This third edition updates and expands the earlier award-winning volumes, providing classrooms and individuals alike with one of the finest available resources for ethics-engaged modern medicine.

Through a multiphase coding process, the researchers examined the selection, characteristics, and planned use of 111 written, visual, oral, and material sources that preservice teachers incorporated into plans for inquiry-based elementary social studies instruction. Preservice teachers identified Google as their main tool for locating potential sources, selected far more secondary than primary sources, and varied widely in how they prepared sources for elementary students. Planned use of sources focused almost entirely on identifying key details, with limited opportunities designed for students (...) to contextualize sources, examine bias, or corroborate evidence. Implications for teacher education related to source selection and analysis are discussed. (shrink)

Jeffrey Bishop’s The Anticipatory Corpse demonstrates how death is present in and cloaked by contemporary practices of end-of-life care. A key to Bishop’s argument is that for modern medicine the cadaver has become epistemologically normative and that a metaphysics shorn of formal and final causes now shapes contemporary healthcare practices. The essays of this symposium laud and interrogate Bishop’s argument in three ways. First, they raise critical methodological challenges from the perspectives of human rights, Charles Taylor’s concept of social imaginaries, (...) and economics. Second, they demonstrate the analytical power of his argument by detailing how it might be extended to additional issues beyond simply end-of-life care and how it might be brought into conversation with sociology. Third, they engage the constructive turn Bishop takes at the end of the book. Bishop himself also updates readers on the reception of The Anticipatory Corpse, as well as the way his thinking has evolved over the past 5 years since its publication. He also engages the questions, challenges, and openings provided by our authors. (shrink)

Catholic health care is one of the key places where the church lives Catholic social teaching (CST). Yet the individualistic methodology of Catholic bioethics inherited from the manualist tradition has yet to incorporate this critical component of the Catholic moral tradition. Informed by the places where Catholic health care intersects with the diverse societal injustices embodied in the patients it encounters, this book brings the lens of CST to bear on Catholic health care, illuminating a new spectrum of ethical issues (...) and practical recommendations from social determinants of health, immigration, diversity and disparities, behavioral health, gender-questioning patients, and environmental and global health issues. (shrink)

The principle of stewardship has come to play a significant role in the consciousness of Catholic health care. This is a recent development correlative with changes in the economic configurations of Catholic health care in the latter two decades of the twentieth century, as well as with the striking ascendance of the principle within US Catholic culture during the same period. Yet while the concept of stewardship seems to be an unobjectionable given central to Catholic practice, I argue that in (...) its contemporary configuration, it embodies a deeply problematic set of theological assumptions drawn from a particular historical trajectory that is—from a Catholic perspective—quite troubling. This history is concurrent with an equally problematic deformation of the concept of charity. Taken together, these malformed concepts often shackle and misdirect the ability of those who work within Catholic health care to creatively discern transformative solutions and faithful modes of practice. (shrink)

Catholic health care has long been a key place where the Church embodies its social doctrine. However, the moral methodology that shapes Catholic bioethics relies on an act-based approach to decision making, which is rooted in the pre–Vatican II manualist tradition, focusing primarily on clinical issues related to the beginning and end of life. This essay argues that given the doctrinal status of Catholic social thought, Catholic bioethics must revisit its scope and methodology. It proceeds in three steps: a meta-analysis (...) of traditional Catholic bioethics, validating the claim made above; an overview of the limited literature published since 1980 engaging Catholic bioethics and CST; and a map of a Catholic bioethics informed by CST generated from a dual starting point. The essay concludes by focusing on both the places where marginalized persons encounter Catholic health care and the ethical issues presented, including race, health care disparities, immigration status, and gender inequality, as well as the interrelated perspective of the common good, expanding the array of issues to include environmental degradation, unions, health care financing, and more. (shrink)

