This book examines cultural recognition and the struggle for identity in America's schools. In particular, the contributing authors focus on the recognition and misrecognition as antagonistic cultural forces that work to shape, and at times distort identity.

1. On 30th July 2021, the historian of philosophy Michael Alexander Stewart, ‘Sandy’ for colleagues and friends, died peacefully, leaving unfinished the redaction of a volume in which he intended t...

In Enhancing Evolution, leading bioethicist John Harris dismantles objections to genetic engineering, stem-cell research, designer babies, and cloning and makes an ethical case for biotechnology that is both forthright and rigorous. Human enhancement, Harris argues, is a good thing--good morally, good for individuals, good as social policy, and good for a genetic heritage that needs serious improvement. Enhancing Evolution defends biotechnological interventions that could allow us to live longer, healthier, and even happier lives by, for example, providing us (...) with immunity from cancer and HIV/AIDS. Further, Harris champions the possibility of influencing the very course of evolution to give us increased mental and physical powers--from reasoning, concentration, and memory to strength, stamina, and reaction speed. Indeed, he says, it's not only morally defensible to enhance ourselves; in some cases, it's morally obligatory. In a new preface, Harris offers a glimpse at the new science and technology to come, equipping readers with the knowledge to assess the ethics and policy dimensions of future forms of human enhancement. (shrink)

Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) have gained a degree of prominence across recent moral enhancement literature as a possible intervention for dealing with antisocial and aggressive impulses. This is due to serotonin's purported capacity to modulate persons’ averseness to harm. The aim of this article is to argue that the use of SSRIs is not something worth getting particularly excited about as a practicable intervention for moral enhancement purposes, and that the generally uncritical enthusiasm over serotonin's potential as a moral (...) enhancer is a consequence of the paucity of viable options for envisaging practicable moral enhancement interventions. While there are many conceptual issues raised by the idea of moral enhancement generally, and by the idea of serotonin as a morally affective agent, the aim here is to look at practical concerns. It is argued that SSRIs do not, nor cannot in the reasonably foreseeable future, be made to work as a reliably safe or reliably effective means for moral enhancement, even within the very limited remit of treating “reactive” aggression. SSRIs might be effective as a limited and partial mental health intervention (even this is questionable), but not as a generally effective moral enhancement technology. (shrink)

Knowing how to be good, or knowing how to go about trying to be good, is of immense theoretical and practical importance. And what goes for trying to be good oneself, goes also for trying to provide others with ways of being good, and for trying to make them good whether they like it or not. This is what is meant by 'moral enhancement'. John Harris explores the many proposed methodologies or technologies for moral enhancement: traditional ones like good (...) parenting and education; newer ones like chemical or biological intervention; modifying the environment to make bad outcomes of all sorts less likely; experimentation with political and social systems. The issue of whether and to what extent moral enhancement is possible is the subject of this book. (shrink)

:The term “moral bioenhancement” conceals a diverse plurality encompassing much potential, some elements of which are desirable, some of which are disturbing, and some of which are simply bland. This article invites readers to take a better differentiated approach to discriminating between elements of the debate rather than talking of moral bioenhancement “per se,” or coming to any global value judgments about the idea as an abstract whole. Readers are then invited to consider the benefits and distortions that come from (...) the usual dichotomies framing the various debates, concluding with an additional distinction for further clarifying this discourse qua explicit/implicit moral bioenhancement. (shrink)

The chapter will argue that the way current enthusiasm for moral enhancement is articulated in the extant literature is itself morally problematic. The moral evaluation of the discourse will proceed through three stages. First, we shall look at the chequered history of various societies’ attempts to cast evil, character, and generally undesirable behaviour, as biological problems. As will be argued, this is the larger context in which moral enhancement discourse should be understood, and abuses in the recent past and present (...) should therefore be highlighted. Second, it will be argued that, given moral functioning's profoundly contextual and responsive qualities, any notion of a fine-grained, powerfully efficacious moral enhancement is both unrealistic and, actually, incoherent. Since enthusiasts’ hopes are unrealistic and incoherent, such enhancement would not even be capable of providing the transformative ends that supposedly justify the sometimes extreme prescriptions set forward. Finally, the chapter concludes with the claim that moral enhancement enthusiasm actually serves to trivialise the evils of this world, and not only to trivialise the hard-won efforts required to diminish and overcome such evils, but to misdirect attention away from the real hard work that needs to be done in facing such evils. (shrink)

