A secular chaplaincy

This essay reviews Richard Zaner'sTroubled Voices, a philosopher's reflection on his work as a clinical ethicist at a major medical center. Through stories of sickness and illness and the dilemmas posed by infirmity, Zaner considers principal issues in clinical ethics and the philosopher's place at the bedside. director of medical ethics at The New York Hospital.     

Richard Zaner’s “Troubled” Voice In <Emphasis Type="Italic">Troubled Voices</Emphasis>: Poseur,Posing, <Emphasis Type="Italic">Possibilizing</Emphasis>?

This essay considers Richard Zaner’s storytelling in Troubled Voices as a form of possibilizing which uses the stories to exemplify important moral themes such as contingency and freedom. Distinguishing between activities of moral discovery through the telling of a story and “posing” in the sense of writing to tell the “moral” of the story, I suggest that something crucial goes on for Zaner in his own tellings. Several of the more insistent implications Zaner reveals about the moral relationships encountered in the activity of clinical ethics consultation are examined in that light, especially regarding this question: is it more beneficial, or harmful, to articulate elements of core meanings and values that are entailed in individual viewpoints, which, prior to an ethics consultant’s participation, may have remained unspoken and possibly unacknowledged?     

Holy mothers of God: sex work,inheritance, and the women of Jesus’ genealogy*

ABSTRACT

In this article I consider the stories of Jesus’ women ancestors in the genealogy which opens the Gospel of Matthew. Reading these stories in light of Marxist-feminist analyses of marriage, sex work and reproductive labor, alongside contemporary sex workers’ rights discourse, and through Marcella Althaus-Reid's claim that all theology is “a sexual act”, I explore their implications for contemporary debates about property and propriety in both Christian systematic theology and contemporary Christian sexual ethics – which cannot, of course, be disentangled from one another. To conclude, I return to the twinned questions of righteousness and purity which centrally define both theological accounts of Christian identity and Christian sexual ethics, suggesting that righteousness relies for its coherence not only on the abjection of those who fall short of its standards, but also on their labor.     

Who Wants these Stories? Reflections on Ethical Implications of the Re-publication of a Missionary Work

This paper discusses ethics in the context of Aboriginal Studies. Taking the example of a late-nineteenth century missionary work, a collection of out-of-print Mi’kmaq stories, it examines the ethical implications of the potential re-publication of such a text. It is argued that the Baptist missionary Silas T. Rand, who translated and transcribed the narratives, did his work from a Eurocentric perspective. The biases of a colonial ideology built into his translations/interpretations which are often quoted as authoritative would be further perpetuated if his work is republished without critical commentary. As Aboriginal oral traditions generally form the basis of Aboriginal cultures and contemporary Aboriginal literatures but have been demeaned for centuries thereby further colonizing the peoples, an edition of Rand’s work informed by a postcolonial ethics is crucial. The paper therefore concludes with the suggestion that the stories collected by the missionary should be repatriated in the respective Mi’kmaq communities in a way that the people can decide how to go about their publication (if they want them published at all). A non-Aboriginal scholar may facilitate the process but should follow the directions of the communities.     

Constructing a story to live by: Ethics,emotions and academic practice in the context of climate change

Starting from the concept of the narrative-self, this paper explores the everyday ethics of research and academic practice as seen through the storied-experiences of two women who have chosen their careers through their desire to contribute meaningfully to the resolution of environmental issues. Selves are embedded in language, in relationships, in societies, in places and in ecologies. However, selves are also co-constructed in dialogue between teller and listener or writer and reader. In the intersubjective space opened up through dialogue lies the potential for change at both personal and societal levels. Enacting a narrative ethics of reading and writing that draws on counselling practices, this paper brings my own affective, embodied story into dialogue with the published memoir of Alison Watt. As we both struggle to find stories we can live by within the contexts of specific academic and research communities we begin to challenge the narratives and discourses that dominate our respective fields of field biology and human geography. The emotional and embodied practice of narrative ethics is offered as one possible response to the overemphasis on technical rationality within our society and its institutions. I argue that the development of practical wisdom (phronesis) is essential to addressing issues such as climate change, which are not simply technical problems but are fundamentally rooted in the human condition.     

