The Future of Public Policy

This article reports the results of research that uses policy network theory and advocacy coalition theory to deduce the implications for the future of public policy in EU Member States of king trends: all those technological, economic, environmental, and social trends that can be empirically verified, affect the lives of large numbers of people and are expected by relevant experts to continue for at least the next 20 years. The resulting policy implications can be summarized as more assertive security policies, more business-friendly economic policies, more liberal social policies, and increased public spending.     

Psychoanalysis is becoming an impossible profession within the public welfare system in Sweden

Abstract

The preconditions for psychoanalytic practice within the Swedish public welfare system are analyzed in this article. Psychoanalysis remains a one-to-one treatment and relies on the analyst's capacity to use his or her own subjective response. The development of the psychoanalytic process is dependent on unconscious reality, making it impossible to work with a model that has a strict relation between diagnosis, treatment method, and result. Objectivity and the desire to predict treatment outcomes characterize the immanent logic in the complex system of laws and recommendations that affects most practices within the field of medicine. As a consequence of this development, psychoanalysis and psychodynamic therapy are marginalized, since our treatment methods are not adapted to the present industrialization and economization of the medical health sector, with the result that the preconditions for psychoanalytic training have changed dramatically. The exclusion of psychoanalysis from the national health insurance scheme is a demanding challenge at a time when the Swedish welfare model is undergoing fundamental changes.     

Developmentalism And The Child In Nineteenth-Century Science

In recent years, public science events have been designed as a means to foster a dialogue between science and the public and to contribute to ongoing policy processes. Regardless of their tangible outcome, such events rely on a certain framing, reconfigure scientific knowledge and conceptualise the public in specific ways. These constructs are exemplified by a science festival that was held in the train station hall in Zurich. Novel insights can be gained from a spatial, an object and an actor-related approach borrowed from the artistic context: the discussions about the White Cube can be adapted to contribute to the analysis of the science festival. When we look into the spatial situation created to foster exchange about scientific knowledge, we find how the exhibition display is taking care of minor details. While the organisers transformed the station hall into a laboratory, they created a kind of dialogic situation that filled an authority gap as it equally enabled exchange. The objects put in place in the exemplary case helped to design a customer–supplier relationship between the public and science. Under the umbrella of the science event, a range of diverse research endeavours was homogenised and unified. The audience, finally, was invited to familiarise itself with scientific knowledge. However, they were allocated a consumer role that obliged them to remain guests in the laboratory environment of the station hall. Thus, public science events may be successful in attracting large attendance and allowing more experiences with science, but while they create novel forms of familiarisation with science for visitors, they do not necessarily remedy public doubts about science and technology.     

Anticipatory Governance: Bioethical Expertise for Human/Animal Chimeras

The pedigree chart is a cornerstone technology for producing bodies and value in livestock pure breeding. It organizes a cluster of processes, technologies, and discourses gathered under the rubric ‘pedigree practices’. Angus breeders commonly use artificial insemination to import performance ‘genetics’ into their herds, using the ‘expected progeny differences’ predicted by massive pedigree databases that now also contain phenotype data reported by cattle growers. Discourses of biological inheritance, good breeding, and pedigrees arose in the eighteenth century, concomitant with a fascination with races, species, and other biological kinds. A case study from Angus cattle breeding illustrates pedigree practices and the bodies made through them, showing how information and computing technologies, assisted reproductive technologies, and discourses of good breeding, purity, health, and disease leveraged a single bull and the two genetic diseases he carried into the pedigrees of up to 10% of the Angus herd. Technologies now widely used in human reproductive medicine were developed for use in livestock animals, especially cattle, extending a long relationship between cows and humans. While the development of these pedigree practices represents increased control over animal reproduction and bodies, it has also been instrumental in rendering all animal bodies, including human bodies, not only more technically but also more rhetorically available for reproductive interventions. These interventions may amplify anxieties about health, species, breed, and kin while also providing opportunities for contesting the boundaries of these nature–cultural categories.     

