人体器官“有偿”获取机制的伦理依据与法律观照

人体器官、组织无偿捐献是当今获取器官的主流模式, 有偿模式 (含经济补偿、捐赠激励) 被排斥在体制之外。创建符合国情的器官捐献和移植体系, 既遵循我国社会的普遍伦理法则, 又符合国际通行的器官移植伦理标准, 提倡无偿、允许有偿 (补偿、激励) 获取人体器官模式和机制可能成为一种切合实际的选择。这既是对多年来关于人体器官“无偿”还是“有偿”获取讨论的回应, 也是对器官捐献机制的一个重大改进。为使这一机制真正发挥效力, 需要法律与伦理的融通和观照。     

“Breaking Her Spirit” Through Objectification,Fragmentation, and Consumption: A Conceptual Framework for Understanding Domestic Sex Trafficking

It is now recognized that sex trafficking is an issue present in the United States as victims are frequently children and adults who were born and raised in the United States. Anti-trafficking researchers and advocates state that the problem is one of supply and demand and that trafficking of vulnerable individuals will continue until the demand for commercial sex ceases. One goal of this article is to show how Carol Adams’ model of violence against women is uniquely applicable to the issue of sex trafficking. In particular, this article outlines the ways in which objectification, fragmentation, and consumption allow commercial sexual exploitation through sex trafficking to continue. The article also explores links between pornography and sex trafficking as well as the processes traffickers use to groom individuals for exploitation through prostitution in a manner that helps to ensure compliance. Finally, the article seeks to implore clinicians to increase their understanding of the issues unique to sex trafficking survivors and take an integrative theoretical approach when working with trafficked individuals.     

Suicide bombings and the self

The failure to locate a unifying psychological profile of suicide bombers should prompt moves to a more extended and interdisciplinary front, availing itself of insights from disciplines such as sociology, philosophy and history of ideas, as well as from psychology. This paper aims in that direction by exploring ‘traditional’ versus ‘western liberal’ conceptions of the self, with special emphasis on their possible pathologies; and by integrating those pathologies with insights from Durkheimian suicidology. It is hypothesised that suicide bombers in the West are typically callow, malleable young men targeted by terror merchants, and that their suicide missions are, first and foremost, acts of deluded self-enhancement, which need to be understood against the backdrop of the western liberal conception of the self. Finally, some implications for moral education are suggested.     

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.     

Economic Exploitation in Intercollegiate Athletics

This paper investigates philosophically the question of whether or not college and university athletes in the USA are doing something morally wrong should they terminate their college or university experience prior to graduation and enter the professional athletic ranks. Various moral arguments are brought to bear in order to attempt to shed light on this issue. One reason why such athletes ‘turn professional’ before they graduate is the perceived economic exploitation they experience as essentially underpaid workers earning much revenue for their respective institutions. But who is exploiting whom here? Is it just student athletes who are exploited by the system? I expand the reasoning about the exploitation of intercollegiate athletics to include not just student athletes, but their supporting colleges and universities. In the end, it is proposed that the National Collegiate Athletic Association and similar academically related athletic agencies should permit and encourage each of their constituent institutions as a matter of policy to protect themselves (and their supporting taxpayers, in the cases of public institutions) contractually from economic exploitation by professional sports franchises. Thus the question of student athletes leaving college for professional sports contracts has hidden beneath it questions of private professional sports franchises’ exploitation of the institutions with which such student athletes are affiliated.     

Clarifying Amateurism: A Logical Approach to Resolving the Exploitation of College Athletes Dilemma

In this paper we investigate the logical consequences of the common understanding of amateurism in the context of big-time US college athletics, and in so doing, illustrate a method based on linguistic analysis and logic. The initial thrust of the paper centres on the term ‘amateur’ as presupposed by the late Professor Brand in his attempt to justify the ‘business’ of NCAA-sponsored Division I sports by decoupling the ‘participants from the enterprise’. Next, we examine a more rigorous definition of the term ‘amateur’ in order to show more clearly the difficulties posed by the current situation in college athletics. Additionally, our use of linguistic analysis exposes a flaw in the NCAA's recent move to amend by-law 12.02 in an attempt to avoid the charge of exploitation. Lastly, we put forth a new proposal for better dealing with the central issues swirling around the NCAA as it strives to formulate sound policy at this ‘tectonic’ juncture of players, fans, college programmes and academic integrity.     

A Social Interpolation Model of Group Problem-Solving

How do people use information from others to solve complex problems? Prior work has addressed this question by placing people in social learning situations where the problems they were asked to solve required varying degrees of exploration. This past work uncovered important interactions between groups' connectivity and the problem's complexity: the advantage of less connected networks over more connected networks increased as exploration was increasingly required for optimally solving the problem at hand. We propose the Social Interpolation Model (SIM), an agent-based model to explore the cognitive mechanisms that can underlie exploratory behavior in groups. Through results from simulation experiments, we conclude that “exploration” may not be a single cognitive property, but rather the emergent result of three distinct behavioral and cognitive mechanisms, namely, (a) breadth of generalization, (b) quality of prior expectation, and (c) relative valuation of self-obtained information. We formalize these mechanisms in the SIM, and explore their effects on group dynamics and success at solving different kinds of problems. Our main finding is that broad generalization and high quality of prior expectation facilitate successful search in environments where exploration is important, and hinder successful search in environments where exploitation alone is sufficient.     

国际关系的伦理审视

探讨国际关系伦理,明确战争的正义性和非正义性,以避免战争,尽量减少战争带来的伤亡,维护世界和平;各国要相互尊重,平等地开展国际合作,共同发展,实现世界的共同繁荣;南北国家要加强交流与合作,寻求最佳的结合点,共同致力于全球的可持续发展;最后,各国必须以伦理道德为依托来解决国际人权问题,必须承认人权的普遍性和多样性,确立一个同纷繁复杂的文化多样性相协调的普遍的最低道德标准。     

试论进化论思想对近代中西医论争的影响

进化论在近代中国得到广泛传播后,对东西方文化的评判产生重要影响,作为当时中西文化论争一部分的中西医论争自不可避免。进化论思想使中医得到“落后”的价值评价,在现实中给予了批判中医论者政治上的正当性,并成为他们废止中医的思想来源之一;同时,由于被评价为“落后、迷信、不科学”,中医表达自身的话语权也逐渐发生了转移,造成了中医的“失语”。     

大学生经济信心和心理健康的关系:生涯自我效能感的中介作用

采用经济信心问卷、生涯自我效能感量表、总体主观幸福感量表、贝克焦虑和抑郁量表,对237名大学生进行调查,考察大学生经济信心对其心理健康的影响,以及生涯自我效能感在两者之间可能的中介作用。结果表明,经济信心与生涯自我效能感和主观幸福感呈显著的正相关,与抑郁显著负相关,生涯自我效能感与主观幸福感显著正相关,与焦虑、抑郁显著负相关。大学生经济信心对其主观幸福感和抑郁具有显著的预测作用。大学生生涯自我效能感在经济信心与主观幸福感之间起到部分中介作用,其在经济信心和抑郁之间起到完全中介作用。此外,大学生生涯自我效能感传递了经济信心对焦虑的间接影响。