Reflections of a reluctant clinical ethicist: Ethics consultation and the collapse of critical distance

The obvious appeal and growing momentum of clinical ethics in academic medical centers should not blind us to a potential danger: the collapse of critical distance. The very integration into the clinical milieu and the processes of clinical decision making, that clinical ethics claims as its greatest success, carries the seeds of a dilution of ethics' critical stance toward medicine and medical education. The purpose of this paper is to suggest how this might occur, and what potential contributions of ethics to medicine might be sacrificed as a result. Medical sociology will be used for comparison. Sociologists have found that they may function either as students and critics of established medical practices and educational philosophies, or as collaborative participants in them — but rarely both. It may be that professional ethics is most effective when it plays the role of stranger rather than insider, and is continually able to question the most basic assumptions and values of the enterprise with which it is associated. As with medical sociology, ethics and humanities must ask to what extent their desire for acceptance in the clinic requires their acceptance of the clinic: specifically, acceptance of basic assumptions about optimal ways of organizing medical education, socializing physicians-in-training, providing care, and even of defining medical ethics itself. The paper concludes by recommending that ethics reassert its strangeness in the medical milieu even as it assumes a more prominent role within the medical center.     

Effects of Pronoun Type and Gender Role Consistency on Children's Recall and Interpretation of Stories

The pronouns he, she, and they were compared with he and she alternating, to examine recall and gender interpretation of stories. Participants, who were ethnically diverse, were 48 girls and boys aged 6 and 9 from working-class and middle-class areas of San Antonio. Children read stories about imaginary characters of ambiguous gender referred to by varying pronouns and enjoying either stereotypically masculine, feminine, or neutral activities. Recall was higher for girls, older children, and children who heard stories containing she instead of he. Six-year-olds, but not 9-year-olds, recalled more information from stories containing gender-consistent activities. Interpretation of character gender for he, she, and he/she alternating was based largely on pronoun; for stories using they, it was based both on pronoun and activity. The results underscore the nongeneric nature of generic pronouns and the gender differences in recall and interpretation evoked by contact with gender specific reading material.     

The senior therapist's grandiosity: Clinical and ethical consequences of merging multiple roles

Grandiose senior therapists who knowingly foster treatment relationships that run counter to the wisdom and ethics of the field of psychotherapy can do harm to their patients. When practitioners merge the boundaries of treatment they simultaneously violate professional ethical codes and violate the frame of the analysis. Multiple role relationships often exploit patients' dependency while gratifying the narcissism of the senior therapist. The focus of this paper will be to explore the motivation and personality of senior therapists who are socially involved with their patients. The convergence of ethical and clinical problems related to multiple role relationships will be addressed also. Professionals may be able to resolve the problem through group process.     

What I Talk About When I Talk About Teaching and Learning

In this text I discuss two events in which I learned something important about life and about education in order to formulate in a precise manner two propositions for my pedagogical creed. In focus for both are the interrelatedness of theory and life. The stories are told through the lenses of Emmanuel Levinas’s and Jacques Rancière’s thinking, but the stories also are shown to be essential in my understanding of their thinking. The first story is about learning ethics as a consequence of meeting an old man on a remote island and the second story is about teaching, when a young girl in a situation of war taught me something important about political life. In a final section I discuss briefly what those theoretical/practical experiences and memories bring to my understanding of education.     

Loób and Kapwa: An Introduction to a Filipino Virtue Ethics

This is an introduction to a Filipino virtue ethics which is a relationship-oriented virtue ethics. The concepts to be discussed are the result of the unique history of the Philippines, namely a Southeast Asian tribal and animist tradition mixed with a Spanish Catholic tradition for over 300 years. Filipino virtue ethics is based on two foundational concepts in Filipino culture. The first is loób, which can easily be misunderstood when literally translated into English as ‘inside’ but which is better translated as ‘relational will’, and the second is kapwa, which is literally translated as ‘other person’ but is better understood as ‘together with the person’. These serve as pillars for a special collection of virtues (kagandahang-loób, utang-na-loób, pakikiramdam, hiya, lakas-ng-loób/bahala na) which are not individualistic virtues in the same way as most of the cardinal virtues of the Western tradition (i.e. prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude) but are all directed towards the preservation and strengthening of human relationships. This introduction to a Filipino virtue ethics is articulated and organized through a dialogue with Aristotelian-Thomistic virtue ethics.     

