Sarah Jones

Book reviewed in this article: Beginning Lives, by Rosalind Hursthouse. On Moral Medicine:Theological Perspectives in Medical Ethics, edited by Stephen E. Lammers and Allen Verhey. Quantitative Risk Assessment, edited by James M. Humber and Robert F. A Theory of Value and Obligation, by Robin Attfield. Ethical Issues at the Outset of Life, edited by William B. Weil Jr. and Martin Benjamin. Legal Frontiers of Death and Dying by Norman L. Cantor Having Your Baby By Donor Insemination:A Complete Resource Guide, by Elizabeth Noble.

The goal of this paper is both modest and ambitious. The modest goal is to show that intercountry adoption should be considered by ethicists and healthcare providers. The more ambitious goal is to introduce the many ethical issues that intercountry adoption raises. Intercountry adoption is an alternative to medical, assisted reproduction option such as in vitro fertilization (IVF), intracytoplasmic sperm injection, third party egg and sperm donation and surrogacy. Health care providers working with assisted reproduction are in a unique position to introduce their clients to intercountry adoption; however, providers should only do so if intercountry adoption is ethically equal or superior to the alternatives. This paper first presents a brief history of intercountry adoption. The second section compares intercountry adoption with medical alternatives. The third section examines the unique ethical challenges that are not shared by other medical alternatives. The final section concludes that it is simplistic for a healthcare provider to promote intercountry adoption unconditionally; however, in situation where intercountry adoption is practiced conscientiously it poses no greater ethical concern than several medical alternatives. This conclusion is preliminary and is intended as a start for further discussion.

This commentary explores a few of the common threads in a symposium of obesity narratives in light of the American Medical Association’s classification of obesity as a disease. While the narratives illustrate the breadth of experiences, they each highlight the absence of a clear approach for the treatment of obesity, as well as the lack of conversation and compassion in the most basic of interactions with medical professionals. This could be cause for despair, yet we learn through these shared experiences that we can take control of our care and plot a course for real and lasting assistance with this condition.

In Meanings, Manners, and Scepticism, I argue that the ordinary language philosopher, the relevant alternativist, and the contextualist fail to refute the sceptic. I argue that they fail to refute the sceptic because their arguments critically rest on a number of both dogmatic and erroneous assumptions. In particular they rest on the dogmatic and erroneous assumptions that common sense is threatened by skepticism, that ordinary linguistic behaviour is of epistemic significance, and that the sceptic's departure from the linguistic norm suffices to prove his sceptical alternatives irrelevant to the truth of ordinary claims to know. I argue that the first assumption is mistaken because it wrongly assumes that common sense consists not only of first-order beliefs about the world, but also second-order knowledge beliefs about those beliefs. I argue that the second assumption is mistaken because it conflates two logically distinct sets of standards: the standards of appropriate and the standards of true assertion. Finally, I argue that the third assumption is mistaken because it rests on a confusion of the kind of standard operative in ordinary knowledge-discourse with the kind of standard the sceptic appeals to when he reasons that we can never know. I conclude that appealing to ordinary linguistic behaviour and habits cannot suffice to prove the sceptic's hypothesis irrelevant to the truth of our knowledge claims, though insofar as common sense does not include second-order knowledge beliefs the truth of even the most radical skepticism cannot threaten our ordinary claims to know