Meat abstinence, as is practiced in some religions, has a positive impact on reducing the damages that the process of meat production inflicts on the environment. The Ethiopian Orthodox Christians observe fasting by abstaining from meat for more than half a year, and this seems to do the environment and economy some good. Religion has been playing a regulatory role between ever-increasing meat demands and the country’s fast-growing meat and live animal exports. The article concludes that individuals' tendency to (...) drift from religious life practices, coupled with a growing middle class that can afford to buy meat regularly, and the country’s need to maximize foreign currency through meat and livestock exportation, is likely to see Ethiopia introduce intensive livestock production in the not too distant future, to meet domestic meat demands and increase livestock export earnings. (shrink)

In the setting of transplant medicine, decision making needs to take into account the multiple clinical and psychosocial case variables, rather than turn to arbitrary rules that cannot be scientifically supportedThe yearly demand for liver transplants far exceeds the supply of available organs .1 Additionally, alcoholic cirrhosis has been a controversial indication for transplant as these recipients can be viewed as having caused their own illness—an illness that is preventable by abstaining from alcohol . While not categorically denying liver transplantation (...) to those with alcoholic cirrhosis, many hospitals have incorporated a six month alcohol abstinence criterion 2 in an effort to select optimal candidates. The six month rule has two purposes; namely, allowing the liver a chance to recover in the absence of alcohol , and also observation of the patient to verify that he/she remains alcohol free, with the hope of reducing the risk of relapse. Everhart et al,3 determined that 85% of US liver transplant programmes and 43% of third party payers require a defined period of abstinence—for example, three or six months—as part of the waiting list process.Liver transplantation does not cure alcoholism, as evidenced by the fact that roughly 20% of these patients use alcohol following transplant, with one third exhibiting “repetitive or heavy drinking”.4 Arguments abound as to the scientific merit of a six month abstinence criterion in reducing the risk of alcohol relapse following transplant. Some propose that a minimum of six months abstinence itself predicts a lower relapse rate,5 while others argue that six months is not predictive or that other factors—for example, illicit drug use—in combination with a minimum number of months abstinent is predictive.6,7 Even the United …. (shrink)

This study seeks to understand the ways in which men who pledge sexual abstinence until marriage negotiate and assert masculine identities before and after marriage. Using longitudinal qualitative data, this work traces the ways in which men who pledge abstinence until marriage manage a tension between both “sacred” and “beastly” discourses surrounding sexuality. The situational and interactional gendered practices of these men highlight their attempts to resolve the incongruity between practices of sexual purity and hegemonic definitions of masculinity. (...) I argue that a decision to pledge sexual abstinence until marriage is an example of hybrid masculinities in that the postmarriage transition to a more hegemonically masculine status suggests that such practices are not challenging current gendered systems of power and inequality. These findings underscore the potential fallacy in using cross-sectional data to illustrate changes in gender relations, and demonstrate the importance of incorporating life course perspectives when theorizing masculinities. (shrink)

My main aim in this paper is to show that influential antireductionist arguments such as Fodor's, Kitcher's, and Dupré's state stronger conclusions than they actually succeed in establishing. By putting to the fore the role of metaphysical presuppositions in these arguments, I argue that they are convincing only as 'temporally qualified argument', and not as 'generally valid ones'. I also challenge the validity of the strategy consisting in drawing metaphysical lessons from the failure of reductionist programmes. What most of these (...) antireductionist standpoints have in common is a pretension to methodological imports. I conclude by explaining why, in order to remain relevant for scientific practice, antireductionist arguments should stay clear of metaphysics, for the latter, I argue, does not mix well with a taste for methodological prescriptions. (shrink)

