The Protestant ethic — a moral code stressing hard work, rigorous self-discipline, and the organization of one's life in the service of God — was made famous by sociologist and political economist Max Weber. In this brilliant study (his best-known and most controversial), he opposes the Marxist concept of dialectical materialism and its view that change takes place through "the struggle of opposites." Instead, he relates the rise of a capitalist economy to the Puritan determination to work out anxiety over (...) salvation or damnation by performing good deeds — an effort that ultimately discouraged belief in predestination and encouraged capitalism. Weber's classic study has long been required reading in college and advanced high school social studies classrooms. (shrink)

This article draws on a five-year, multi-sited transnational research project on the global traffic in human organs, tissues, and body parts from the living as well as from the dead as a misrecognized form of human sacrifice. Capitalist expansion and the spread of advanced medical and surgical techniques and developments in biotechnology have incited new tastes and traffic in the skin, bones, blood, organs, tissues, marrow and reproductive and genetic marginalized other. Examples drawn from recent ethnographic research in Israel, the (...) Palestinian Authority and Turkey serve to cast light on the dark side of organs harvesting and transplantation. The article focuses on the dangers of the `fetishized kidney' for both sellers and buyers, for whom this new commodity has become an organ of opportunity and an organ of last resort. The bodily sacrifice is disguised as a donation, rendered invisible by its anonymity, and hidden under the medical rhetoric of `life saving' and `gift giving'. It suggests that the ultimate fetish as recognized long ago by Ivan Illich is the idea of `life' as object of manipulation. (shrink)

On the usual account of moral reasoning, social science is often seen as able to provide “just the facts,” while philosophy attends to moral values and conceptual clarity and builds formally valid arguments. Yet disciplines are informed by epistemic values—and bioethics might do well to see social scientific practices and their attendant normative understandings about what is humanly important as a significant part of ethics generally.

The alienation of body parts and their transformation into commodities raises questions about ownership, property rights, and about possible violation of the moral order. This article focuses on the `social life' of objects, including body parts, and the multiple meanings attached to them that are made visible in systems of exchange. The transformation of DNA obtained in blood samples into immortalized cell lines for use in the Human Genome Diversity Project is introduced as an illustration of contested commodification. The meanings (...) attached to the blood samples by those from whom they are procured and their worth to the scientists who create the cell lines are of an entirely different order. Disputes about the HGDP that have erupted since it was first planned are presented in detail, followed by a discussion of the ethics of gene prospecting and the associated politics of biocapitalism currently proliferating in the private sector. (shrink)

Public bioethics bodies are used internationally as institutions with the declared aims of facilitating societal debate and providing policy advice in certain areas of scientific inquiry raising questions of values and legitimate science. In the United States, bioethical experts in these institutions use the language of consensus building to justify and define the outcome of the enterprise. However, the implications of public bioethics at science-policy boundaries are underexamined. Political interest in such bodies continues while their influence on societal consensus, public (...) debate, and science policy remains ambiguous. This article presents a theoretical discussion of public bioethics bodies as boundary organizations and examines them in terms of relationship to the moral and cognitive authority of science and other forms of expertise, mechanisms for public participation in controversial science policy, and the deployment of consensus models. The theoretical discussion is examined in the case of the U.S. Human Embryo Research Panel. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article attempts to show a way in which social science research can contribute in a meaningful and equitable way to philosophical bioethics. It builds on the social science critique of bioethics present in the work of authors such as Renée Fox, Barry Hoffmaster and Charles Bosk, proposing the characteristics of a critical bioethics that would take social science seriously. The social science critique claims that traditional philosophical bioethics gives a dominant role to idealised, rational thought, and tends to (...) exclude social and cultural factors, relegating them to the status of irrelevancies. Another problem is the way in which bioethics assumes social reality divides down the same lines/categories as philosophical theories. Critical bioethics requires bioethicists to root their enquires in empirical research, to challenge theories using evidence, to be reflexive and to be sceptical about the claims of other bioethicists, scientists and clinicians. The aim is to produce a rigorous normative analysis of lived moral experience. (shrink)

