Genetics research and biotechnology development - while holding the promise of improved pharmaceuticals, medical treatments, and foods - is also raising concerns about the impact of market forces on scientific inquiry, product development, and the provision of health care.

In his professional life, Richard Posner is addressed as “Your Honor,” inasmuch as he is Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. He is also a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. Finally, he is a prolific author of books and articles in scholarly journals in which he expounds at length and with copious footnotes his particular views of jurisprudence and public policy. One of his frequent intellectual adversaries, legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin, (...) wryly described Judge Posner as “the lazy judge who writes a book before breakfast, decides several cases before noon, teaches all afternoon at the Chicago Law School, and performs brain surgery after dinner.”. (shrink)

This book reviews Foucault's philosophy on power and ethics to investigate the possibility of restructuring freedom available to the subject. Foucault's Kantian inspired view of critique as an art of voluntary inservitude, of reflective indocility is applied to biopolitics, bioethics, artificial intelligence, and bureaucracy. This work of freedom is a process of self-creation where the subject seeks to rearrange power relations and open possibilities for autonomy and agency. This book shows how the critical attitude identifies limitations of (...) power to open the possibility for transgression as an escape from normalized submission. This involves revealing and exposing unrecognised forms of power influencing the subject to enable new ways to think differently. Psychoanalysis combined with Foucault is also shown to enhance an understanding of power relations and the task of an ethics of freedom. This is then integrated with a philosophy of place to better understand the relationship between home, self-creation, ethics, and freedom. The book outlines that Foucault's philosophy has important relevance to the writings of Heidegger, Lacan, Aristotle, Jung and Arendt which is essential reading for students and professionals of politics, ethics, phenomenology and psychoanalysis. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Ethics, Theory and the NovelRichard FreadmanEthics, Theory and the Novel, by David Parker; x & 218 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, $54.95 paper.“The word ‘ethics’ seems to have replaced ‘textuality’ as the most charged term in the vocabulary of contemporary literary and cultural theory”— so writes Steven Connor in the TLS. The claim will strike some as surprising—not least the so-called “humanist” critics who for almost three (...) decades have been defending ethical discourse against attacks from proponents of “literary and cultural theory.” There have been various intellectual sources for these attacks: neo-Marxists have claimed that ethical discourse is intrinsically class-specific and therefore ideological; psychoanalytic critics and theorists have often eschewed ethical inquiry in the belief that human conduct is predominantly determined by amoral unconscious forces; many feminists have argued that traditional ethical discourses are rendered untenable by their “gendered” histories; poststructuralists, while in some cases wanting to keep ethics on the agenda, have found it disconcertingly hard—even impossible—to conjure worthwhile ethical discourse out of a position which denies the existence of “centered” moral agents, and which sees language as inherently slippery and self-contradictory; postcolonialists tend to see Western ethical discourses as culpably ethnocentric. And so on.Yet, whatever the rhetoric of these and other strands of literary and cultural theory, it is too simple to say that they have renounced ethics altogether. Clearly, feminism, postcolonialism, Marxism, and other movements are ethical projects, and one of David Parker’s central points in Ethics, Theory, and the Novel is that the rhetoric of ethical refusal on the part of some proponents of these movements reflects an act of costly and unwarranted cultural repression: “the expansive moment of poststructuralism in the 1970s and early 1980s has suppressed some discursive possibilities which, constituted as we are partly by [End Page 519] various religious and humanistic traditions, we stand in abiding need of, and are poorer without” (pp. 3–4). Another casualty of the process, he argues, has been literature itself: it has been downgraded by the proponents of cultural studies, relegated to secondary, evidential status. Parker wants to retrieve cultural centrality and prestige for literature, and to insist that literary theory needs a rich conception of canonical literature, which “ought to be regarded as Theory’s resistant Other” (p. 6). Together with humanist criticism itself, such texts should function as the “subversive Other to the suppressive will of hegemonic Theory” (p. 146).The sense of regret at suppressed human richness and possibility is everywhere apparent in this subtle, deeply considered book. Parker’s characterization of our ethical and broader cultural predicament owes much to Charles Taylor’s monumental Sources of the Self; in particular, to Taylor’s claim that we need to “acknowledge the full range of goods we live by” (p. 20), and his three-fold account of our ethical traditions: Kantian/Judeo-Christian, Enlightenment, Romantic. Out of the cultural pluralism inherent in Taylor’s project Parker fashions a critical pluralism which reads, and also evaluates, novels in the light of their treatment of the “various goods”—the ethical strands—they explore, dramatize, and embody. His principle texts are Middlemarch, Anna Karenina, The White Peacock, and Women in Love. It is central to his case that with variousness comes tension and conflict, and that the greatest literature is that which gives ethical complexity and diversity the least reductive, “the fullest, most engaged and most intelligent examination” (p. 197). Such writing constitutes a canon—an institution for which Parker offers a courageous and compelling defense. He argues that some texts just are better than others at reflecting “the full range of good we live by,” and that, far from being merely an expression of supremacist cultural bias, the ethnocentrism of the Western canon actually schools us in “a long ethical tradition of self-reflection precisely on the tendency to self-righteous superiority” (p. 50).Literature’s contribution to “self-reflection” is crucial precisely because we are so prone to repress, to forget: the cultural selectivity against which Taylor warns is mirrored and enacted in the individual psyche. Parker is particularly concerned with two kinds of forgetting: a righteousness which blinds us... (shrink)

The book Ethics of Artificial Intelligence offers a solid exploration of arguments and real-world examples that enrich the ongoing debate surrounding AI ethics. With 12 insightful chapters, the book delves into pressing ethical issues, such as the enhancement of human abilities, the nature of consciousness, and questions of responsibility and accountability in various contexts where AI technology is used. This work connects technology ethics with broader philosophical discussions and provides valuable perspectives on the societal implications of AI. Engaging (...) and accessible, it can serve as an essential resource for scholars, technology-enthusiasts, policymakers, and anyone with an interest in the transformative potential of AI and its ethical dimensions. (shrink)