability information hurt rather than helped interpretation of ambiguous stimuli, challenging a common conceptualisation of predictability as a factor that reduces fear. (shrink)

There is growing interest in tissue procurement for cancer research through autopsy. Establishing an autopsy/tissue donation programme for breast cancer research within an academic medical centre i...

Recent studies suggest that terminally ill African Americans’ care is generally more expensive and of lower quality than that of comparable non-Hispanic white patients. Scholars argue that increasing hospice enrollment among African Americans will help improve end-of-life care for this population, yet few studies have examined the experiences of African American patients and their loved ones after accessing hospice care. In this article, we explore how African American patients and lay caregivers evaluated their hospice experiences. Drawing from 39 in-depth interviews (...) with 26 participants, we use a modified version of Bute and Jensen’s (2011) narrative typology to organize patients’ and caregivers’ stories into three general categories: narratives of satisfaction, narratives of regret, and narratives of ambivalence. Building from these categories, we discuss the implications of this research for understanding hospice experiences, promoting hospice access, and improving end-of-life care for marginalized populations. (shrink)

Pleiotropically acting eukaryotic corepressors such as retinoblastoma and SIN3 have been found to physically interact with many widely expressed “housekeeping” genes. Evidence suggests that their roles at these loci are not to provide binary on/off switches, as is observed at many highly cell‐type specific genes, but rather to serve as governors, directly modulating expression within certain bounds, while not shutting down gene expression. This sort of regulation is challenging to study, as the differential expression levels can be small. We hypothesize (...) that depending on context, corepressors mediate “soft repression,” attenuating expression in a less dramatic but physiologically appropriate manner. Emerging data indicate that such regulation is a pervasive characteristic of most eukaryotic systems, and may reflect the mechanistic differences between repressor action at promoter and enhancer locations. Soft repression may represent an essential component of the cybernetic systems underlying metabolic adaptations, enabling modest but critical adjustments on a continual basis. (shrink)

Adolescence is an important developmental period marked by a transition from primarily parental-controlled eating to self-directed and peer-influenced eating. During this period, adolescents gain autonomy over their individual food choices and eating behavior in general. While parent-feeding practices have been shown to influence eating behaviors in children, little is known about how these relationships track across adolescent development as autonomy expands. The purpose of this qualitative study was to identify factors that impact food decisions and eating autonomy among adolescents. Using (...) the food choice process model as a guide, four focus groups were conducted with 34 adolescents. Focus group discussion was semi-structured, asking teens about influences on their food choices across different food environments, their involvement with food purchasing and preparation, and perceived control over food their choices. Focus group transcripts were analyzed using deductive and inductive code creation and thematic analysis. This study found six leading influences on adolescents' food choices and identified additional factors with prominence within specific environmental contexts. This study distinguished a broader spectrum of factors influencing adolescent food choice that extend beyond “convenience” and “taste” which have previously been identified as significant contributors. The degree of control that teens reported differed by eating location, occasion, and social context. Finally, adolescents demonstrated various levels of engagement in behaviors related to their eating autonomy. Identifying the emergent themes related to adolescent autonomy was the first step toward the goal of developing a scale to evaluate adolescent eating autonomy. (shrink)

Recent debates between modernists and postmodernists have shaken the foundations of modern social science. The epistemological assumptions of long-established procedures for constructing and validating knowledge claims have been called into question. This article discusses how two major contributors to the “new feminist epistemologies”—Dorothy Smith and Patricia Hill Collins—selectively integrate premises of modernist and postmodernist thought into their standpoint approaches. However, the particular premises they select result in significant ontological and epistemological differences between their works. These differences reflect major controversies over (...) materialism versus idealism, as well as essentialism versus diversity. As such, these different standpoints have important implications for feminist scholarship and political practice. (shrink)

How educators and students process and respond to emotions can either enhance or impede the development of the whole child. Social and emotional learning (SEL) refers to the processes of developing social and emotional competencies, which depend on individuals’ capacity to recognize, understand, and manage emotions (i.e., emotional intelligence or EI). Consensus across disciplines about the importance of EI highlights the need to advance the science of how to teach SEL. RULER, an evidence-based approach to teaching EI, provides an educational (...) framework that encompasses a set of practices for comprehensive SEL integration across a school or district. In this article, we describe RULER, explain how it teaches EI, and summarize evidence of its effectiveness. (shrink)