Despite the advances made in understanding the effects of humiliation, no univocal position regarding its meaning exists. Indeed, so indiscreet is its meaning, the emotion is commonly conflated with other related emotions such as shame, embarrassment, and anger. Employing a scoping review design, this review aimed to scope the empirical literature concerning the meaning of humiliation from the perspective of two definitional parameters: i) status, subsuming the values descriptive and prescriptive, and ii) format, subsuming the values intension and extension. CINAHL, (...) EMBASE, EMCare, MEDLINE, PsycINFO, and PubMed were searched for eligible studies. In total, twelve studies were synthesized in this review. Vis-à-vis status, seven studies were found to define humiliation prescriptively, and five, descriptively. Vis-à-vis format, seven studies defined humiliation intensionally, and five, extensionally. Accordingly, the meaning of humiliation varies in the literature. If further progress is to be made in humiliation studies, it is vital for researchers to be cognizant of the different meanings ascribed to humiliation. (shrink)

The following text is taken from the publisher's website: "Romanticism is, and always has been, one of the most hotly contested terms in literary and cultural history. Many of the writers now described as Romantic refused to be defined by the word: 'it would be such bad taste', said Byron in 1820. Lovejoy spoke of a plurality of ‘romanticisms’, born of distinct thought complexes, whilst René Wellek argued that literatures labelled Romantic indicated common conceptions. Comparably, in the post-World War II (...) period, political commentators have seen Romanticism as either profoundly radical or deeply reactionary. This significant collection gathers key critical discussions that explore the complex and many-sided nature of the 'Romantic'. A new introduction by the editors, a full index and chronological table of contents guide the reader through the wealth of material dedicated to a term that is both extremely unstable and remarkably persistent.". (shrink)

Sam Harris dismantles the most common justification for religious faith--that a moral system cannot be based on science.

The article explores the interaction of verbal and nonverbal semantic levels in the performance of Christian ritual. The article maps the distinction between theoretical and performative knowledge onto Barnard and Teasdale's Interacting Cognitive Systems model to give a (partial) account of how meaning emerges in ritual participation. With Christian ritual, both know-how and know-that are needed. Above all, it is their interaction that generate the richness of meaning in ritual performance. Three core claims are made. First, many contemporary concepts of (...) ritual have at least one flaw in that they do not grasp the relationality between verbal and nonverbal, wherein both dimensions have a semantic integrity of their own. Second, there is an ideological valuation of the semantic levels. The experiential level is not only meaningful in its own right, but the fundamental ground of spiritual knowing. Third, combining learning styles and kinds of attention can be valuable for eliciting the full semantic richness of ritual participation. (shrink)

This article explores three aspects of Masterman's language work and applies them to questions of spiritual intelligence: metaphor, coherence, and ambiguity. First, metaphor, which is ubiquitous in ordinary language, both leads and misleads in religious and scientific understanding. Masterman's case for a “dual-approach” to thinking, both speculative and critical, is explored and tied to concepts of moral-spiritual development per Pierre Hadot and Hannah Arendt. Second, Masterman's work on machine translation presents semantic disambiguation as an emerging coherence wherein one gradually hones (...) in on meaning through features of ordinary language (like redundancy and repetition). This is applied to the problem of comprehending difficult spiritual language, and tied to spiritual stretching and spiritual cartography. Third, Masterman's work with thesauri, rather than relying on words as having fixed meanings, appeals to a concept of semantic spaces, nebulae of variously interconnected meanings. This is constructed into an exhortation to reambiguate overfamiliar religious language, to reinvest one's quotidian surroundings with spiritual meaning through defamilarization. (shrink)