This essay asks: How do the realities of embodied trauma inflicted by racism interface with virtue theory? This question illuminates two lacunae in virtue theory. The first is attention to race. We argue that the contemporary academic virtue literature performs largely as a White space, failing to address virtue theory’s role in the social construction of race, ignoring the rich and vibrant resources on virtue ethics alive within the Black theological tradition that long antedates Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, and segregating (...) the emerging literature on race and virtue from the broader discourse. The second is lack of attention to embodiment. More precisely, contemporary virtue theory, informed largely by Aristotle, Aquinas, and MacIntyre, has no conceptual space to theorize the body’s role acquiring and deploying virtue and vice. To explore this nexus, we draw on racial trauma therapist Resmaa Menakem, Katie Walker Grimes, and Howard Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited to challenge contemporary virtue theory and open new possibilities for a robustly corporate, enfleshed theological virtue ethic. (shrink)

This essay argues for a renewed institution of an ancient Christian practice, the Order of Widows. Drawing on the Roman Catholic tradition’s recent writings on the elderly, particularly the 1998 document from the Pontifical Council for the Laity entitled “The Dignity of Older People and their Mission in the Church and in the World,” I argue that we find within the Roman Catholic tradition advocacy for a renewed understanding of the vocation of the elderly within the Church. Building on this, (...) I then trace in the broadest of outlines some elements of what a renewal of the Order of Widows might look like. In doing so, it becomes clear how this new ecclesial practice addresses health issues of older women (devaluation, marginalization, loss of voice, impoverishment, debilitation, loneliness, isolation, and euthanasia). More importantly, such a practice moves beyond principles to demonstrate a concrete alternative. As such it would provide a powerful witness to the very culture the Church seeks to transform. (shrink)

This article identifies three geographical shifts that have altered the relative social, spatial and temporal locations of dying, church and health care, and axiology causally contributing to our culture’s deformed dying processes. It proposes an alternative script for a new art of dying drawing upon the early church’s practice of the order of widows.

A THEOLOGICAL BIOETHICS NEEDS, FIRST, A THEOLOGICAL POLITICS. THE thesis of this essay rests on the claim that the contours of a theological politics are found in the nature of sacramental practices. More specifically, a theological politics of medicine is found in the sacramental practice of anointing of the sick. Anointing provides a radically theological hermeneutic—a theologically robust vision for interpreting medicine that, if enacted, can powerfully make real God's work in the world. Such a vision is embodied in one (...) particular twentieth-century exemplar—the organization called Partners In Health and its cofounder, Paul Farmer. Farmer and PIH, I argue, live the theologic and theological politics of medicine embodied in the practice of anointing. What is more, they show—against those who would accuse such an approach of being naively idealistic—that such a theological politics is possible, powerful, and can even change the world. (shrink)

Across the world people in different societies structure their family relationships in many different ways. These relationships become encoded in their languages as kinship terminology, a word set that maps variably onto a vast genealogical grid of kinship categories, each of which could in principle vary independently. But the observed diversity of kinship terminology is considerably smaller than the enormous theoretical design space. For the past century anthropologists have captured this variation in typological schemes with only a small number of (...) model system types. Whether those types exhibit the internal co-selection of parts implicit in their use is an outstanding question, as is the sufficiency of typologies in capturing variation as a whole. We interrogate the coherence of classic kinship typologies using modern statistical approaches and systematic data from a new database, Kinbank. We first survey the canonical types and their assumed patterns of internal and external co-selection, then present two data-driven approaches to assess internal coherence. Our first analysis reveals that across parents’ and ego’s generation, typology has limited predictive value: knowing the system in one generation does not reliably predict the other. Though we detect limited co-selection between generations, “disharmonic” systems are equally common. Second, we represent structural diversity with a novel multidimensional approach we term kinship space. This approach reveals, for ego’s generation, some broad patterning consistent with the canonical typology, but diversity is considerably higher than classical typologies suggest. Our results strongly challenge the descriptive adequacy of the set of canonical kinship types. (shrink)

