生命科学家的社会伦理责任

生命科学的发展导致了复杂的伦理道德问题,对传统的社会道德观念形成了强烈的冲击.为了最大限度地避免和消除生命科学技术的负面效应,必须制定相应的科技政策和强有力的社会伦理道德规范来约束生命科学家的行为,增强生命科学家的社会责任感,使生命科学更好地为人类造福.     

Policy Recommendations for Carrier Testing and Predictive Testing in Childhood: A Distinction That Makes a Real Difference

The genetic testing of children raises many ethical concerns. This paper examines how five position statements from Canada, UK and USA, which present guidelines for good practice in this area produce different recommendations for carrier testing and predictive testing. We find that the genetic information generated through carrier testing is routinely presented as less serious than that generated from predictive testing. Additionally, the reproductive implications of predictive testing are also routinely erased. Consequently, the papers argue strongly against predictive testing but advise caution against carrier testing in somewhat weaker terms. We argue that these differences rest on assumptions about the status of reproduction in people’s lives and on an ethical stance that foregrounds the self over others. We propose that questioning the crude and sharp distinction between carrier and predictive testing in principle may enable practitioners and parents/families to make more nuanced decisions in practice. Parts of this work have been presented in the 1st International CESAGen Conference, London, 2004, and Genetics and Society Meetings, Wales.     

Social epistemology as a rhetoric of inquiry

Fuller's program of social epistemology engages a rhetoric of inquiry that can be usefully compared and contrasted with other discursive theories of knowledge, such as that of Richard Rorty. Resisting the model of conversation, Fuller strikes an activist posture and lays the groundwork for normative knowledge policy, in which persuasion and credibility play key roles. The image of investigation is one that overtly rejects the storehouse conception of knowledge and invokes the metaphors of distributive economics. Productive questions arise as to how notions of creation and distribution might guide this rhetoric.     

The Role of Christian Belief in Public Policy

It seems intuitive to the believer that God intended throughinstruction in the Law to define morality, intended to leadhumankind to "the right and the good." Further, God's love forhumankind, exemplified by the incarnation, atonement and teachingsof Jesus, and empowered by the Holy Spirit, should lead to abetter world. Indeed, the Christian worldview is a coherentand valid way to look at bioethical issues in public policyand at the bedside. Yet, as this paper explores, in a pluralisticsociety such as the United States, it is neither possible nordesirable for Christians to try to force their views on others.Still, it is obligatory for Christians to stand up and articulatetheir views in the public square. We should try to persuadeothers using either prudential or moral arguments. While wemust be willing to live with "the will of the people," at thesame time, we must not be intimidated into accepting the positionthat our voice is not valid because it has a religious basis.     

Begging the Question: A Case Study

The essay starts by presenting two accounts of begging the question, John Biro's epistemic account and David Sanford's doxastic account. After briefly comparing these accounts, the essay will study an argument suspected of begging the question and subsequently apply the epistemic and doxastic accounts to this test case. It is found that the accounts of Biro and Sanford do not analyse the test case adequately, therefore a new account is developed using the idea of a knowledge-base.     

The Cornell Institute for Research on Children: A vision of integrated developmental science

The Cornell Institute for Research on Children (CIRC) is an intellectual infrastructure funded by the National Science Foundation under the aegis of the Children's Research Initiative, which was spearheaded by Rodney R. Cocking. Cocking's vision of integrated developmental science is an integral part of CIRC's philosophy. CIRC aims to integrate knowledge and paradigms from a variety of fields (e.g., developmental psychology, economics, neuroscience, and pediatrics), which take different perspectives on similar issues (e.g., the effects of toxins on cognitive development), making it explicitly interdisciplinary. The object of CIRC studies is to apply research findings to social policy. To accomplish this, CIRC provides resources to enable teams of scholars from diverse fields to collaborate on policy-relevant questions. CIRC's approach begins by asking policy-makers to define questions for researchers to address, then shepherds the process by which scholars from various relevant disciplines are commissioned to work as a team to answer such questions. To demonstrate the strengths of this approach we describe the six components that comprise CIRC and provide an actual example of a project that CIRC has commissioned as well as a hypothetical example of a project that CIRC could undertake. This article is a progress report, written in an effort to disseminate information about CIRC's agenda.     

Engaging African Americans in Therapy: Integrating a Public Policy and Family Therapy Perspective

The field of marriage and family therapy faces a growing imperative to reach historically underserved populations. African Americans are a prime example of a minority group in the United States that continues to be underserved by the current mental health system. We integrate Andersen’s (1995, Journal of Health and Social behavior, 36, 1–10) public policy model of health service use with Fox et al. (1995, Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved, 6, 434–468) revision of the rural de facto mental health services model (Regier and Goldberg, 1978, Archives of General Psychiatry, 35, 685–693) to develop a more inclusive and culturally sensitive framework that captures salient factors influencing African Americans’ entry into and engagement in therapy. Recommendations for overcoming barriers and suggestions for future research are presented.     

An epidemiological study on work and family stress among Chinese in Hong Kong

Hong Kong, with a population of over six million in a modern city, has been shown to be a very stressful place to live in. However, epidemiological data from a big-scale study in this regard are lacking. The present territory-wide survey, from a sample representative of the general population, was aimed to investigate the work and family stress of Chinese adults in the community with respect to the impact on their psychological well-being. The psychosocial context was considered as an important source of stress. The results showed that coping with work demands and rearing children were reported as the highest stress responses. Moreover, workers in Hong Kong took an instrumental attitude, i.e., one emphasizing material rewards, in order to reduce the job stress arising from interpersonal conflicts in the workplace.