The Shenzi Fragments is the first complete translation in any Western language of the extant work of Shen Dao (350–275 B.C.E.). Though his writings have been recounted and interpreted in many texts, particularly in the work of Xunzi and Han Fei, very few Western scholars have encountered the political philosopher's original, influential formulations. This volume contains both a translation and an analysis of the Shenzi Fragments. It explains their distillation of the potent political theories circulating in China during the Warring (...) States period, along with their seminal relationship to the Taoist and Legalist traditions and the philosophies of the Lüshi Chunqiu and the Huainanzi. These fragments outline a rudimentary theory of political order modeled on the natural world that recognizes the role of human self-interest in maintaining stable rule. Casting the natural world as an independent, amoral system, Shen Dao situates the source of moral judgment firmly within the human sphere, prompting political philosophy to develop in realistic directions. Harris's sophisticated translation is paired with commentary that clarifies difficult passages and obscure references. For sections open to multiple interpretations, he offers resources for further research and encourages readers to follow their own path to meaning, much as Shen Dao intended. The Shenzi Fragments offers English-language readers a chance to grasp the full significance of Shen Dao's work among the pantheon of Chinese intellectuals. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hurricane Gloria LAWRENCE DUGAN A screaming northern gale flew past his wild words And slammed the sails, and pulled a wave toward heaven. —Aeneid, i.102–3 (Sarah Ruden, trans.) i. A phalanx of weather tools at the door, A shovel, an ice-pick, an umbrella, A new cane, leaning against each other, Plastic fabricated to resist storms, Reminds me of a storm I rode out years ago, The Nor’easter of 1985, (...) On the twenty-first floor of 5 Penn Center Across the street from where the Fox Theater Spread the bright wings of its marquee, folded Now forever, torn down, and then replaced With a glass-box not unlike the office I looked out of, watching the rain lashing Windows, tearing at the flags hung on poles On other buildings, solitary banners Left up as if to challenge the weather To do its worst, to refute the young storm Tearing northeast out of the Atlantic, Predicted only a few days before As a hurricane, that didn’t happen, But leaving the high-rise building nearly Deserted, with the ticker still running Across the wall; the market had opened Empty office or not, unoccupied Desks giving it that strange quietude Peculiar to such spaces, which the mind Expects to be filled, even while seeing Otherwise. arion 28.2 fall 2020 66 hurricane gloria I felt like a sailor for The only time in my life, stepping off The elevator at 21, and then Walking into the main hall and sensing The building swayed slighty, barely feeling It but knowing it distinctly, hearing It creak exactly as I had heard ships At sea in dozens of movies, and with The sound, the sway, the massive grid of pipes And beams giving and taking. jms Old timers hadn’t warned me about this Although some had ridden out several Storms as bad, real or metaphorical, Not even old Harris who remembered Moving down from Susquehanna county In ’29, to Wall Street and the Crash. ii. Future archaeologists of urban Storms will study pictures of umbrellas Taking flight, wrecked synthetic shapes blooming Against resistant hands, then abandoned, Stuffed into trash cans, twirling down alleys, Pastels, stripes or old-fashioned banker-black, The edge of the story, the windy street’s Last rebuke to those daring to stagger To lunch but caught in the nor’easterly Gale’s grey wall of wind and rain that rattled Doors and buckled windows. The building held Two dozen companies, and I still like To think one fronted for an anchorite, Some isolated individual Up on 24, alone at his desk In a skyscraper office for ten years Praying, sometimes looking down the cliff walls At the peregrine falcons sweeping home Lawrence Dugan 67 To their massive nest stuffed tight in the bronze Lap of a statue seated on City Hall, One of the allegories of Founders And Lenape chiefs placed high over Broad, The hawks diving downward athwart the storm Coming on in grey curtains wavering Over the city and the Delaware Valley. Across the river in Jersey The pines begin, in Camden the street dirt Is sand; halfway to the shore the forest Runs above the expressway, farms below, The pines flourishing in sandy barren Earth lacking nitrogen, incinerating Every dozen years, thousands of acres Blowing away in flames seen at the shore. After that rain those woods were safe for weeks. iii. Ten years and two jobs later I needed Census material and found it online On a rainy day in Center City In a high-rise office nearby, a halfDay ’s work done to my surprise in only Twenty minutes, then realizing as I Stood up from a computer that the view Was familiar. I was back on 21 In my old office; jms had moved But the grey sky cleared with a sweep of wind And the view north and south looked as before Wherever the market’s ticker-tape rolled now. The weather had surprised me again; The only full rainbow I ever saw, The ancient sign that spares the world from floods, A pure unblemished iridescent span, Appeared late in spring, in a sun shower.... (shrink)