This article seeks to establish that the social sciences have an important contribution to make to the study of ethics. The discussion is framed around three questions: (i) what theoretical work can the social sciences contribute to the understanding of ethics? (ii) what empirical work can the social sciences contribute to the understanding of ethics? And (iii) how does this theoretical and empirical work combine, to enhance the understanding of how ethics, as a field of analysis and debate, is socially (...) constituted and situated? Through these questions the argument goes beyond the now commonly cited objection to the over‐simplistic division between normative and descriptive ethics (that assigns the social sciences the ‘handmaiden’ role of simply providing the ‘facts’). In extending this argument, this article seeks to establish, more firmly and in more detail, that: (a) the social sciences have a longstanding theoretical interest analysing the role that a concern with ethics plays in explanations of social change, social organisation and social action; (b) the explanations that are based on the empirical investigations conducted by social scientists exemplify the interplay of epistemological and methodological analyses so that our understanding of particular substantive issues is extended beyond the conventional questions raised by ethicists, and (c) through this combination of theoretical and empirical work, social scientists go beyond the specific ethical questions of particular practices to enquire further into the social processes that lie behind the very designation of certain matters as being ‘ethical issues’. (shrink)

This article seeks to establish that the social sciences have an important contribution to make to the study of ethics. The discussion is framed around three questions: (i) what theoretical work can the social sciences contribute to the understanding of ethics? (ii) what empirical work can the social sciences contribute to the understanding of ethics? And (iii) how does this theoretical and empirical work combine, to enhance the understanding of how ethics, as a field of analysis and debate, is socially (...) constituted and situated? Through these questions the argument goes beyond the now commonly cited objection to the over‐simplistic division between normative and descriptive ethics (that assigns the social sciences the ‘handmaiden’ role of simply providing the ‘facts’). In extending this argument, this article seeks to establish, more firmly and in more detail, that: (a) the social sciences have a longstanding theoretical interest analysing the role that a concern with ethics plays in explanations of social change, social organisation and social action; (b) the explanations that are based on the empirical investigations conducted by social scientists exemplify the interplay of epistemological and methodological analyses so that our understanding of particular substantive issues is extended beyond the conventional questions raised by ethicists, and (c) through this combination of theoretical and empirical work, social scientists go beyond the specific ethical questions of particular practices to enquire further into the social processes that lie behind the very designation of certain matters as being ‘ethical issues’. (shrink)

Modern scientific and medical advances bring new complexity and urgency to ethical issues in health care and biomedical research. This book applies the American philosophical theory of pragmatism to such bioethics. Critics of pragmatism argue that it lacks a universal moral foundation. Yet it is this very lack of a metaphysical dividing line between facts and values that makes pragmatism such a rigorous and appropriate method for solving problems in bioethics. For pragmatism, ethics is a way of satisfying the complex (...) demands of multiple individuals and groups in a contingent and changing world. Pragmatism also demands careful attention to the ways in which scientific advances change our values and ethics.The essays in this book present different approaches to pragmatism and different ways of applying pragmatism to scientific and medical matters. They use pragmatism to guide thinking about such timely topics as stem cell research, human cloning, genetic testing, human enhancement, and care for the poor and aging. This new edition contains three new chapters, on difficulties with applying pragmatism to law and bioethics, on helping people to die, and on embryonic stem cell research. (shrink)

This innovative book is the first comprehensive synthesis of economic, political, and cultural theories of value. David Graeber reexamines a century of anthropological thought about value and exchange, in large measure to find a way out of quandaries in current social theory that have become critical at a time of ideological collapse in the face of Neoliberalism. Rooted in an engaged, dynamic realism, Graeber argues that projects of cultural comparison are necessarily revolutionary projects: He attempts to synthesize the best insights (...) of Karl Marx and Marcel Mauss, who represent two extreme, but ultimately complementary, possibilities in the shape such a project might take. Graeber breathes new life into the classic anthropological texts on exchange, value, and economy. He rethinks the cases of Iroquois wampum, Pacific kula exchanges, and the Kwakiutl potlatch within the flow of world historical process, and recasts value as a model of human meaning-making that far exceeds rationalist/reductive economist paradigms. (shrink)

This text explores the border between medical and social problems, the boundary between health and social change. The book studies the body as the mediator between individual and collective experience, finding that many health problems, for example the trauma of violence or depression in the course of chronic pain, are less individual medical problems than interpersonal experiences of social suffering. It argues for an ethnographic approach to moral practice in medicine, one that embraces the infrapolitical context of illness, responses to (...) it, the social institutions relating to it and the way it is configured in medical ethics. (shrink)

The Visible Human Project examines how the VHP provides visual access to every organ of the body, viewable from every angle and capable of being manipulated to simulate living processes like respiration.