Telling a “baby story”: Mothers narrating their pre-schoolers' past across two cultural contexts

Mothers from two middle-class contexts from Berlin, Germany (n = 35), and Delhi, India (n = 28) told a baby story to their 3-year olds about an event that had happened during the children's first year of life. The contexts represented two cultural models: the model of psychological autonomy (Berlin) and the model of autonomy-relatedness (Delhi). We investigated the culture-specific functions of this reminiscing task as reflected in the structure, content and specificity of the stories. The stories in both contexts were minimally interactive and the children contributed few elaborations themselves. Stories told by the Berlin mothers were longer, and more specific. Mothers in both contexts were similarly elaborative relative to being repetitive. The stories were highly child-centred in both contexts but even more child-centred for Delhi. Importantly, maternal narrations from the Berlin context were embedded in a frame story that characterised the child's individual past; stories thus constructed “exclusive baby stories”. Most stories told by the Delhi mothers had no frame story but instead were about what the child used to do as a baby in general; they thus constructed “routine baby stories”. Results are interpreted in the view of the underlying self, social and directive functions of this reminiscing task.     

A transition of Chinese humanism and aesthetics from rationalism to irrationalism

Chinese people attach importance to intuition and imagery in ways of thinking that are quite sensible, but the result, i.e. the thoughts that are popularized in virtue of political power, are rather rational. These rational thoughts, which were influenced by Buddhism and continually became introspective, had been growing more irrational factors. Up to the middle and late Ming Dynasty, when the economy was developed, they merged with the growing emphasis on daily needs of food and clothes and the envisagement to the utilitarian circumstances, and finally broke through the threshold of rationalism. Under the attack of Geng Dingxiang, Li Zhi who emphasized these thoughts was forced beyond his previous boundaries and led a whole variation in how he viewed a series of issues including values, humanity, ethics and aesthetics. This indicated a historical change from rationalism to irrationalism in Chinese humanism and aesthetics thoughts. Translated by Huang Deyuan from Xueshu Yuekan 学术月刊 (Academic Monthly), 2006, (11): 103–112     

The protection of patients’ rights in clinical trials

The Helsinki Declaration is a very important document regarding the protection of patients’ rights in clinical trials and one of the fundamental sources of operational principles for every ethics committee. Although they have been updated, the international guidelines for ethics committees continually fail to address certain issues pertaining to the protection of patients’ rights in clinical trials. These issues include, most significantly, the method of electing ethics committees (a free, secret ballot should be preferred to direct appointment), the avoidance of conflict of interest during the election of ethics committee members, and the necessary insurance coverage for the participants of clinical trials. Polish law should, on the other hand, be developed in such way as to not limit the effectiveness of ethics committees in protecting patients’ rights in clinical trials. The ideal solution would be to draft a uniform law concerning not only clinical trials, but all medical experiments. The opinions of experts who have been reviewing medical research projects for several years may prove to be especially valuable in this setting. This paper was presented at the 6th International Bioethics Conference on the subject of ‘The Responsible Conduct of Basic and Clinical Research’, held in Warsaw, Poland, 3–4 June 2005. The author is Chairman, Bioethics Committee of the Warsaw Regional Chamber of Physicians and Dentists.     

Being, Doing, and Knowing: Developing Ethical Competence in Health Care

There is a growing interest in ethical competence-building within nursing and health care practising. This tendency is accompanied by a remarkable growth of ethical guidelines. Ethical demands have also been laid down in laws. Present-day practitioners and researchers in health care are thereby left in a virtual cross-fire of various legislations, codes, and recommendations, all intended to guide behaviour. The aim of this paper was to investigate the role of ethical guidelines in the process of ethical competence-building within health care practice and medical research. A conceptual and critical philosophical analysis of some paragraphs of the Helsinki Declaration and of relevant literature was performed. Three major problems related to ethical guidelines were identified, namely, the interpretation problem (there is always a gap between the rule and the practice, which implies that ethical competence is needed for those who are to implement the guidelines); the multiplicity problem (the great number of codes, declarations, and laws might pull in different directions, which may confuse the health care providers who are to follow them); and the legalisation problem (ethics concerns may take on a legal form, where ethical reflection is replaced by a procedure of legal interpretations). Virtue ethics might be an alternative to a rule based approach. This position, however, can turn ethics into a tacit knowledge, leading to poorly reflected and inconsistent ethical decisions. Ethical competence must consist of both being (virtues) and doing (rules and principles), but also of knowing (critical reflection), and therefore a communicative based model is suggested.     