Harms and risks to groups and third-parties can be significant in the context of research, particularly in data-centric studies involving genomic, artificial intelligence, and/or machine learning technologies. This article explores whether and how United States federal regulations should be adapted to better align with current ethical thinking and protect group interests. Three aspects of the Common Rule deserve attention and reconsideration with respect to group interests: institutional review board (IRB) assessment of the risks/benefits of research; disclosure requirements in the informed (...) consent process; and criteria for waivers of informed consent. In accordance with respect for persons and communities, investigators and IRBs should systematically consider potential group harm when designing and reviewing protocols, respectively. Research participants should be informed about any potential group harm in the consent process. We call for additional public discussion, empirical research, and normative analysis on these issues to determine the right regulatory and policy path forward. (shrink)

A comparison of the literatures on how infants represent generic object classes, gender and race information in faces, and emotional expressions reveals both common and distinctive developments in the three domains. In addition, the review indicates that some very basic questions remain to be answered regarding how infants represent facial displays of emotion, including (a) whether infants form category representations for discrete classes of emotion, (b) when and how such representations come to incorporate affective meaning, (c) the developmental trajectory for (...) representation of emotional expression at different levels of inclusiveness (i.e., from broad to narrow or narrow to broad?), and (d) whether there is superior discrimination ability operating within more frequently experienced emotion categories. (shrink)

Harms and risks to groups and third-parties can be significant in the context of research, particularly in data-centric studies involving genomic, artificial intelligence, and/or machine learning technologies. This article explores whether and how United States federal regulations should be adapted to better align with current ethical thinking and protect group interests. Three aspects of the Common Rule deserve attention and reconsideration with respect to group interests: institutional review board (IRB) assessment of the risks/benefits of research; disclosure requirements in the informed (...) consent process; and criteria for waivers of informed consent. In accordance with respect for persons and communities, investigators and IRBs should systematically consider potential group harm when designing and reviewing protocols, respectively. Research participants should be informed about any potential group harm in the consent process. We call for additional public discussion, empirical research, and normative analysis on these issues to determine the right regulatory and policy path forward. (shrink)

“One of the great mysteries … is why some people stand up for what is right while others do not”. So ends Bioethics in Action. The greater mystery, called out by this book, is why many of th...

The Health Humanities Consortium was established in 2015 to “promote health humanities scholarship, education, and practice through transdisciplinary methods and theories that focus on the intersection of the arts and humanities, health, illness, and healthcare.” As the founding co-chairs of the HHC, we provide a history of the founding of this organization in this article, describing the journey of its creation, the choices and challenges it faced as a new organization, and our hopes for a rich future.

The boundaries of honesty are the focal point of this exploration of the individualistic origins of modernist ethics and the consequent need for a more pragmatic approach to business ethics. The tendency of modernist ethics to see honesty as an individual responsibility is described as a contextually naive approach, one that fails to account for the interactive effects between individual choices and corporate norms. By reviewing the empirical accounts of managerial struggles with ethical dilemmas, the article arrives at the contextual (...) preconditions for encouraging the development of reflective moral agents in modern corporations. (shrink)

The body of the one deemed mad often remains a sexual body with sexual needs. Mental health services respond to these demands of the body in various ways, including constructing rules around physical movement. In this context, we were interested in how mental health clinicians problematized the sexual needs and practices of residents of a long‐stay mental health rehabilitation facility and how solutions were constructed in relation to the residents’ sexual desires. This paper reports findings from mental health clinicians, as (...) part of a case study where we addressed this question. Mental health clinicians responded to residents’ sexuality from a discourse of risk. The notion of the engagement with each resident as a sexual subject was subordinated to the paternalistic notion of protecting the patient from risk. The resident became an object to be monitored and protected rather than a subject with sexual desire and agency. This paternalism also showed itself in relation to a ‘no‐sex on‐site’ rule that allowed for a shift of risk from the organization to the resident. Residents, rather than having a relatively safe place to have sexual relations, were required to find a place elsewhere, potentially unsafe, outside the facility. (shrink)

Life together : moral reasoning in theological context -- Pilgrim's progress : virtues and the goal of the journey -- The imitation of Christ : issues along the way.