Uterus Transplantation: The Ethics of Using Deceased Versus Living Donors

Research teams have made considerable progress in treating absolute uterine factor infertility through uterus transplantation, though studies have differed on the choice of either deceased or living donors. While researchers continue to analyze the medical feasibility of both approaches, little attention has been paid to the ethics of using deceased versus living donors as well as the protections that must be in place for each. Both types of uterus donation also pose unique regulatory challenges, including how to allocate donated organs; whether the donor / donor's family has any rights to the uterus and resulting child; how to manage contact between the donor / donor's family, recipient, and resulting child; and how to track outcomes moving forward.     

Agency without autonomy: valuational agency

National minority women's defense of non-liberal minority cultures that encompass sexist customs and rules has greatly perplexed liberal theorists. Many attempted to resolve this puzzle by attributing constrained agency to such women and dismissing their defense as unreasonable. This article argues that this liberal assessment of minority women's position is philosophically indefensible and that the failure of mainstream liberalism to make sense of these women's response indicates not that these women's agency is compromised but rather that the liberal conception of agency as autonomy has limits in its cross-cultural applicability. An alternative conception of agency, valuational agency, that illuminates minority women's agency is proposed as a more plausible alternative for radically pluralistic societies.     

Global surrogacy: exploitation to empowerment

Commercial surrogacy has gone global in the last decade, and India has become the international centre for reproductive tourism, boasting numerous high-quality and low-fee clinics. The growth of the surrogacy industry in India raises serious concerns of global gender justice, in particular whether the option is inordinately enticing for women who lack other remunerable options and whether the conditions are adequate and the compensation fair. In this paper I argue that the moral harm of global commercial surrogacy lies in the exploitative nature of transactions involving unequally vulnerable parties. More specifically, I argue that the practice exploits Indian surrogates on the basis of an inter-contractual failure of both justice and consent. I go on to consider an important objection to my use of exploitation as the relevant conceptual tool of analysis. The ethnographic challenge holds that the exploitation lens Occidentalizes surrogacy by conceptualizing the practice in universalizing terms, thereby eclipsing the particularities of the global surrogate's lived experience. I respond by showing that in fact the exploitation and the ethnographic models are not so at odds as they might seem. Provided we are careful in our use of the former to nuance our analysis by appeal to narrative evidence supplied by the latter, we are thereby best situated to identify and address the moral difficulties generated by commercial surrogacy under conditions of global injustice.     

Asylum Seekers and Human Rights

Asylum seekers, by their very circumstances, test our common assumptions and practice in relation to human rights. The treatment of asylum seekers in many European countries has become harsher, more restrictive and less tolerant in recent years, raising questions about the violation of their rights. The article examines the bases of the rights that asylum seekers do have and whether these are best supported as human rights or more limited rights that attach to the place of their temporary residence and to obligations made by their country of temporary residence. Given the propensity of receiving countries to afford increasingly limited rights, the article identifies a limited set of rights that should take priority in a hierarchy of rights and which might claim widespread acceptance as those which asylum seekers must enjoy. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

医学伦理学——欧洲与中国的桥

跨文化医学伦理学研究,要求我们以理智的方式去应对全球化。既要维护多样性,又要明确共同利益、亦要追求共同目标。任何文化都不能强行提出一些标准去规范国际间的生物医学。自主权应坚持义务论的解释,否则一个强势风气将会支配利益的选择解释,将文化多样性在伦理学中铸成一个统一的模式,形成自主权的“通货膨胀倾向”。     

Same but different: Comparative modes of information processing are implicated in the construction of perceptions of autonomy support

An implicit assumption behind tenets of self‐determination theory is that perceptions of autonomy support are a function of absolute modes of information processing. In this study, we examined whether comparative modes of information processing were implicated in the construction of perceptions of autonomy support. In an experimental study, we demonstrated that participants employed comparative modes of information processing in evaluating receipt of small, but not large, amounts of autonomy support. In addition, we found that social comparison processes influenced a number of outcomes that are empirically related to perceived autonomy support such as sense of autonomy, positive affect, perceived usefulness, and effort. Findings shed new light upon the processes underpinning construction of perceptions related to autonomy support and yield new insights into how to increase the predictive validity of models that use autonomy support as a determinant of motivation and psychological well‐being.     

Happiness theories of the good life

The paper starts with a presentation of the pure happiness theory, i.e. the idea that the quality of a person’s life is dependent on one thing only, viz. how happy that person is. To find out whether this type of theory is plausible or not, I examine the standard arguments for and against this theory, including Nozick’s experience machine argument. I then investigate how the theory can be modified in order to avoid the most serious objections. I first examine different types of epistemic modifications of the theory (e.g. the idea that a person’s happiness is more valuable for her if it is based on a correct perception of her own life), and then turn to a number of modifications which all make the value of a person’s happiness depend on whether the evaluative standard on which her happiness is based satisfies certain requirements. In connection with this, I present and defend my own modified version of the happiness theory.     

中小学教师教学自主权量表的修订

研究选取1222名中小学教师,针对Pearson和Hall(1993)编制的教学自主权量表进行修订。通过验证性因素分析,发现修订后的量表与原量表结构一致,包括课程自主和一般教学自主两个因素。修订后的量表具有良好的信度和效度指标,是一个有价值的测量教学自主权的研究工具。     

VALUE AND INTELLIGENT COLLEGIATE DEPRESSION

Abstract: Philosophy teachers converse with troubled students who suffer from what I dub “intelligent collegiate depression” (ICD): a lack of self‐esteem, feelings of futility and pessimism about their futures, a distrust of academic values, and a lack of conviction that their lives matter. Students express their values and their resignation with what approaches conventional wisdom for them: They must be allowed to act as they wish so long as they do not hurt anyone; otherwise it does not matter what they do with their lives. I argue here that students' endorsement of this near‐nihilistic version of Mill's harm principle shows that they are committed to believing in more values than they realize. I then show how to parlay this commitment into a rejection of the worst effects of ICD—all the while holding in abeyance the question of metaethical objectivism vs. subjectivism. My approach shows that accepting a popular ICD premise logically undermines much of the unhappy ICD worldview.