Luther on Unio Cum Christo

Although often neglected, Luther's concept of unio cum Christo in justification is a fruitful model for integrating faith and ethics. According to this model, the Christian is justified in union with Christ who is present in faith. Since Christ is the incarnation of God's self‐giving love, the Christian united with Christ will in turn love her neighbor. This model of integration reveals an intrinsic connection between faith and ethics. Justification concerns not only the dyad of self and God, but also the self's relations with other persons. For Luther, loving the neighbor completes justification. Nonetheless, in both Luther's writings and for the purposes of constructive ethics, unio cum Christo is best understood not as an exhaustive account of integration, but as a helpful model for illuminating certain theological commitments, especially the importance of neighbor love to the God‐relation.     

现代语境中的伦理学和伦理学家

Ethics in the modern context is under the dual pressure of scientific-technological rationality and market commercialization, which has led to breakthroughs in the original boundaries of knowledge and academic methodology. The gradual separation of the domain of public life and that of private life in modern society and the former’s increasing pressure on the latter, in addition to the above dual pressure on ethics, is causing a dramatic transformation of the structure of ethical knowledge itself. All of these raise new theoretical problems for ethics and ethicists in the modern context. Answering and solving these problems makes sense for the future development of ethics as one of the classic humanities, and tests modern ethicists’ ability to realize their moral and theoretical duties. Translated by Yan Xin from Daode yu wenming 道德与文明 (Morality and Civilization), 2007, (4): 4–9     

Virtue Ethics and Situationist Personality Psychology

In this paper I examine and reply to a deflationary challenge brought against virtue ethics. The challenge comes from critics who are impressed by recent psychological evidence suggesting that much of what we take to be virtuous conduct is in fact elicited by narrowly specific social settings, as opposed to being the manifestation of robust individual character. In answer to the challenge, I suggest a conception of virtue that openly acknowledges the likelihood of its deep, ongoing dependence upon particular social relationships and settings. I argue that holding this conception will indeed cause problems for some important strands of thought in virtue ethics, most notably in the tradition of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. But an approach to virtue ethics modeled on David Hume's treatment of virtue and character in A Treatise of Human Nature promises to escape these problems.     

Varieties of Objectivity: Reply to De Mesel

In a previous paper, I argued that the later Wittgenstein did not endorse a realist account of ethics, where a realist account is understood to involve a claim to truth as well as objectivity. In this paper, I respond to a number of critical questions that Benjamin De Mesel raises about that interpretation. I agree with him that just as there are uses for expressions such as “truth”, “fact” and “reality” in ethics, there are uses for expressions such as “objectivity” that do not involve a deeper realist commitment. But I uphold and reinforce my claim that objectivity in ethics as the realist conceives it is ruled out by Wittgenstein, who describes the correspondence between ethical expressions and reality in an entirely different way.     

God at Play: Seeing God Through the Lens of the Young Krishna

Abstract : This article begins with the absence of biblical stories about Jesus' youth. This lack means that typical boyhood characteristics, such as playfulness, are absent from a traditional Christian picture of the divine. Using the lens of stories told about Krishna's youth in the Bhagavata Purana, I suggest that Christians could learn from the Hindu idea of a “god at play,” as such a concept enhances a Christian understanding of who God has revealed Godself to be, and how Christians are called to be in relationship to God.     

Toward a decolonial global ethics

This paper argues that decolonial theory can offer a distinctive and valuable ethical lens. Decolonial perspectives give rise to an ethics that is fundamentally global but distinct from, and critical of, moral cosmopolitanism. Decolonial ethics shares with cosmopolitanism a refusal to circumscribe normative commitments on the basis of existing political and cultural boundaries. It differs from cosmopolitanism, though, by virtue of its rejection of the individualism and universalism of cosmopolitan thought. Where cosmopolitan approaches tend to articulate abstract principles developed from within a particular Western tradition, decolonial approaches reject abstract global designs in favour of inter-cultural dialogue amongst multiple people(s), including peoples who deem collective and non-human entities to be of fundamental moral importance. In addition, decolonial global ethics rejects universality in favour of ‘pluriversality’.