Opposition within the organic agriculture community to a state regulatory initiative intended to close a loophole on the prohibition of stoop labor in California agriculture illuminates critical tensions around the “labor question” underpinning California's rapidly expanding organic sector. Through an exploration of the contradictions between the political economic realities of organic agriculture, the lived realities of farm workers, and the ideological framework of “agricultural exceptionalism” espoused in the organic community, this article challenges widely held assumptions that organic agriculture embodies a (...) more socially sustainable form of production. We conclude that these tensions must be confronted if any progress is to be made toward the incorporation of social justice into definitions of agro-food system sustainability. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on exploring various models of spiritual development. It first addresses philosophical dilemmas underpinning the concept of spiritual development by questioning whether these can be addressed without metaphysical assumptions embedded in religious worldviews and thus understood in any consensual way across different historical and cultural contexts. Traditional models of spiritual development are then reviewed, drawing from indigenous, Eastern, and Western cultures. Integrative-philosophical and scientific models, including those from the psychology of religion, transpersonal psychology, and neurobiology, are then presented. (...) The chapter concludes by noting the complexities involved in understanding spiritual development accompanied by suggestions on future directions for these models by highlighting their commonalities and differences and by providing some evaluative perspectives for thinking critically about them. (shrink)

Since the birth of the first test-tube baby, Louise Brown, in 1977, we have seen truly remarkable advances in biotechnology. We can now screen the fetus for Down Syndrome, Spina Bifida, and a wide range of genetic disorders. We can rearrange genes in DNA chains and redirect the evolution of species. We can record an individual's genetic fingerprint. And we can potentially insert genes into human DNA that will produce physical warning signs of cancer, allowing early detection. In fact, biotechnology (...) has progressed to such a point that virtually any kind of genetic manipulation, if not already possible, is just around the corner. But these breakthroughs also raise serious ethical and moral dilemmas that we are only now beginning to confront. In Wonderwoman and Superman, noted medical ethicist John Harris offers the first thorough analysis of the moral dilemmas created by the revolution in molecular biology. Covering a wide array of recent innovations, Harris discusses, for example, the moral decisions involved and the consequences of creating egg and embryo banks. Who should be allowed to use such resources? Should recipients be screened? Should such banks be open for public or private use? And does it cheapen life to make embryos available for sale? In another chapter, Harris examines the question of conceiving children chiefly for organ donation, focusing on the recent case of a woman who wanted to have a second child to provide a bone marrow donor for her first child sick with leukemia (she intended to abort the fetus if its bone marrow did not genetically match that of her living child). In this case, the medical staff had to decide whether they should perform in-vitro fertilization, knowing that the mother did not satisfy the clinic's criteria (there was no father), and also knowing the potential for abortion. Discussing the ethics of the mother's choice and the clinic's choice, Harris asks whether it is morally correct to create a child as an organ donor, whether the future child would suffer, whether it is worth any suffering to be born, and who has the right to weigh the various factors (both moral and physiological) involved in making these decisions. Delving into a multitude of issues such as when life begins, when suffering is needless, and whether we should play God, Wonderwoman and Superman provides not only a thought-provoking inquiry into the potential and actual ethical dilemmas created by the many advances in biotechnology, but challenges us to learn to choose responsibly and to face the moral implications of the choices that confront us. (shrink)

In this retitled and revised version of Harris's original text Wonderwoman and Superman, the author discusses the ethics of human biotechnology and its implications relative to human evolution and destiny.

In this enlightening book, Sam Harris argues that free will is an illusion but that this truth should not undermine morality or diminish the importance of social and political freedom; indeed, this truth can and should change the way we think about some of the most important questions in life.