This article investigates the changing justifications of one of the hallmarks of orthodox psychoanalytic practice, the neutral and abstinent stance of the psychoanalyst, during the middle decades of the 20th century. To call attention to the shifting rationales behind a supposedly cold, detached style of treatment still today associated with psychoanalysis, explanations of the clinical utility of neutrality and abstinence by ‘classical’ psychoanalysts in the United States are contrasted with how intellectuals and cultural critics understood the significance of psychoanalytic (...) abstinence. As early as the 1930s, members of the Frankfurt School discussed the cultural and social implications of psychoanalytic practices. Only in the 1960s and 1970s, however, did psychoanalytic abstinence become a topic within broader intellectual debates about American social character and the burgeoning ‘therapy culture’ in the USA. The shift from professional and epistemological concerns to cultural and political ones is indicative of the changing appreciation of psychoanalysis as a clinical discipline: for psychoanalysts as well as cultural critics, I argue, changing social mores and the professional decline of psychoanalysis infused the image of the abstinent psychoanalyst with nostalgic longing, making it a symbol of resistance against a culture seen to be in decline. (shrink)

In our previous article on the question whether heroin addicts are able to give informed consent voluntarily to research on heroin-assisted treatment, we criticized the ongoing bioethical discussion of a flawed conceptualization of heroin addicts' options. As a participant in this discussion, Edmund Henden defends the conceptualization as sufficient for determining whether heroin addicts are able to give informed consent to the research on heroin-assisted treatment voluntarily. This discussion on research on heroin-assisted treatment seems to go astray in several respects. (...) In his reply to our article Henden maintains some of the biases, such as the necessity of abstinence in recovery, that seem to prevail in addiction research on a more general level as well. These biases run the danger of having implausible ethical implications on stakeholders in addiction research and treatment. In our reply to him, we will further clarify and discuss the importance of describing the relevant issues in plausible terms that do justice to the realities of the cases of informed consent in research on heroin-assisted treatment and also raise a wider issue of the ethics of wording as well as of the narrow scope, or ‘tunnel vision’, in addiction research as currently conducted. (shrink)

Abstinence from meat has been a subject of much controversy and friction from the dawn of Christian history. Relatively widespread in the early Church, it was praised when it formed part of a temporary ascetic fasting regimen, but condemned if it amounted to a permanent rejection of animal flesh, as it would be associated with heretical ideas found in various dissident groups, gnostic sects, and pagan philosophical schools. Nevertheless, several patristic authors put forth a number of compelling arguments in (...) defense of a meatless diet, all of which would be revisited by future generations of Christian thinkers. Laying the emphasis upon the ethical incentives for abstaining from animal flesh, as well as upon enduring ambivalent attitudes toward vegetarian dietary practices, this article offers a brief overview of abstinence from meat throughout Christian history. (shrink)

BackgroundThe German guidelines for liver transplantation stipulate that every patient with alcohol-related liver disease needs to prove evidence of a 6-month abstinence period before they can be admitted to the waiting list for liver transplantation. This internationally widespread abstinence rule has been criticised as it prevents patients at least temporarily from receiving an effective and potentially life-saving therapy. This poses the question of how this abstinence rule is depicted and justified by transplantation professionals.ArgumentsIn case of the 6‑month (...) abstinence rule, guidelines are used as a tool for rationing health care. Four frames of interpretation can be reconstructed from the ethical and medical literature. Each linguistically mediated frame offers a different representation of the 6‑month abstinence rule. According to these different framings, the 6‑month waiting period is depicted (1) as a diagnostic tool to determine the regenerative capacity of the liver, (2) as a prognostic tool to determine the prospects of success of a transplantation, and (3) to determine the drinking behaviour after transplantation. In a further context, the abstinence rule (4) is interpreted as an expression of an obligation to avoid behaviour harmful to health.ConclusionThese four frames provide linguistically mediated patterns of interpretation that are used by different actors to limit the indication for liver transplantation. They give rise to different ethical questions that allow a systematic ethical assessment of the 6‑month abstinence rule. (shrink)

The abstinence approach to sex education remains influential despite its demonstrated ineffectiveness. One bill forbids the “promotion” of “gateway sexual activity,” while requiring outright condemnation of “non-abstinence,” defined so loosely as to plausibly include handholding. Bioethics seldom (if ever) contributes to sex-ed debates, yet exploring the pivotal role of medical discourse reveals the need for bioethical intervention. Sex-ed debates revolve around a theory of human flourishing based on heteronormative temporality, a developmental teleology ensuring the transmission of various supposed (...) social goods through heterosexual marriage (Halberstam, 2005). Heteronormative temporality also constitutes a moralized discourse in which the values of health and presumed certainties of medicine serve to justify conservative religious dictates that otherwise would appear controversial as the basis for public policy. Overall, this analysis explores how moralized medical discourses compound existing injustices, while suggesting bioethics’ potential contributions to moral and political analysis of sex-ed policies. (shrink)

