Robyn Bluhm

With this issue of IJFAB, we mark the end of one phase of the journal’s life and take our first steps into the next. It was eleven years ago, in 2007, that the first issue of IJFAB, then based at Stony Brook University and published by Indiana University Press, appeared with Mary Rawlinson as editor. That first issue was made possible by long months of work on the part of Mary and a group of others who were convinced that for feminist bioethics to develop as a field, it needed its own journal with dedicated space to publish the best of contemporary feminist perspectives in bioethics. The first issue included a foundational paper by Sue Sherwin on how feminism could revitalize mainstream bioethics; one by Margrit...

Although researchers in psychiatry have been trying for decades to elucidate the pathophysiology underlying mental disorders, relatively little progress has been made. One explanation for this failure is that diagnostic categories in psychiatry are unlikely to track underlying neurological mechanisms. Because of this, the US National Institutes of Mental Health has recently developed a novel ontology to guide research in biological psychiatry: the Research Domain Criteria. In this paper, I argue that while RDoC may lead to better neuroscientific explanations for mental disorders, it is unlikely that this new knowledge will then lead to an improved diagnostic system. I therefore suggest that researchers in psychiatry should work toward the development of two new ontologies: one for research and one for clinical practice.

Although depression is among the more common types of mental disorders, it is significantly more common in women than in men. In this article, I draw on feminist analyses of personhood and of autonomy to explain the greater prevalence of depression among women. I argue that such an approach builds on earlier feminist critiques of psychiatry, but provides a more nuanced explanation of how social factors can affect women’s mental health by emphasizing that women with depression are not merely passive victims of oppressive social practices, but rather that these women are actively responding to their environment and interpreting their own experiences.

This paper looks at the implications of contemporary work in philosophy of science for nursing science. Early work on the nature of theories in nursing was strongly influenced by logical empiricism, and this influence remains even long after nurse scholars have come to reject logical empiricism as an adequate philosophy of science. Combined with the need to establish nursing as an autonomous profession, nursing theory's use of logical empiricism has led to serious conceptual problems. Philosophers of science have also rejected many of the central tenets of logical empiricism, including its focus on the logical justification of theories and the idea that science is, or should be, unified. Instead, there has been an increasing focus on the practice of science, which in turn has led to a pluralist understanding of science that emphasizes the construction of scientific models that are appropriate for certain purposes or in certain contexts. I suggest that this approach to philosophy of science may provide better resources for nursing science.

Neuroscience research examining sex/gender differences aims to explain behavioral differences between men and women in terms of differences in their brains. Historically, this research has used ad hoc methods and has been conducted explicitly in order to show that prevailing gender roles were dictated by biology. I examine contemporary fMRI research on sex/gender differences in emotion processing and argue that it, too, both uses problematic methods and, in doing so, reinforces gender stereotypes.

Evidence-based medicine (EBM) was developed to ensure that health-care decisions are based on the best available research evidence. Making this evidence available to patients is supposed to increase their autonomy by putting them in a position to make better-informed choices. In this paper, I draw on work in feminist bioethics to critique EBM’s approach to involving patients in decision making, in which patients are asked merely to select their preferences among various possible treatment outcomes but are not encouraged to actively contend with the effects of illness on their lives as a whole.

The suggestion that at least some emotions are modular captures a number of our intuitions about emotions: they are generally fast responses to a stimulus, they are involuntary, and they are easily distinguished from one another; we simply know that, for example, anger feels different than fear. Candidates for modular emotions are usually the so-called “basic” emotions - anger and fear are good examples of these. Defenders of emotion theories that focus on basic emotions, such as Paul Ekman in psychology and Paul Griffiths in philosophy, emphasize the advantages of theories that stress the evolutionary continuity of emotional expression and link emotions to the activity of neural circuits that are similar in human beings and other animals.In this paper, however, I will examine arguments for the discontinuity of emotions in human beings, as compared with other animals. Owing to a combination of cultural practices and neuroanatomy, both our emotional “wiring” and our emotions are unique.

As neuroscience has gained an increased ability to enchant the general public, it has become more and more common to appeal to it as an authority on a wide variety of questions about how humans do and should act. This is especially apparent with the question of gender roles. The term ‘neurosexism’ has been coined to describe the phenomenon of using neuroscientific practices and results to promote sexist conclusions; its feminist response is called ‘neurofeminism’. Here, our aim is to survey the phenomena of neurosexism and neurofeminism using a largely philosophical approach, incorporating concepts from the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of science, ethics, and feminist philosophy. First, we delineate how neuroscientific studies purporting to show sex brain differences may be prone to bias at a number of methodological levels – including the choice of categories to be studied, and the choice of tools for data gathering, analysis, and presentation. Then, we show how interpretations of such studies may wrongly assume the notion of ‘hard-wiring’. Furthermore, lack of attention to distinctions within philosophy of mind may result in a mistaken supposition that brain differences lead to mental and/or psychological and/or behavioral ones. It is not difficult to see how these forms of neurosexism, leading to claims of ‘hard-wired’ gender differences that map onto traditional and harmful gender stereotypes, raise ethical questions. We conclude by briefly considering one: are the harms caused by neurosexist studies and their interpretations outweighed by their potential benefits?

Feminist scholars have shown that research on sex/gender differences in the brain is often used to support gender stereotypes. Scientists use a variety of methodological and interpretive strategies to make their results consistent with these stereotypes. In this paper, I analyze functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) research that examines differences between women and men in brain activity associated with emotion and show that these researchers go to great lengths to make their results consistent with the view that women are more emotional than men.