This article explores the overlap between systems biology and predictive neuroscience, placing them in their larger context, the contemporary trend of bioinformatic convergence across the sciences. These two domains overlap with respect to their interest in data accumulation and data integration; their reliance on computational statistical correlation; and their translational goals, that is, producing practical fruits and applications from the interscientific cross-pollination that contemporary data-integrative approaches make possible. The interventions that such translational conversations generate are medical and social in nature, (...) and are aimed at both prevention and treatment. It will be argued that such approaches, socially and medically applied, contain potential for conveying both agency-enhancing and agency-diminishing social messages. The article concludes with a call to balance the overwhelmingly quantitative focus characteristic of predictive neuroscience with more qualitative empirical methodologies. This would represent a double helical approach. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt's essays about the 1957 crisis over efforts of a group of youth, the “Little Rock Nine,” to desegregate a high school in Little Rock, Arkansas, reveal a tension in her vision of the “public.” In this article Aaron Schutz and Marie Sandy look closely at the experiences of the youth desegregating the school, especially those of Elizabeth Eckford, drawing upon them to trace a continuum of forms of public engagement in Arendt's work. This ranges from arenas of (...) “deliberative friendship,” where unique individuals collaborate on common efforts, to a more conflictual “public stage,” where groups act in solidarity to change aspects of the public world. While Arendt famously asserted in her essay “The Crisis in Education” that political capacities should not be taught in schools, it makes more sense to see this argument as focused on what she sometimes called the conflictual “public stage,” reflecting the experience of the Little Rock Nine. In contrast, Schutz and Sandy argue that Arendt's own work implies that “deliberative friendship,” as described in her essay “Philosophy and Politics” and elsewhere, should be part of everyday practices in classrooms and schools. (shrink)

The eighteenth century was a time of brilliant philosophical innovation in Britain. In Of Liberty and Necessity James A. Harris presents the first comprehensive account of the period's discussion of what remains a central problem of philosophy, the question of the freedom of the will. He offers new interpretations of contributions to the free will debate made by canonical figures such as Locke, Hume, Edwards, and Reid, and also discusses in detail the arguments of some less familiar writers. (...) class='Hi'>Harris puts the eighteenth-century debate about the will and its freedom in the context of the period's concern with applying what Hume calls the "experimental method of reasoning" to the human mind. His book will be of substantial interest to historians of philosophy and anyone concerned with the free will problem. (shrink)

A retired manager and university teacher reflects on global ethics, on the purpose of life, and on the challenges facing global ethics in a contemporary world where there is no certainty about shared belief or shared values. The future lies, he concludes, with process and with a deeper understanding of one another.

: The concept of the person has come to be intimately connected with questions about the value of life. It is applied to those sorts of beings who have some special value or moral importance and where we need to prioritize the needs or claims of different sorts of individuals. "Person" is a concept designating individuals like us in some important respects, but possibly including individuals who are very unlike us in other respects. What are these respects and why are (...) they important? This paper sets out to answer these questions and to develop a coherent and useful concept of the person. (shrink)

