The Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal is extremely proud to present this special volume on ethical and social issues arising from the COVID-19 pandemic, featuring work that is practically relevant and engaged as well as conceptually rigorous. From the issue co-editors: It is with great pleasure and a sense of urgency that we present this […]
An interdisciplinary quarterly journal dedicated to philosophical bioethics.
Recent Posts
Book Reviews
Jane Ward, The Tragedy of Heterosexuality, NYU Press, 2020
THE STRAIGHTS ARE NOT OKAY. The tragedy of heterosexuality is this: modern straightness dooms once-hopeful, loving couples to share dull, frustrating, and lonely lives together. After all, men are from Mars, women are from Venus, and what’s a heterosexual to do about it? Against this dismal state of affairs, Jane Ward’s The Tragedy of Heterosexuality […]
Keep reading »
Book Reviews
Maneesha Deckha, Animals as Legal Beings: Contesting Anthropocentric Legal Orders, University of Toronto Press, 2021
Animals as Legal Beings is a new and important monograph-length treatment on the inadequacies of both a property and a personhood approach to the legal status of nonhuman animals. In line with decades of literature arguing for the abolishment of the property status of animals, Professor Maneesha Deckha, Professor and Lansdowne Chair in Law at […]
Keep reading »
Book Reviews
Jeremy Snyder, Exploiting Hope: How the Promise of New Medical Interventions Sustains Us—and Makes Us Vulnerable, Oxford, 2020
Snyder’s book ‘Exploiting hope’ is as relevant as ever. His book is about the hope of desperate individuals seeking treatments that cannot (yet) be found in conventional medicine. The book engages with hope in the setting of phase I cancer trials, stem cell interventions, right-to-try laws and crowd funding, offering a new language to explain […]
Keep reading »
Book Reviews
Kate Manne, Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women, Crown, 2020
Entitled is in several ways a sequel to Kate Manne’s Down Girl (2018) and provides us with applications and illustrations of the conceptual tools that were introduced in the earlier work. We are provided with a range of concrete instances in which misogyny is an important factor, and in which men’s privilege is prioritized over […]
Keep reading »
Book Reviews
Imani Perry, Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation, Duke University Press, 2018.
Revolution begins with the self, in the self…It may be lonely. Certainly painful. It’ll take time. We’ve got time. That of course is an unpopular utterance these days. Instant coffee is the hallmark of current rhetoric. But we do have time. We’d better take time to fashion revolutionary selves, revolutionary lives, revolutionary relationships. Mouth don’t […]
Keep reading »
Special Issue, Uncategorized
Surging Solidarity: Reorienting Ethics for Pandemics
Jordan Pascoe & Mitch Stripling [This is an advance copy of an article that will appear in print in September 2020 as part of the KIEJ’s special double issue on Ethics, Pandemics, and COVID-19.] ABSTRACT. Public discourse about ethics in the COVID-19 pandemic has tended to focus on scarcity of resources and the protection of […]
Keep reading »
Special Issue, Uncategorized
How Soviet Legacies Shape Russia’s Response to the Pandemic: Ethical Consequences of a Culture of Non-Disclosure
Nataliya Shok & Nadezhda Beliakova [This is an advance copy of an article that will appear in print in September 2020 as part of the KIEJ’s special double issue on Ethics, Pandemics, and COVID-19.] ABSTRACT. The COVID-19 pandemic required strong state responsibility for the health of its citizens and the effective allocation of healthcare resources. […]
Keep reading »
Special Issue
Structural Stigma, Legal Epidemiology, and COVID-19: The Ethical Imperative to Act Upstream
Daniel S. Goldberg [This is an advance copy of an article that will appear in print in September 2020 as part of the KIEJ’s special double issue on Ethics, Pandemics, and COVID-19.] ABSTRACT. The primary claim of this paper is that COVID-19 stigma must be understood as a structural phenomenon. Doing so will inform the […]
Keep reading »
Special Issue, Uncategorized
Intellectual Disability and Justice in a Pandemic
Ryan H. Nelson & Leslie P. Francis [This is an advance copy of an article that will appear in print in September 2020 as part of the KIEJ’s special double issue on Ethics, Pandemics, and COVID-19.] ABSTRACT. Much of the discussion of care prioritization during the COVID-19 pandemic has focused on access to high-technology, intensive […]
Keep reading »
Special Issue, Uncategorized
Incarceration, COVID-19, and Emergency Release: Reimagining How and When to Punish
Lauren Lyons [This is an advance copy of an article that will appear in print in September 2020 as part of the KIEJ’s special double issue on Ethics, Pandemics, and COVID-19.] ABSTRACT. The wide-ranging effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have amplified social inequalities and revealed vulnerabilities in public systems. These dual effects are especially salient […]