Call for Papers – Time Sensitive! The Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal announces a special emergency, open-access issue on Ethics, Pandemics, and COVID-19 Papers from 3,000-12,000 words on ethical issues raised by the COVID-19 pandemic are invited. Papers on resource allocation; duties towards the vulnerable; rights to privacy and mobility; pandemics and xenophobia; the ethical […]
An interdisciplinary quarterly journal dedicated to philosophical bioethics.
Recent Posts
Book Reviews
Jenny Reardon, The Postgenomic Condition: Ethics, Justice, and Knowledge After the Genome, University of Chicago Press, 2017.
In The Postgenomic Condition, Jenny Roberts asks whether massive investments in genome sequencing have yielded meaningful knowledge. Her book presses important questions about what has really been gained from high through-put sequencing of strings of A, C, G, and T, and who has benefited from the genome project and its aftermath. More fundamentally, her target […]
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Editor's Pick
Editor’s Pick, September 2019: David M. Peña-Guzmán and Joel Michael Reynolds
The Editor’s Pick for our September 2019 Issue is David M. Peña-Guzmán and Joel Michael Reynolds’s paper, “The Harm of Ableism: Medical Error and Epistemic Justice.” One of our guest editors for this special issue, Sandra L. Borden writes, “The authors argue for a specific kind of knowledge-based medical error originating in ableism. They characterize […]
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Editor's Pick
Editor’s Pick, June 2019: Jonathan Kaplan
The Editor’s Pick for our June 2019 issue is Jonathan Kaplan’s paper, “Self-Care as Self-Blame Redux: Stress as Personal and Political.” Kaplan’s article opens up an entirely new and clearly important topic for bioethicists: the concept and role of ‘self-care.’ It takes up popular imperatives to take care of oneself as care suggestions and considers […]
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Book Reviews
Rik Peels and Martijn Blaauw, The Epistemic Dimensions of Ignorance, Cambridge University Press, 2017.
The Epistemic Dimensions of Ignorance is a provocatively framed collection of essays dealing with a variety of epistemic issues related to the concept of ignorance. The first three essays in the volume have to do with the nature of ignorance itself. Le Morvan and Peels’ contribution provides an overview of some relevant literature, and distinguishes […]
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Book Reviews
Sean Valles, Philosophy of Population Health: Philosophy for a New Public Health Era, Routledge, 2018
Sean Valles’ Philosophy of Population Health marks an important contribution to the analysis of philosophical issues relevant to a broad range of issues at the interface of population and public health. The book exemplifies the constructive contributions scholars from philosophy of science and ethics can make to advance our understanding core issues in this area, […]
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Editor's Pick, Uncategorized
Editor’s Pick, December 2018: Alison Reiheld
Our Editor’s Pick for our December 2018 issue is Alison Reiheld’s paper, “Rightly or for Ill: The Ethics of Individual Memory.” This paper takes up a rich issue that has yet to receive significant philosophical attention: the ethics of memory. The paper asks questions such as: when are we morally blameworthy or praiseworthy for remembering, […]
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Book Reviews
Carl Cranor, Tragic Failures: How and Why We are Harmed by Toxic Chemicals, Oxford University Press, 2017
Long before there were any professional philosophers who identified as doing socially engaged or socially relevant philosophy of science, Carl Cranor was demonstrating exactly how philosophical reflections on science can and should inform law and policy. Cranor is a philosopher who also is a professor of law. He is thus in a unique position to […]
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Book Reviews
Cathy Gere, Pain, Pleasure, and the Greater Good: from the Panopticon to the Skinner box and beyond, University of Chicago Press, 2017
The opening pages to Pain, Pleasure, and the Greater Good read almost like an historical mystery or an ethical “whodunit,” (hint: it was the Utilitarians), capturing the reader’s attention immediately. It is certainly pleasing to encounter a work on utilitarianism that is not another dry philosophical text. Yet, ultimately, do the author’s philosophical points get […]
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Book Reviews
Katie Watson, Scarlet A: The Ethics, Law, and Politics of Ordinary Abortion, Oxford University Press, 2018
“This book isn’t a blueprint for a new conversation. It’s an explanation of why we need one, and an invitation to participate in moving that forward,” (12) says Katie Watson in the introduction to her book Scarlet A: The Ethics, Law and Politics of Ordinary Abortion. She does herself a disservice with this; in many […]