Building on the success and importance of three previous volumes, _Relational Psychoanalysis_ continues to expand and develop the relational turn. Under the keen editorship of Lewis Aron and Adrienne Harris, and comprised of the contributions of many of the leading voices in the relational world, _Volume 4_ carries on the legacy of this rich and diversified psychoanalytic approach by taking a fresh look at recent developments in relational theory. Included here are chapters on sexuality and gender, race and class, (...) identity and self, thirdness, the transitional subject, the body, and more. Thoughtful, capacious, and integrative, this new volume places the leading edge of relational thought close at hand, and pushes the boundaries of the relational turn that much closer to the horizon. Contributors: Neil Altman, Jessica Benjamin, Emanuel Berman, Jeanne Wolff Bernstein, Susan Coates, Ken Corbett, Muriel Dimen, Martin Stephen Frommer, Jill Gentile, Samuel Gerson, Virginia Goldner, Sue Grand, Hazel Ipp, Kimberlyn Leary, Jonathan Slavin, Malcolm Owen Slavin, Charles Spezzano, Ruth Stein, Melanie Suchet. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Late-Marxist, Post-Poststructuralist Critical NebulosityWendell V. HarrisIllustration, by J. Hillis Miller; 168 pp. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992, $35.00.The title of J. Hillis Miller’s Illustration is apt in a way other than the author anticipated: it is a composite illustration of most of what makes so much of contemporary literary and aesthetic criticism unsatisfying if not nugatory. Initial evidence of the lack of cogent conceptualization is the disparateness of the (...) two long essays jammed between the covers of the book. Part One is entitled “The Work of Cultural Criticism in the Age of Digital Reproduction” and Part Two “Word and Image.” Miller explains the relationship by saying what while the first section of the book “will attempt to understand” the shift in literary studies toward theory and especially cultural studies, the second section “will explore the relations of picture to word as one practical and theoretical issue important to cultural studies” (p. 9). But that connection is (fleetingly) asserted in the midst of an argument so fragmented and confused that whole sections must here be passed over without comment.What is most striking about Part One is the thought-disabling imprecision of many of the key terms and the not unrelated way in which the argument follows well-travelled modes of Marxist and poststructuralist thought. The title of Part One, “The Work of Cultural Criticism in the Age of Digital Reproduction,” is of course intended to [End Page 127] link Miller’s first essay to what is probably the best-known of Walter Benjamin’s essays, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Both seek not only to link changing technological possibilities to the direction of cultural change, but to suggest that such changes should be harnessed to the work of political revolution. Miller might have been warned by the deficiencies of Benjamin’s over-rated essay. Benjamin begins his essay by applauding Marx for so cogently showing “what could be expected of capitalism in the future”: the prophecy Benjamin derives from Marx is “that one could expect [capitalism] not only to exploit the proletariat with increasing intensity, but ultimately to create conditions which would make it possible to abolish capitalism itself” (p. 217). 1 There is still plenty of exploitation to be found in the world, not excluding the most economically (capitalistically) developed countries, but it requires real intellectual contortions to argue that the growth and exploitation of a proletariat has increased where capitalism has most developed; the assertion that the world is moving toward the abolition of capitalism hardly requires comment.Benjamin’s closing argument, the point toward which his entire essay is presumably driving, substitutes a clever slogan for thought. “The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life” (p. 241). But, writes Benjamin in his closing sentence, “Communism responds by politicizing art” (p. 242). Miller attempts to explain the distinction: “To aestheticize politics is to treat the state as though it were a work of art” while the “politicizing of art... means affirming the political value and force of art” (p. 10). Well, it is of course possible to assume such a meaning for Benjamin’s words, especially since it is hard to know exactly what they mean, but why make so much of an essay which begins by endorsing a prophecy that has become increasingly dubious, ends in an ambiguous formulation, and in between mixes obvious and trivial observations with a highly questionable argument about the disappearance of the “aura” of a work as a result of mechanical reproduction? As for the latter, the cheap reproduction of, for example, certain of Van Gogh’s paintings can be argued to “debase” them, but if they mean little to those who encounter them only on cheap posters or computer screens, they can scarcely mean less than they did to those unaware of their existence before the age of mechanical reproduction. And after all, if the original paintings have not retained their “aura,” museums could simply fill their rooms with reproductions.The reason Miller links his essay to that of Benjamin is presumably to demonstrate his allegiance to the form of Marxist thought so frequently... (shrink)

From reason to practice in bioethics brings together original contributions from some of the world's leading scholars in the field of bioethics. With a particular focus on, and critical engagement with, the influential work of Professor John Harris, the book provides a detailed exploration of some of the most interesting and challenging philosophical and practical questions raised in bioethics.

The field of rhetoric provides unique frameworks and tools for understanding the role of language in moral reasoning and corruption. Drawing on a discursive understanding of the self, we focus on how the rhetoric of conversations constructs and shapes our moral reasoning and moral behavior. Using rhetorical appeals and a moral development framework, we construct three propositions that use variation in the rhetoric of conversations to identify and predict corruption. We discuss some of the implications of our model.

