The Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal will be publishing a special volume on ethical and social issues arising out of the 2016 US presidential election and the transition to the Trump administration. Papers will be anonymously reviewed and judged according to the scholarly standards typical for the journal, without regard to political orientation. Creativity in […]
An interdisciplinary quarterly journal dedicated to philosophical bioethics.
Recent Posts
Book Reviews
Mari Mikkola, The Wrongs of Injustice: Dehumanization and its Role in Feminist Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 2016
Mari Mikkola identifies three primary forms of social injustice—oppression, domination, and discrimination—and asks what makes them wrong. She argues that feminist philosophy has thus far focused heavily on gender as a lens or anchor through which to understand and respond to injustice. In Mikkola’s view, this orientation around gender (and what she terms “the gender […]
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Editor's Pick
Editor’s Pick, December 2016: Bertha A. Manninen
Our Editor’s Pick for December 2016 is Bertha A. Manninen’s paper, “Sustaining a Pregnant Cadaver for the Purpose of Gestating a Fetus: A Limited Defense.” Manninen argues that “there are times it is morally permissible to keep a brain-dead pregnant woman on life support” for the “sole purpose of allowing her fetus to gestate until […]
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Book Reviews
Dominic Wilkinson, Death or Disability: The Carmentis Machine and Decision-Making for Critically Ill Children, Oxford University Press, 2013
Dominic Wilkinson, a neonatal physician and medical ethicist, has written a searching, moving, and philosophically sophisticated book about the ethics of life and death decision making in the neonatal intensive care unit. Although I will devote much of this review to criticism, I want to say at the outset that Death or Disability represents interdisciplinary […]
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Book Reviews
Elizabeth Barnes, The Minority Body, Oxford University Press, 2016
Professor Elizabeth Barnes has produced a tightly and carefully reasoned philosophical examination of the significance of disability. It provides a clear defense of certain core principles of the disability rights movement in contrast to the many professional philosophers (those which I will term ‘mainstream bioethicists’) who consider that movement to be ill-conceived. An example of […]
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Book Reviews
David Shoemaker, Responsibility from the Margins, Oxford University Press, 2015
David Shoemaker’s highly innovative and intricately argued new book draws on much of his previous work together with substantial original material to form a detailed and cohesive treatment of responsibility. The book is engaging, crisp, and admirably clear. It is marvelously ambitious in its strategy and framework, engagement with multiple literatures, and decidedly novel approach […]
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Book Reviews
Jennifer Greenwood, Becoming Human: The Ontogenesis, Metaphysics, and Expression of Human Emotionality, MIT Press, 2015
Becoming Human by Jennifer Greenwood is one of the most thought-provoking books on emotion and its expression I have read. At its core, it attempts to provide an account of the development of full human emotionality and in so doing argues the emotions are “transcranial.” Emotions are radically realized outside our nervous systems and beyond […]
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Editor's Pick
Editor’s Pick, September 2016: Nie and Fitzgerald
Our Editor’s Pick for September 2016 is Jing-Bao Nie and Ruth Fitzgerald’s article, “Connecting the East and the West, the Local and the Universal: The Methodological Elements of a Transcultural Approach to Bioethics.” Nie and Fitzgerald argue that scholars working in transcultural bioethics have “seriously problematic methodological habits in approaching cultural differences,” such as “radically […]
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Book Reviews
Eula Biss, On Immunity: An Inoculation, Greywolf Press, 2014
In On Immunity: An Inoculation, essayist and author Eula Biss has given academics and clinicians interested in the public’s skepticism of vaccines, and of science skepticism more generally, a fresh look at what drives these phenomena. Despite public health’s continued success in maintaining high rates of coverage for vaccines across the United States, recent measles, […]
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Book Reviews
Alice Crary, Inside Ethics: On the Demands of Moral Thought, Harvard University Press, 2016
In this original and insightful new work, Alice Crary proposes that we see human beings and animals as creatures that are “inside ethics,” which is to say that they possess “characteristics that are simultaneously empirically discoverable and morally loaded” (4). This view rejects what Crary sees as the dominant paradigm in moral philosophy, wherein empirical […]