Persons and humans: refashioning ourselves in a better image and likeness

Abstract. This article argues that there are neither moral considerations that in principle forbid the development or use of recom-binant DNA technology, nor grounds to hold that its application is likely to cause more harm than good. A defensible moral position would enjoin a prudent assessment of consequences, rather than an absolute prohibition. The technology may remain controversial because it presupposes the difference between being a person, an entity who can evaluate and manipulate its own biological structure, and human-ness as a biological structure likely to be the subject of engineering over the long-range future.     

THE CRISIS OF VIRTUE: ARMING FOR THE CULTURAL WARS AND PELLEGRINO AT THE LIMES

Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics -     

Holiness, virtue, and social justice: contrasting understandings of the moral life.

Being a Christian involves metaphysical, epistemological, and social commitments that set Christians at variance with the dominant secular culture. Because Christianity is not syncretical, but proclaims the unique truth of its revelations, Christians will inevitably be placed in some degree of conflict with secular health care institutions. Because being Christian involves a life of holiness, not merely living justly or morally, Christians will also be in conflict with the ethos of many contemporary Christian health care institutions which have abandoned a commitment to Christian spirituality. In this regard, managed care raises the special question of how Christian institutions can act morally under financial constraints and maintain their character while under the control of secular managers. This question itself raises the further question as to why health care institutions need even pose this query when there are Christian physicians and nurses who could work for less, or Christian men and women who could become sisters and brothers and work for nothing. Contemporary challenges to Christians to maintain their integrity in a post-Christian world have much of their force because Christians have failed to maintain traditional Christian sprituality. In the face of that failure, Christian physicans and nurses will find themselves in greater conflict with health care institutions, because few will any longer understand the requirements of traditional Christianity. In its place, they will have put a generic spirituality, a value-neutral understanding of the role of the health professional, and an anonymous commitment to social justice.     

Ethical issues in diagnosis

The ways in which ethical issues arise in making clinical judgments are briefly discussed. By showing the topography of the role of value judgments in medical diagnostics it is suggested why clinical medicine remains inextricably a value-infected science.     

The role of inhibition in the production of disfluencies

Disfluency is a common occurrence in speech and is generally thought to be related to difficulty in the production system. One unexplored issue is the extent to which inhibition is required to prevent incorrect speech plans from being articulated. Therefore, we examined disfluency production in participants with attention-deficit/ hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), which is linked to deficits in inhibitory function and response suppression (Nigg, 2001). Participants completed a sentence production task in which they were presented with two pictures and a verb and their task was to produce a sentence. If inhibition plays a role in preventing incorrect speech plans, we would expect ADHD participants to produce more repetition and repair disfluencies than would non-ADHD controls. The results showed that one subtype of ADHD (i.e., the combined) produced more repair disfluencies as task demands increased. We conclude that the production system relies on inhibitory control in order to prevent errors in language production.