ABSTRACT Within the context of national traditions in colonial science, the scientific activities of Jesuit missionaries present us with a unique combination of challenges. The multinational membership of the Society of Jesus gave its missionaries access to virtually every Portuguese, Spanish, and French colony. The Society was thus compelled to engage an astonishingly diverse array of cultural and natural environments, and that diversity of contexts is reflected in the range and the complexity of Jesuit scientific practices. Underlying that complexity, however, (...) was what I see as a unique combination of institutional structures; namely, European colleges, overseas mission stations, and the regular circulation of personnel and information. With this institutional framework as a backdrop, I briefly trace what I see as the most salient themes emerging from recent studies of Jesuit overseas science: 1) the Societys ability to use scientific expertise to its advantage amid the complex web of dependencies upon which it missionary activities rested; 2) the ability of its missionaries to become intimate with a wide range of cultures and to appropriate natural knowledge held by indigenous peoples, especially in the fields of material medica and geography; and 3) the different ways Jesuits used published accounts of “remote nature” (i.e., natural histories of overseas colonies) to advance their corporate and religious causes. (shrink)

Reason's Grief takes W. B. Yeats's comment that we begin to live only when we have conceived life as tragedy as a call for a tragic ethics, something the modern West has yet to produce. Harris argues that we must turn away from religious understandings of tragedy and the human condition and realize that our species will occupy a very brief period of history, at some point to disappear without a trace. We must accept an ethical perspective that avoids (...) pernicious fantasies about ultimate redemption but that sees tragic loss as a permanent and pervasive aspect of our daily lives, yet finds a way to think, feel and act with both passion and hope. Reason's Grief takes us back through the history of our thinking about value to find our way. The call is for nothing less than a paradigm shift for understanding both tragedy and ethics. (shrink)

In his ‘Moral Enhancement, Freedom, and What We Value in Moral Behaviour’,1 David DeGrazia sets out to defend moral bioenhancement from a number of critics, me prominently among them. Here he sets out his stall: "Many scholars doubt what I assert: that there is nothing inherently wrong with MB. Some doubt this on the basis of a conviction that there is something inherently wrong with biomedical enhancement technologies in general. Chief among their objections are the charges that biomedical enhancement is (...) unnatural, use of biomedical enhancements evinces an insufficient appreciation for human “giftedness”, and biomedical enhancements pose a threat to personal identity. Elsewhere I have attempted to neutralize these objections. Here I will address a set of concerns that are directed at MB in particular and appeal to the nature and value of human freedom."Let me make clear at once that I do not believe there is anything inherently wrong with MB. I have been an advocate for human enhancement for over 30 years writing four books defending such enhancements.2–⇓4 The most recent of these published in 2007 covers much the same ground as Allen Buchanan's 2011 book cited by DeGrazia,5 but, unlike Buchanan, I do not define enhancements in terms of the intention or the motivation of those who produce them but rather in terms of their effect. I must also make clear that, like DeGrazia, I have also, for a very long time, attempted to neutralise objections 1–3 listed in the above passage.2–⇓4DeGrazia introduces his critique of my approach like this: "I will construe Harris’ argument and similar arguments as directed entirely at motivation-based MB—though I will hereafter omit the qualifier, “motivation-based.” (Certainly, these arguments do not apply to embryo selection, which … ". (shrink)

Cloning - few words have as much potential to grip our imagination or grab the headlines. No longer the stuff of science fiction or Star Wars - it is happening now. Yet human cloning is currently banned throughout the world, and therapeutic cloning banned in many countries. In this highly controversial book, John Harris does a lot more than ask why we are so afraid of cloning. He presents a deft and informed defence of human cloning, carefully exposing the (...) rhetorical and highly dubious arguments against it. He begins with an introduction to what a human clone is, before tackling some of the most common and frequently bizarre criticisms of cloning: Is it really wicked? Can we regulate it? What about the welfare of cloned children? Does it turn human beings into commodities? Dismissing one by one some of the myths about human cloning, in particular that it is degrading and unsafe, he astutely argues that some of our most cherished values, such as the freedom to start a family and the freedom from state control, actually support the case for human cloning. Offering a brave and lucid insight into this ethical minefield, John Harris at last shows that far from ending the diversity of human life or creating a race of super-clones, cloning has the power to improve and heal human life. (shrink)