A strength of liberal political institutions is their ability to accommodate pluralism, both allowing divergent comprehensive doctrines as well as constructing the common ground necessary for diverse people to live together. A pressing question is how far such pluralism extends. Which comprehensive doctrines are simply beyond the pale and need not be accommodated by a political consensus? Rawls attempted to keep the boundaries of reasonable disagreement quite broad by infamously denying that political liberalism need make reference to the concept of (...) truth, a claim that has been criticized by Joseph Raz, Joshua Cohen, and David Estlund. In this paper, we argue that these criticisms fail due to the fact that political liberalism can remain non-committal on the nature of truth, leaving the concept of truth in the domain of comprehensive doctrines while still avoiding the issues raised by Raz, Cohen, and Estlund. Further substantiating this point is the fact that Rawls would, and should, include parties in the overlapping consensus whose views on truth may be incoherent. Once it is seen that political liberalism allows such incoherence to reasonable parties, it is clear that the inclusion of truth and the requirement of coherence urged by Raz, Cohen, and Estlund requires more of reasonable people than is necessary for a political consensus. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue for a new analysis of Porphyry’s argument for justice in On abstinence. I aim to show that (i) in addition to being an inner order of soul, justice is attributed to external actions and (ii) justice of actions consists in refraining from harming harmless living creatures, including animals and plants. The relevant harm, I argue, consists in taking the lives of living creatures and taking products from them by force or without care. I contend (...) that Porphyry extends moral concern for others to all living creatures, but not merely on the basis of animal suffering. Finally, I argue that that the hierarchy of godlikeness in On abstinence does not support the subordination of moral concern for animals and plants to higher virtues of purity and theory. (shrink)

In book 3 of On Abstinence from Animal Food, Porphyry is traditionally taken to argue that animals are rational and that it is, therefore, unjust to kill them for food. Since the vast majority of scholars endorse this interpretation, I call it ‘the consensus interpretation’. Yet, strangely enough, elsewhere in his corpus Porphyry claims that the non-human animals are irrational. Jonathan Barnes notices this discrepancy and suggests that an appeal to the distinction between specific and non-specific predication can resolve (...) the problem. This paper explains Barnes’ solution, but argues that it must ultimately be rejected. It concludes with a brief survey of other approaches to the problem, and with an outline of the proposed solution, in which the consensus interpretation of On Abstinence is rejected in favour of a dialectical reading of Book 3. Porphyry, this piece suggests, may not have believed that animals were rational after all. (shrink)

Heyman's model, paradoxically, predicts that whereas a maximizing approach to drug choice will prevent escalation of drug use it will never yield complete abstinence. We suggest an alternative model that overcomes this difficulty by focusing on changes in drug tolerance. A small modification allows maximization to predict either abstinence or moderation (e.g., social drinking).

In recent years, many studies have examined conservative Christian responses to shifting societal attitudes about sexuality. In this article we examine official discourse from the LDS Church found in General Conference talks and the official adult magazine of the Church, Ensign, to better understand how leaders of the religion have taught the members to abstain from the use of pornography. Using a grounded-theory approach, we noted a pattern to the lessons that included four elements: avoiding dangerous associations, taking personal responsibility, (...) maintaining inner purity, and seeking spiritual treatment. This study extends previous research by examining how Mormon leaders taught their followers to interpret and protect themselves from pornography. As such, our analysis demonstrates the elaboration of religious teachings that may facilitate the negative reactions to pornography researchers have observed in survey and outcome-based research on members of conservative religions. (shrink)

