Jonathan Moreno

When asked why he turned from philosophy to the history of ideas, Isaiah Berlin said that he was worried that if he stayed in philosophy he wouldn't know any more at the end of his life than he had at the beginning. Mark Lilla makes the point in a somewhat more constructive way: "His [Berlin's] instinct told him that you learn more about an idea as an idea when you know something about its genesis and understand why certain people found it compelling and were spurred to action by it".It took me decades longer than the brilliant Oxford don to appreciate the point, but when I did it came as a lightning strike of recognition. My brain seems to have been keyed from the beginning in the syntax of...

Henry Knowles Beecher, an icon of human research ethics, and Timothy Francis Leary, a guru of the counterculture, are bound together in history by the synthetic hallucinogen lysergic acid diethylamide. Beecher was a U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel who received five battle stars, was inducted into the Legion of Merit, held the first endowed chair in his discipline, wrote at least three path-breaking papers, and is honored by two prestigious ethics awards in his name. Leary was a West Point dropout who was obliged to leave a research assistant professorship, was convicted of violating the Marihuana Tax Act, was sentenced to 20 years in prison and broke out with the...

The term ‘bioterrorism’ seems to have become a kind of shorthand for sowing terror through the use of other ‘unconventional’ weapons, especially chemical, nuclear, and radiological weapons, or ‘dirty bombs’. The ethical problems associated with these other threats are closely associated with those raised by biological agents. Therefore, this article necessarily refers to these related potential terrorist technologies, all of them made more available to militant organizations through the spread of knowledge and material in the post-cold war era.

Consensus is commonly identified as the goal of ethics committee deliberation, but it is not clear what is morally authoritative about consensus. Various problems with the concept of an ethics committee in a health care institution are identified. The problem of consensus is placed in the context of the debate about realism in moral epistemology, and this is shown to be of interest for ethics committees. But further difficulties, such as the fact that consensus at one level of discourse need not imply consensus at another, oblige us to look more closely at the deliberative process itself. That yields two complementary methods of deliberation that have proven their worth. Finally, placing ethics committees in the context of Dewey's philosophy of social intelligence suggests that consensus should be regarded primarily as a condition rather than as the goal of inquiry. Keywords: ethics committee, consensus, moral authority CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this?

Following a brief account of the puzzle that ethics committees present for the Western Philosophical tradition, I will examine the possibility that social contract theory can contribute to a philosophical account of these committees. Passing through classical as well as contemporary theories, particularly Rawls' recent constructivist approach, I will argue that social contract theory places severe constraints on the authority that may legitimately be granted to ethics committees. This, I conclude, speaks more about the suitability of the theory to this level of analysis than about the ethics committee phenomenon itself. Keywords: ethics committees, moral consensus, social contract theory CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this?

On September 4, 2001, press reports indicated that the Defense Intelligence Agency of the U.S. Department of Defense planned to reproduce a strain of anthrax virus suspected of being held in Russian laboratories. According to the same reports, the Central Intelligence Agency, under the auspices of Project Clear Vision, is engaged in building replicas of bomblets believed to have been developed by the former Soviet Union. These small bombs were designed to disperse biological agents, including anthrax. Government attorneys were said to be confident that, because these projects were designed to develop defensive measures, they were not in violation of the 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention

it is mandatory that in building up our strength, we enlarge upon our technical superiority by an accelerated exploitation of the scientific potential of the United States and our allies. National Security Council, NSC-G8: United States Objectives and Program for National Security April 14, 1950 Innovation within the armed forces will rest on experimentation with new approaches to warfare, strengthening joint operations, exploiting U.S. intelligence advantages, and takingfull advantage of science and technology. George W Bush, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, September 17,2002.