A recent contribution to the moral decision-making literature argues that individuals' moral behavior is partially shaped by the amount of moral approbation they expect to receive from their moral referent groups (Jones and Ryan, 1997). This paper examines the nature and content of these previously underexamined sources of moral guidance. In an open-ended empirical test of undergraduate business students (n = 369), we found that 1) significant differences exist between individuals' moral referent groups and work-related referent groups, 2) females were (...) more likely than males to include themselves in their moral referent groups, 3) females were more likely than males to be designated as moral referents, and 4) females were more likely to be included in moral referent groups than in work-related referent groups. The paper also includes a general description of the membership of these business subjects' moral referent groups and presents a variety of suggestions for future research. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 12.2 (2007) 124-125MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]A Few Thoughts on the Future of Environmental PhilosophyLori GruenThe potential of Environmental Philosophy to serve as an interdisciplinary bridge seems to be as strong as ever, and focusing on ways to enhance and expand philosophical engagement in multi/inter-disciplinary environmental projects is important. Continuing to develop work on environmental justice and eco-justice both theoretically and practically is one rich (...) way to promote interdisciplinary engagement and expand the possibilities for environmental thinking more broadly. For example, environmental justice inquiry often attracts students to environmental philosophy and environmental science who would not ordinarily be interested in philosophy or science. Environmental justice issues also provide significant service-learning opportunities that can encourage students and faculty to develop more sophisticated ways of integrating theory and practice while working with local communities. Integrating service-learning projects into environmental philosophy/studies classrooms inevitably encourages the development of interdisciplinary skills that will serve faculty and students and allows for greater discussions of local environmental problems to be addressed both inside and outside the classroom.As discussions of global justice, human rights, transnational feminism, and egalitarianism continue to gain prominence in philosophy, political science, feminist studies, and law, it is important that environmental philosophers continue developing ways to contribute to the dialogue. Environmental philosophers can certainly help enliven and deepen the practical as well as theoretical significance of these discussions. The new area of "cultural environmental studies" is one place this might happen, but it is certainly possible for environmental philosophers to engage in these analyses in other contexts.Environmental philosophers have a tendency to look at large systemic issues, and as climate change becomes increasing pressing it is important not to ignore the particularity of risks and potential harms for different human communities as well as non-human animals who may be disproportionately impacted. Non-human animals are facing alarming dangers from anthropogenic environmental destruction. At the end of [End Page 124] 2006, the baiji, or Chinese river dolphin, went extinct in the polluted Yangtze River; early in 2007, the UN reported an "emergency situation for the orangutan" in Borneo and Sumatra and experts predict their extinction within the next 20 years; dramatic climate events have had increasingly worrying impacts on isolated populations, from the whooping crane to the Asian elephant; unsustainable logging continues to threaten great apes and other species in Africa as more areas are opened for the trade in bushmeat; global warming is threatening the polar bear with extinction; recreational boating is decimating the manatees; and we can expect the losses to mount. Attending to the biodiversity loss as well as animal suffering must be a priority.Lori Gruen is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Wesleyan University where she also chairs the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program and directs the Ethics in Society Project. She has published extensively on topics in ecofeminist ethics and epistemology, environmental justice, and feminist analyses of human relations to non-human animals. She is currently writing a book exploring the complex philosophical issues raised by our relations to captive chimpanzees. E-mail: [email protected] JournalContentsTop... (shrink)

Abstract:To date, our understanding of ethical decision making and behavior in organizations has been concentrated in the area of moral judgment, largely because of the hundreds of studies done involving cognitive moral development. This paper addresses the problem of our relative lack of understanding in other areas of human morality by applying a recently developed construct—moral approbation—to illuminate the link between moral judgment and moral action. This recent work is extended here by exploring the effect that organizations have on ethical (...) behavior in terms of the moral approbation construct. (shrink)

Unconsented intimate exams on men and women are known to occur for training purposes and diagnostic reasons, mostly during gynecological surgeries but also during prostate examinations and abdominal surgeries. UIEs most often occur on anesthetized patients but have also been reported on conscious patients. Over the last 30 years, several parties—both within and external to medicine—have increasingly voiced opposition to these exams. Arguments from medical associations, legal scholars, ethicists, nurses, and some physicians have not compelled meaningful institutional change. Opposition is (...) escalating in the form of legislative bans and whistleblower reports. Aspiring to professional and scientific detachment, institutional consent policies make no distinction between intimate exams and exams on any other body part, but patients do not think of their intimate regions in a detached or neutral way and believe intimate exams call for special protections. UIEs are found to contribute to moral erosion and moral distress of medical students and compromise the sacred trust between the medical community and the general public. This paper refutes the main arguments in favor of the status quo, identifies a series of harms related to continuing the current practice, and proposes an explicit consent policy for intimate exams along with specific changes to medical school curriculum and institutional culture. Because patients are the rights-holders of their bodies, consent practices should reflect and uphold patient values which call for explicit consent for intimate exams. (shrink)

