Privacy and the Human Genome Project

The Human Genome Project has raised many issues regarding the contributions of genetics to a variety of diseases and societal conditions. With genetic testing now easily conducted with lowered costs in nonmedical domains, a variety of privacy issues must be considered. Such testing will result in the loss of significant privacy rights for the individual. Society must now consider such issues as the ownership of genetic data, confidentiality rights to such information, limits placed on genetic screening, and legislation to control genetic testing and its applications. There is often a conflict between individual rights to privacy and the need for societal protection.     

Telling stories: metaphors of the Human Genome Project

Scientists of the Human Genome Project tend to rely on three metaphors to describe their work, each of which implicitly tells much the same story. Whether they claim to interpret the ultimate “book,” to fix a flawed “machine,” or to map a mysterious “wilderness,” they invariably cast the researcher as one who dominates and exploits the Other. This essay, which explores the ways such a story conflicts with feminist values, proposes an alternative.     

The ethics of belief: doxastic self-control and intellectual virtue

Most of the literature on doxastic voluntarism has concentrated on the question of the voluntariness of belief and the issue of how our actual or possible control of our beliefs bears on our justification for holding them and on how, in the light of this control, our intellectual character should be assessed. This paper largely concerns a related question on which less philosophical work has been done: the voluntariness of the grounding of belief and the bearing of various views about this matter on justification, knowledge, and intellectual virtue. In part, my concern is the nature and extent of our voluntary control over our responses to reasons for believing—or over what we take to be such reasons. This paper provides a partial account of such control and, on the basis of the account, will clarify the criteria for appraising intellectual virtue.     

人类基因组计划与博士生的时代意识

人类基因组计划（HGP）的成就表明,面对新世纪的挑战,作为肩负国家重任的高层次人才的博士生更要转变观念,增强时代意识,发展（科技）战略意识、科技前沿意识,创新意识,市场意识,协作意识。其中尤以发展（科技）战略意识最为重要,其影响深远,意义重大。     

Justice and care: The implications of the Kohlberg-Gilligan debate for medical ethics

Carol Gilligan has identified two orientations to moral understanding; the dominant ‘justice orientation’ and the under-valued ‘care orientation’. Based on her discernment of a ‘voice of care’, Gilligan challenges the adequacy of a deontological liberal framework for moral development and moral theory. This paper examines how the orientations of justice and care are played out in medical ethical theory. Specifically, I question whether the medical moral domain is adequately described by the norms of impartiality, universality, and equality that characterize the liberal ideal. My analysis of justice-oriented medical ethics, focuses on the libertarian theory of H.T. Engelhardt and the contractarian theory of R.M. Veatch. I suggest that in the work of E.D. Pellegrino and D.C. Thomasma we find not only a more authentic representation of medical morality but also a project that is compatible with the care orientation's emphasis on human need and responsiveness to particular others.     

Varsity medical ethics debate 2018: constant health monitoring - the advance of technology into healthcare

The 2018 Varsity Medical Ethics debate convened upon the motion: “This house believes that the constant monitoring of our health does more harm than good”. This annual debate between students from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge is now in its tenth year. This year’s debate was hosted at the Oxford Union on 8th of February 2018, with Oxford winning for the Opposition, and was the catalyst for the collation and expansion of ideas in this paper.New technological devices have the potential to enhance patient autonomy, improve patient safety, simplify the management of chronic diseases, increase connectivity between patients and healthcare professionals and assist individuals to make lifestyle changes to improve their health. However, these are pitted against an encroachment of technology medicalising the individual and home, an exacerbation of health inequalities, a risk to the security of patient data, an alteration of the doctor-patient relationship dynamic and an infringement on individual self-identity. This paper will draw upon and develop these concepts, while contending arguments for and against constant health monitoring. This is not a review of medical devices and health monitoring, but a reflective development and more detailed elaboration of the main points highlighted in the 2018 Varsity Medical Ethics debate.     

Honoring the duallium: disability,environmental ethics,and the implicit religion of gardening

In recent years, the pilgrimage shrine of La Sainte-Baume has attracted an increasing number of non-Catholic pilgrims influenced by the ‘New Age’ and the Neopagan movement. These pilgrims consider Mary Magdalene as a sort of female counterpart of Jesus and the mountain of La Sainte-Baume, where according to a Christian legend she spent the last part of her life, as a ‘power place’ charged with ‘healing energy’. Based on 3 years of field work among Mary Magdalene pilgrims and drawing on Tanya Luhrmann's idea of ‘interpretive drift’ (1989), the essay describes the way in which these pilgrims gradually shift from their previous Christian background towards what they generally identify as ‘spirituality’. The pilgrims reconceptualise La Sainte-Baume and its saint, and make their own a shrine they feel was misappropriated and unjustly monopolised by the ‘Church’.     

In the public interest: intellectual disability, the Supreme Court, and the death penalty

This article deals with a case that recently came before the U.S. Supreme Court. The issues involved whether attorneys provided effective assistance to a person convicted of murder when no mitigating evidence was presented (either strategically or by neglect) to the jury concerning the intellectual disabilities of their client during the death penalty phase of the trial. The Supreme Court had previously ruled that the death penalty for intellectually disabled individuals (mentally retarded) constituted cruel and unusual punishment. In this case the attorneys made a strategic decision not to present possibly mitigating evidence for the death penalty phase. The Supreme Court considered whether the appeals court abdicated its judicial review responsibilities. The results of psychological evaluations are presented, and the decisions of the Supreme Court are discussed.     

Blockheads, roundheads, pointy heads: intellectual disability and the brain before modern medicine

Recent work on the conceptual history of intellectual disability has pointed to a discontinuity in the seventeenth century, identifying the concept as essentially modern in a more radical sense than mental illness or physical disability. However, Galenist accounts of intellectual impairment were clearly connected (via anatomy) to neurology, which could be taken as prima facie evidence that Galenism shares with modern medicine one of its basic explanatory approaches to intellectual disability. Close textual examination does not bear out this counter-claim, at least as far as the conceptual apparatus itself is concerned. However, it does reveal a degree of continuity in the medical mind-set as discourses of monstrosity were transposed from the domain of anatomy to that of post-Cartesian psychology.     

人类基因组计划在西方引发的人性观思考

人类基因组计划在西方世界引起了相当广泛深入的关于人性观的思考。分子生物学的研究成果正在重新塑造人们对人类进化史和人类本身的认识。基因工程、干细胞研究等前沿领域产生的问题促使人们转向西方的传统哲学去寻找思想资源。尽管遗传决定论的陈旧观点在大众文化中仍时有所见。新的基因组学研究已开始采纳一种更全面的、兼顾历史与社会文化因素的角度。