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32Having Children: Philosophical and Legal Reflections on ParenthoodHastings Center Report 9 (2): 29. 1979.Book reviewed in this article: Having Children: Philosophical and Legal Reflections on Parenthood. Edited by Onora O'Neill and William Ruddick.
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Physical Equations and IdentityIn Milton Karl Munitz (ed.), Identity and individuation, New York University Press. pp. 233--250. 1971.
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20Philosophy and public affairsSocial Research: An International Quarterly 47 (4): 734-748. 1980.In the last decade many academic philosophers in the United States have "gone public." In television interviews, newspapers, and neighborhood meetings they have discussed misuse of animals, whistle-blowing, and world hunger. Philosophers sit on presidential commissions on medical experimentation, on scientific research review boards, on committees to draft codes of conduct for trial lawyers, social workers, and senators. They consult with town planners, prison officials and inmates, generals, co…Read more
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22On responses and reactionsAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 46 (1). 1968.This Article does not have an abstract
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90"Biographical Lives" Revisited and ExtendedThe Journal of Ethics 9 (3-4): 501-515. 2005.After reviewing the history, rationale, and Jim Rachels’ varied uses of the notion of biographical lives, the essay further develops its social dimensions and proposes an ontological analysis. Whether one person is leading one life or more turns on the number of separate social worlds he or she creates and maintains. Furthermore, lives are constituted by narrated events in a story. Lives, however, are not stories, but rather are extended “verbal objects,” that is, “narrative objects” with a hybr…Read more
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95Summary. Disputes about pediatric, educational, and other child-related matters may reflect more general concepts of parenthood, including parental rights and responsibilities. These concepts may be child-centered, focusing either on a child’s needs or on a child’s development. Needs and development are not wholly distinct or in competition, but some parents may emphasize one or the other and, in case of conflict, favor one over the other. Such emphasis and preference tends to distinguish parent…Read more
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79Hope and DeceptionBioethics 13 (3-4): 343-357. 1999.There are, I thinks too many morally significant exceptions to accept the physician's rationales or the bioethicist's criticisms, stated siveepingly. Physicians need to take account of the harms caused by loss of hopes, especially false hopes due to deception, as Ivell, as of the harms of successfully maintained deceptive hopes. As for autonomy, hopes even..
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108Objections to hospital philosophersJournal of Medical Ethics 11 (1): 42-46. 1985.Like morally sensitive hospital staff, philosophers resist routine simplification of morally complex cases. Like hospital clergy, they favour reflective and principled decision-making. Like hospital lawyers, they refine and extend the language we use to formulate and defend our complex decisions. But hospital philosophers are not redundant: they have a wider range of principles and categories and a sharper eye for self-serving presuppositions and implicit contradictions within our practices. As …Read more
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40Do Doctors Undertreat Pain?Bioethics 11 (3-4): 246-255. 1997.At graduation, some North American medical students repeat the Prayer of Maimonides "never to forget that the patient is a fellow creature in pain, not a mere vessel of disease." [2] How could a physician ever forget that a patient is in pain? Don't physicians confront constant remindersmoans, groans, winces, and other obvious manifestations of pain? Yes, but it is those very "reminders," as I shall explain, that provoke at least two kinds of forgetting common among physiciansone, psychologica…Read more
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5117. Social Self-DeceptionsIn Brian P. McLaughlin & Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (eds.), Perspectives on Self-Deception, University of California Press. pp. 380-389. 1988.
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3Lives and libertyIn John Philip Christman (ed.), The Inner citadel: essays on individual autonomy, Oxford University Press. pp. 221--233. 1989.
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162Biomedical and environmental ethics alliance: Common causes and grounds (review)Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 6 (4): 457-466. 2009.In the late 1960s Van Rensselaer Potter, a biochemist and cancer researcher, thought that our survival was threatened by the domination of military policy makers and producers of material goods ignorant of biology. He called for a new field of Bioethics—“a science of survival.” Bioethics did develop, but with a narrower focus on medical ethics. Recently there have been attempts to broaden that focus to bring biomedical ethics together with environmental ethics. Though the two have many differenc…Read more
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22Prejudice against "unbalanced" familiesAmerican Journal of Bioethics 1 (1). 2001.This Article does not have an abstract
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42Philosophers have simplified brain death issues by drawing two distinctions--that between dead persons and dead bodies or organisms, and that between the concept of definition of death and the criteria for determining when and that death has occurred. The result has been protracted debates as to whether the death of patients is the death of persons or the death of organisms, and whether physicians should use cardio-respiratory criteria, whole brain criteria, or higher brain criteria. Advocates o…Read more