Is a feminist political liberalism possible? Political liberalism’s regard for a wide range of comprehensive doctrines as reasonable makes some feminists skeptical of its ability to address sex inequality. Indeed, some feminists claim that political liberalism maintains its position as a political liberalism at the expense of securing substantive equality for women. We claim that political liberalism’s core commitments actually restrict all reasonable political conceptions of justice to those that secure genuine substantive equality for all, including women and other marginalized (...) groups. In particular, we argue that political liberalism’s criterion of reciprocity limits reasonable political conceptions of justice to those that eliminate social conditions of domination and subordination relevant to reasonable democratic deliberation among equal citizens and that the criterion of reciprocity requires the social conditions necessary for recognition respect among persons as equal citizens. As a result, we maintain that the criterion of reciprocity limits reasonable political conceptions of justice to those that provide genuine equality for women along various dimensions of social life central to equal citizenship. (shrink)

Notion essentielle au croisement de la psychologie, de l'ethique et de l'esthetique de la tradition occidentale, la phantasia des Grecs, devenue imaginatio dans le monde latin avant d'etre traduite dans les differentes langues europeennes, a connu un echo considerable tout au long de l'histoire de la pensee philosophique. Les etudes rassemblees dans le present volume sont issues d'un seminaire et d'une journee d'etudes qui se sont tenus en 2001 a l'Universite catholique de Louvain et aux Facultes Notre-Dame de la Paix (...) de Namur. Elles visent a eclairer l'evolution du sens et du role de la notion au travers d'etapes historiques particulieres, surtout anciennes, s'echelonnant du VIe siecle avant Jesus-Christ au XVIIe siecle de notre ere. (shrink)

Due to COVID-19’s strain on health systems across the globe, triage protocols determine how to allocate scarce medical resources with the worthy goal of maximising the number of lives saved. However, due to racial biases and long-standing health inequities, the common method of ranking patients based on impersonal numeric representations of their morbidity is associated with disproportionately pronounced racial disparities. In response, policymakers have issued statements of solidarity. However, translating support into responsive COVID-19 policy is rife with complexity. Triage does (...) not easily lend itself to race-based exceptions. Reordering triage queues based on an individual patient’s racial affiliation has been considered but may be divisive and difficult to implement. And while COVID-19 hospital policies may be presented as rigidly focused on saving the most lives, many make exceptions for those deemed worthy by policymakers such as front-line healthcare workers, older physicians, pregnant women and patients with disabilities. These exceptions demonstrate creativity and ingenuity—hallmarks of policymakers’ abilities to flexibly respond to urgent societal concerns—which should also be extended to patients of colour. This paper dismantles common arguments against the confrontation of racial inequity within COVID-19 triage protocols, highlights concerns related to existing proposals and proposes a new paradigm to increase equity when allocating scarce COVID-19 resources. (shrink)

: Because an influenza pandemic would create the most serious hardships for those who already face most serious hardships, countries should take special measures to mitigate the effect of a pandemic on existing social inequalities. Unfortunately, there is little evidence that anybody is thinking about that.

The practical guide provides advice on assessing whether existing ethics programmes are effective and culturally appropriate and developing and disseminating organisation-wide values and standards to take account of the many cultures in which a business operates, including training which is as culturally relevant to employees worldwide.

In _Politics with Beauvoir_ Lori Jo Marso treats Simone de Beauvoir's feminist theory and practice as part of her political theory, arguing that freedom is Beauvoir's central concern and that this is best apprehended through Marso's notion of the encounter. Starting with Beauvoir's political encounters with several of her key contemporaries including Hannah Arendt, Robert Brasillach, Richard Wright, Frantz Fanon, and Violette Leduc, Marso also moves beyond historical context to stage encounters between Beauvoir and others such as Chantal Akerman, (...) Lars von Trier, Rahel Varnhagen, Alison Bechdel, the Marquis de Sade, and Margarethe von Trotta. From intimate to historical, always affective though often fraught and divisive, Beauvoir's encounters, Marso shows, exemplify freedom as a shared, relational, collective practice. _Politics with Beauvoir_ gives us a new Beauvoir and a new way of thinking about politics—as embodied and coalitional. (shrink)

We think Hall (2013) is correct in arguing that the environmental movement needs a stronger narrative and believe that such a narrative requires significant nuance. Hall rightly recognizes the importance of appropriately framing the current narratives appealed to by the environmental movement. They are too simplistic and, as such, misleading. The optimistic frames tend to ignore the real losses people experience in trying to live greener lifestyles. The ‘doom and gloom’ frames are apt to foster a sense of hopelessness rather (...) than motivate change. However a stronger narrative, as we think Hall would agree, requires that the more qualitative, multifaceted, and mutable nature of value be considered. (shrink)

