Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal is extremely proud to present this special volume on ethical and social issues arising out of the 2016 US presidential election and the Trump administration. The issue includes twelve articles. Some of these articles will be published in an online supplement to the journal within the next few weeks through Johns Hopkins Press. […]
An interdisciplinary quarterly journal dedicated to philosophical bioethics.
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Book Reviews
Sarah S. Richardson, Sex Itself: The Search for Male and Female in the Human Genome, University of Chicago Press, 2013
Following the glorious tradition of feminist philosophers and scholars of science from the 1980s onward such as Evelyn Fox-Keller, Helen Longino, Anne Fausto-Sterling, and others who revealed how popular notions of masculinity and femininity infiltrated and shaped the content of scientific knowledge, Sarah S. Richardson’s book Sex Itself: The Search for Male and Female in […]
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Book Reviews
Jesse Wall, Being and Owning: The Body, Bodily Material, and the Law, Oxford University Press, 2015
Jesse Wall’s Being and Owning: The Body, Bodily Material, and the Law addresses the legal status of ‘bodily material’; items which used to be, but are no longer, part of a living human organism: especially, ‘separated’ materials like gametes or tissue samples, and (to a lesser extent) cadavers and other mortal remains. Wall’s discussion, however, […]
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Book Reviews
Travis Rieder, Toward a Small Family Ethic: How Overpopulation and Climate Change Are Affecting the Morality of Procreation. Springer, 2016.
The global human population is currently about 7.6 billion people, and our numbers are still increasing. Although human population growth has not been a popular topic to discuss in the last quarter-century, its contribution to various environmental problems is becoming harder and harder to ignore. Travis Rieder’s Toward a Small Family Ethic confronts the effects […]
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Editor's Pick
Editor’s Pick, March 2018: Audrey R. Chapman, Adrian Carter, Jonathan M. Kaplan, Kylie Morphett, and Wayne Hall
Our Editor’s Pick for our March 2018 issue is “Ethical Guidelines for Genetic Research on Alcohol Addiction and Its Applications,” by Audrey R. Chapman, Adrian Carter, Jonathan M. Kaplan, Kylie Morphett, and Wayne Hall. In this important paper, Chapman and her coauthors examine the ethical issues surrounding genetic research on alcohol addiction. The authors take on […]
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Book Reviews
Sarah LaChance Adams, Mad Mothers, Bad Mothers, and What a “Good” Mother Would Do: The Ethics of Ambivalence, Columbia University Press, 2014
When a mother deliberately harms her child, it is tempting to assume that she must be either insane (a “mad mother”) or lacking the “natural” love of a mother for her children (a “bad mother”). We want to believe that such mothers have almost nothing in common with “good” mothers. Drawing extensively on empirical research, […]
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Book Reviews
Nancy Bauer, How to do things with Pornography, Harvard University Press, 2015
Nancy Bauer’s How to do things with Pornography is a difficult to review book. It sits in a somewhat liminal location somewhere between monograph and thematic collection. Bauer takes the reader on an intellectual journey that crosses a number of philosophical sub-disciplines but also moves between philosophical writing for a general audience and more technical […]
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Book Reviews
Lisa Tessman, When Doing the Right Thing is Impossible, Oxford University Press, 2017
Lisa Tessman’s When Doing the Right Thing is Impossible offers an engaging and accessible exploration of the complex philosophical issues surrounding moral dilemmas and moral failure. Are there genuine moral conflicts? Is it true that in some situations a moral agent cannot help but fail? Tessman offers her own answer – yes, in some situations, […]
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Editor's Pick
Editor’s Pick, December 2017: Joseph Stramondo
Our Editor’s Pick for our December 2017 issue is Joe Stramondo’s paper, “Disabled By Design: Justifying and Limiting Parental Authority to Choose Future Children with Pre-Implantation Genetic Diagnosis.” In this fascinating paper, Stramondo takes up the increasingly visible question of when and whether eugenic steps to create a disabled child—for instance, to select an embryo […]
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Editor's Pick
Editor’s Pick, September 2017: Yechiel Michael Barilan
Our Editor’s Pick for September 2017 is Yechiel Michael Barilan’s paper, “The Role of Doctors in Hunger Strikes.” Barilan provides “a critical examination of the social history of prisoners’ hunger strikes, the philosophy of nonviolence, and the debate on its medicalization.” As he notes in the paper, three paradigms dominate the existing literature on hunger […]
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Book Reviews
Françoise Baylis and Carolyn McLeod (eds), Family-Making: Contemporary Ethical Challenges, Oxford University Press, 2014
This fascinating anthology focuses on the question of how we make families, and how bionormative assumptions shape or distort our collective thinking about parenting, children’s welfare, and state obligations to parents and children. The editors are primarily interested in the question of whether parents’ moral responsibilities toward children differ for children produced through assistive reproductive […]