Focusing on the social construction of morality, The Ethnography of Moralities discusses a topic which is complex but central to the study and nature of anthropology. With the recent shift towards an interest in indigenous notions of self and personhood, questions pertaining to the moral and ethical origins of beliefs relating to human rights become increasingly relevant. Some of the questions that the contributors address are: * How is the ethical knowledge grounded? * Which social domains most profoundly articulate moral (...) values and which are most affected? * Who defines and who enforces what is right and wrong? * What constitutes an ethical breach? Suggested answers are made with reference to empirical material so that the complexities and varieties of theoretical and methodological issues are highlighted. They are also discussed with reference to a wide array of ethnographic studies from Argentina, Mongolia, Melanesia, Yemen, Zimbabwe, Mexico, Britain and The Old Testament. (shrink)

Paul Rabinow brings together years of distinguished work in this authoritative volume that seeks to reinvigorate the human sciences. Specifically, he assembles a set of conceptual tools - "modern equipment"--To assess how intellectual work is currently conducted and how it might change.

The postmodern opposition between theory and lived reality has led in part to an anthropological turn to "dialogic" or "reflexive" approaches. Michael Jackson claims these approaches are hardly radical as they still drift into such abstractions as "society" or "culture." His Minima Ethnographica proposes an existential anthropology that recognizes even abstract relationships as modalities of interpersonal life. Written in the style of Theodor Adorno's Minima Moralia, Jackson's work shows how general ideas are always anchored in particular social events and critical (...) concerns. Emphasizing the intersubjective encounter over objective descriptions of the whole historical and contemporary situation of a given people, he illustrates the power and originality of existential anthropology through a series of vignettes from his fieldwork in Sierra Leone and Australia. An award-winning poet, novelist, and anthropologist, Jackson offers a timely critique of conventions that dull our sense of the links between academic study and lived experience. (shrink)

If cultures are always in the making, this book catches one kind of culture on the make. Academics will be familiar with audit in the form of research and teaching assessments - they may not be aware how pervasive practices of 'accountability' are or of the diversity of political regimes under which they flourish. Twelve social anthropologists from across Europe and the Commonwealth chart an influential and controversial cultural phenomenon.

In this collection of essays, Clifford Geertz explores the nature of his anthropological work in relation to a broader public, serving as the foremost spokesperson of his generation of scholars, those who came of age after World War II. ...

While examining the important role of imagination in making moral judgments, John Dewey and Moral Imagination focuses new attention on the relationship between American pragmatism and ethics. Steven Fesmire takes up threads of Dewey's thought that have been largely unexplored and elaborates pragmatism's distinctive contribution to understandings of moral experience, inquiry, and judgment. Building on two Deweyan notions—that moral character, belief, and reasoning are part of a social and historical context and that moral deliberation is an imaginative, dramatic rehearsal of (...) possibilities—Fesmire shows that moral imagination can be conceived as a process of aesthetic perception and artistic creativity. Fesmire's original readings of Dewey shed new light on the imaginative process, human emotional make-up and expression, and the nature of moral judgment. This original book presents a robust and distinctly pragmatic approach to ethics, politics, moral education, and moral conduct. [The downloadable sample is Chapter Seven, "The Moral Artist."]. (shrink)