Desire and the Good in Plotinus

Plotinus calls the first principle the One and the Good. According to Plotinus, ‘Good’ is an appropriate name for the One because the One is that which all things desire. Since he says that the One is beyond knowledge, beyond language, beyond intellect, and beyond being, however, what philosophical evidence can he provide for his claim that the One is that which all desire? In this article I offer some philosophical evidence, aside from mystical union with the One, for why ‘the Good’ is an appropriate name for the One, and for why calling the One ‘Good’ is not at odds with the fact that it is beyond knowledge, but rather entails it. To this end, after an initial consideration of the relationship between the good and desire in Plato and Aristotle, I focus on the role that desire plays in relation to the Good in Plotinus' thought.     

Romantic Longings,Moral Ideals,and Democratic Priorities: On Richard Rorty's Use of the Distinction Between the Private and the Public

Abstract

The heart of Richard Rorty's philosophy is his distinction between the private and the public. In the first part of this paper, I highlight the profound influence that the inherited vocabularies of Romanticism and Moralism have had on Rorty's understanding of both the distinction and the problems he intends to solve with it. I also suggest that Rorty shares with Plato, Kant, and Nietzsche philosophical habits that cause him to treat two importantly different problems as one. Once the moral problem is disentangled from the political, it becomes clear that Rorty's distinction is unnecessary to the former and inadequate for the latter. In the second part of the paper, I argue that Rorty's non‐foundationalist pragmatism supports the view that the political problem is best resolved by what I call a democratic mechanism of arbitration. It is the lingering influence of Romanticism and Moralism, I suggest, that is the cause of Rorty's reluctance to embrace fully the political priority of democratic consensus. Finally, I discuss why this analysis of Rorty's liberalism may have implications for the general question of how best to resolve political disputes in pluralist societies.     

生态伦理背景中的健康道德凝思

健康道德是关于人类健康的一种道德观念.在生态伦理视域中健康道德观念被拓展、更新.它把人的健康、社会的健康和自然界的健康共同作为研究对象.它提出生态伦理视域下的健康道德具有公益性、代继性和共生性的基本特点,提出人人参加,事事参与;健康生活,健康行为;抵制陋习,抵制败俗;爱护环境,履行责任的道德要求.     

Atheism in religious clothing? Accounting for atheist interventions in the public sphere

In this paper I review several recent attempts to recast atheism in religious form in Canada, the US and the UK. First, several atheists have argued for the redefinition of atheism as a creed deserving of religious protections from the state. Second, various atheist ‘churches’ have gained publicity in recent years, in part due to their appropriation of the Protestant church format and the rhetoric of religious association. Both of these expressions of atheism stand in marked contradiction to older forms of atheism which emerged in response to (and rejection of) Christianity in the West, and they also stand in contrast to popular forms of atheism today, of the kind espoused by Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. As a result, the cases reviewed here represent the ways in which contemporary atheist movements constitute several different counterpublics, and they mark a significant change in the state’s acknowledgement of atheism as a positive form of belief.     

Pediatric Do-Not-Attempt-Resuscitation Orders and Public Schools: A National Assessment of Policies and Laws

Some children living with life-shortening medical conditions may wish to attend school without the threat of having resuscitation attempted in the event of cardiopulmonary arrest on the school premises. Despite recent attention to in-school do-not-attempt-resuscitation (DNAR) orders, no assessment of state laws or school policies has yet been made. We therefore sought to survey a national sample of prominent school districts and situate their policies in the context of relevant state laws. Most (80%) school districts sampled did not have policies, regulations, or protocols for dealing with student DNARs. A similar majority (76%) either would not honor student DNARs or were uncertain about whether they could. Frequent contradictions between school policies and state laws also exist. Consequently, children living with life-shortening conditions who have DNARs may not have these orders honored if cardiopulmonary arrest were to occur on school premises. Coordinated efforts are needed to harmonize school district, state, and federal approaches in order to support children and families' right to have important medical decisions honored.     

Religiously Affiliated Continuum of Care Retirement Communities

SUMMARY

The paper introduces an action research initiative called Spirited Scotland, an embryonic movement seeking to restore spirituality to an appropriate place in health and social care. It locates the initiative in the changing social and spiritual circumstances of post-industrial Scotland and identifies some challenges it faces associated with the prevailing understandings of health, becoming ill, and successful ageing. The paper also considers some policy and practice challenges raised by Spirited Scotland, in terms both of content and process.