The sexual revolution that took place in the late 1960s and early 1970s is one of the most profound social changes during the second half of the twentieth century in America. Before the revolution, there existed a norm proscribing premarital sex (PS norm); premarital sex was not accepted. After the sexual revolution, the PS norm no longer existed; premarital sex became accepted. In the literature on how premarital sex became accepted, little attention is given to the institutional change that transpired—the (...) collapse of a sexual norm. This study specifies one micro-mechanism of this social change. Specifically, adopting methodological individualism and the prisoner's dilemma game, I develop a theory that explains how a technological innovation for contraception triggered a change in individuals' perception of premarital sex, which led to their behavioral change. As a result, premarital sex became accepted, and the norm proscribing premarital sex collapsed. I use General Social Survey data to test the hypothesized micro-mechanism of the institutional change. The empirical analysis supports the hypothesis derived from the theory. Based on the above analyses, I discuss two alternative explanations and the issue of teenage pregnancy. (shrink)

Clinical studies as well as hundreds of case reports have indicated that Yan Xin Life Science Technology has enabled human participants to live a normal life with little or no food intake for prolonged periods—a state referred to as bigu. Bigu is described in historical records as “taking in qi to avoid food,” and is regarded as a special technique to achieve a long and healthy life. In this study, experiments were designed to study whether cells in vitro can survive (...) without commonly acknowledged essential nutrients after receiving external qi treatments from Dr. Yan Xin, a chief physician and a renowned life scientist. Results reported here indicate that mouse hybridoma cells can survive in Dulbeco’s modified Eagles medium without serum or in phosphate-buffered saline buffer without other nutrient ingredients after qi treatment. These results are the first evidence that a cellular equivalent of the human bigu phenomenon or cellular bigu phenomenon may occur. (shrink)

Investigations into the neurobiology of moral cognition are often done by examining clinical populations characterized by diminished moral emotions and a proclivity toward immoral behavior. Psychopathy is the most common disorder studied for this purpose. Although cocaine abuse is highly co-morbid with psychopathy and cocaine-dependent individuals exhibit many of the same abnormalities in socio-affective processing as psychopaths, this population has received relatively little attention in moral psychology. To address this issue, the authors used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to record (...) hemodynamic activity in 306 incarcerated male adults, stratified into regular cocaine users (n = 87) and a matched sample of non-cocaine users (n = 87), while viewing pictures that did or did not depict immoral actions and determining whether each depicted scenario occurred indoors or outdoors. Consistent with expectations, cocaine users showed abnormal neural activity in several frontostriatial regions during implicit moral picture processing compared to their non-cocaine using peers. This included reduced moral/non-moral picture discrimination in the vACC, vmPFC, lOFC, and left vSTR. Additionally, psychopathy was negatively correlated with activity in an overlapping region of the ACC and right lateralized vSTR. These results suggest that regular cocaine abuse may lead to affective deficits which can impact relatively high-level processes like moral cognition. Moreover, they add to a growing body of research suggesting an important role for the mesocorticolimbic dopamine pathway in socio-affective processing. (shrink)

Rather than proclaiming the "death of God," in the fashion of Nietzsche's madman, F. LeRon Shults proudly proclaims the "birth of God" in his incendiary, radically iconoclastic book Theology after the Birth of God. Shults argues, drawing on the multidisciplinary findings of the biocultural study of religion, that the commonplace belief in supernatural agents is the result of a variety of evolved cognitive and coalitional mechanisms that cause human beings to overdetect agency and that contribute to in-group cohesion—traits that would (...) have been selected because they aided the survival of early hominids living in hunter-gatherer societies, but that are maladaptive in our contemporary context. In his most recent book... (shrink)

This article explores the ascetic tendencies of Naḥmanides as reflected in his oeuvre as a whole, including his halakhic, kabbalistic, exegetical, and philosophical output. A close examination of Naḥmanides’s kabbalistic commentary to a talmudic sugiya concerning the differences between oaths and vows uncovers the austere and ascetic ethos in his teaching and its central place in his religious world. This perspective is linked to the nature of human beings and the human soul, the relationship between body and psyche, the meaning (...) of life and the overcoming of death, and the status of the Torah and the connection between observance of the commandments and the voluntary hasidic ethos. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 11, Issue 12, Page 66-67, December 2011.