Corporate governance and finance are dynamic academic fields that offer myriad opportunities for business ethics analysis. Within the corporate governance triad in recent years, shareholders have increased their power over boards of directors and executives through both regulation and movements to change corporate by-laws. The impact of board characteristics on firm performance has proven elusive, leading to questions concerning board processes and individual director beliefs and behaviors. At the same time, CEOs have lost considerable power, leaving many struggling to regain (...) their control and maintain their compensation levels, while others adopt a stewardship approach to their posts. In the field of finance, the recent financial debacle has led to a reexamination of financial regulation and of the fundamental nature and purpose of the industry. All of these issues provide business ethicists fodder for investigation and analysis. (shrink)

Two recent cases raise the question: Should the body be considered a form of property? Patients generally do not share in the profits derived from the applications of research on their body parts and products. Nor is their consent for research required so long as the body part is unidentified and is removed in the course of treatment. A market in body parts and products would require consent to all categories of research and ensure that patients are protected from coercion (...) and given the chance to be paid fairly for their contributions. Such a market might force us to rethink our policies prohibiting organ sales. Donors, recipients, and society will benefit from a market in body parts so long as owners—and no one else—retain control over their bodies. (shrink)

We have a thriving biotechnology industry in the United States. There are over 1,450 biotechnology companies developing diagnostic and treatment technologies in medicine, creating more nutritional foods, and innovating new industrial processes. Yet this $28.5 billion sector of the economy is not without controversy. The “bio” in biotechnology comes from living, biological entities - people, plants, animals, and even bacteria. In the realm of biobanking, people are the source of the raw material for the discovery of genes for research, diagnosis, (...) and therapy, raising a host of issues about rights and responsibilities, fiduciary duties and societal obligations. (shrink)

This book is a defense of political liberalism as a feminist liberalism. A novel and restrictive account of public reason is defended. Then it is argued that political liberalism's core commitments restrict reasonable conceptions of justice to those that secure genuine, substantive equality for women and other marginalized groups.

In this comprehensive introduction to animal ethics, Lori Gruen weaves together poignant and provocative case studies with discussions of ethical theory, urging readers to engage critically and empathetically reflect on our treatment of other animals. In clear and accessible language, Gruen provides a survey of the issues central to human-animal relations and a reasoned new perspective on current key debates in the field. She analyses and explains a range of theoretical positions and poses challenging questions that directly encourage readers (...) to hone their ethical reasoning skills and to develop a defensible position about their own practices. Her book will be an invaluable resource for students in a wide range of disciplines including ethics, environmental studies, veterinary science, women's studies, and the emerging field of animal studies and is an engaging account of the subject for general readers with no prior background in philosophy. (shrink)

Personal Versus Political Affairs in Churchill's This is a Chair There are plenty of issues in the world to petition and fight for, yet each individual also has "battles" at home to contend with. Which is of more importance? We often separate the two indefinitely. In studying Caryl Churchill's work This Is a Chair, however, I would suggest the personal and political to be intimately related and possibly each even a causation of the other. To take care of one may (...) be eliminating the problem of the other as well. Might political problems stem from petty, personal qualms? Even more specifically might jeopardizing moral norms affect the greater social order? If so, this would be a revelation and fresh pursuit in solving many of the monumental political issues which are faced today. (shrink)

In this article, the author presents findings based on her research on BlueSky, an online interactive textbased forum. She discusses BlueSky participants' online performances of gendered and raced identities. Participants interpret their own and others' identities within the context of expectations and assumptions derived from offline U.S. culture, as well as from their membership in various computer-related subcultures. Given the predominance of white men on BlueSky, such identity interpretations also rely on expectations concerning masculinity and whiteness. The author explores BlueSky (...) participants' understandings of themselves as “nerds” and considers the implications of this nerd identity for their relationship to hegemonic masculinity, especially to expectations of heterosexuality. Analyzing online identity performances in this way provides information pertaining not just to online interaction but to a better understanding of the social construction of gendered and raced identities more generally. (shrink)

Globalization is often discussed as if it were a recent phenomenon relating primarily to the development of world financial markets and improvements in information and travel technologies. But globalization is an ancient process, beginning with mercantile and cultural exchanges and facilitated by advances in transportation. In the twentieth century, the results of globalization can be seen in the rise of global capitalism and in the construction of a global economy. Most recently, the process of globalization has moved beyond the world (...) of finance, however, into areas still traditionally thought of as national concerns, such as culture and healthcare. It is no surprise, therefore, that increasingly the challenges the United States is confronting in healthcare, biotechnology, and the environment are simultaneously faced by the international community as a whole. In the wake of the HIV pandemic, growing environmental consciousness, and a series of sensational advances in biotechnology, there is a dawning realization that problems such as improving public health, regulating advances in biotechnology, and achieving sustainable environmental development transcend national borders. In other words, bioethics concerns are global in nature. (shrink)