Increasingly the body is a possession that does not belong to us. It is bought and sold, bartered and stolen, marketed wholesale or in parts. The professions - especially reproductive medicine, transplant surgery, and bioethics but also journalism and other cultural specialists - have been pliant partners in this accelerating commodification of live and dead human organisms. Under the guise of healing or research, they have contributed to a new 'ethic of parts' for which the divisible body is severed from (...) the self, torn from the social fabric, and thrust into commercial transactions -- as organs, secretions, reproductive capacities, and tissues -- responding to the dictates of an incipiently global marketplace. Breaking with established approaches which prioritize the body as 'text', the chapters in this book examine not only images of the body-turned-merchandise but actually existing organisms considered at once as material entities, semi-magical tokens, symbolic vectors and founts of lived experience. The topics covered range from the cultural disposal and media treatment of corpses, the biopolitics of cells, sperm banks and eugenics, to the international trafficking of kidneys, the development of 'transplant tourism', to the idioms of corporeal exploitation among prizefighters as a limiting case of fleshly commodity. This insightful and arresting volume combines perspectives from anthropology, law, medicine, and sociology to offer compelling analyses of the concrete ways in which the body is made into a commodity and how its marketization in turn remakes social relations and cultural meanings. (shrink)

This honest, forthright, and beautifully-written book introduces readers to the human variations on medical topics spoken of in abstract in the daily news--euthanasia, assisted suicide, abortion, "extreme procedures", genetic testing, experimental surgeries--and to the people who must agonize over those decisions regarding themselves and their loved ones.

This book is the first to provide a sustained, coherent analysis of Foucault's work as a whole. To demonstrate the sense in which Foucault's work is beyond structuralism and hermeneutics, the authors unfold a careful, analytical exposition of his oeuvre. They argue that during the of Foucault's work became a sustained and largely successful effort to develop a new method - "interpretative analytics" - capable of explaining both the logic of structuralism's claim to be an objective science and the apparent (...) validity of the hermeneutical counterclaim that the human sciences can proceed only by understanding the deepest meaning of the subject and his tradition. (shrink)

This collection presents a broad and compelling overview of the most recent work by a world-renowned figure in contemporary thought. The book is in four parts: Koinonia, Polis, Psyche, Logos. The opening section begins with a general introduction to the author's views on being, time, creation, and the imaginary institution of society and continues with reflections on the role of the individual psyche in racist thinking and acting. The second part is a critique of those who now belittle and distort (...) the meaning of May 1968 and other movements of the sixties as well as the French Revolution. In part three, Castoriadis shows how psychoanalysis, like politics, can contribute to the project of individual and collective autonomy and challenges Lacan, Foucault, and Derrida, and others in his report on 'The State and Subject Today'. Finally he examines how Aristotle's original aporetic discovery and cover-up of the imagination were repeated by Kant, Freud, Heidegger, and even Merleau-Ponty. (shrink)

The concept that peope have of themselves as a 'person' is one of the most intimate notions that they hold. Yet the way in which the category of the person is conceived varies over time and space. In this volume, anthropologists, philosophers, and historians examine the notion of the person in different cultures, past and present. Taking as their starting point a lecture on the person as a category of the human mind, given by Marcel Mauss in 1938, the contributors (...) critically assess Mauss's speculation that ntions of the person, rather than being primarily philosophical or psychological, have a complex social and ideological origin. Discussing societies ranging from ancient Greece, India, and China to modern Africa and Papua New Guinea, they provide fascinating descriptions of how these different cultures define the person. But they also raise deeper theoretical issues: What is universally constant and what is culturally variable in people's thinking about the person? How can these variations be explained? Has there been a general progressive development toward the modern Western view of the person? What is distinctive about this? How do one's notions of the person inform one's ability to comprehend alternative formulations? These questions are of compelling interest for a wide range of anthropologists, philosophers, historians, psychologists, sociologists, orientalists, and classicists. The book will appeal to any reader concerned with understanding one of the most fundamental aspects of human existence. (shrink)

Informed consent is increasingly heralded as an ethical panacea, a tool to counter autocratic and paternalistic medical practices. Debate about the implementation of informed consent is constricted and polarised, centring on the right of individuals to be fully informed and to freely choose versus an autocratic, paternalistic practice that negates individual choice. A bioethical framework, based on a principle-led form of reductive/deductive reasoning, dominates the current model of informed consent. Such a model tends to abstract the process of consent from (...) its clinical and social setting. By fleshing out the social process involved when patients and healthy volunteer subjects consent to take part in clinical drug trials, this paper attempts to address the problem arising from the current ‘empty ethics’ model. My arguments are substantiated by qualitative interview data drawn from a study I conducted on the process of consent as experienced by participants in clinical drug trials. (shrink)

This paper briefly summarizes Durkheim’s theory of the dual nature of man suggested earlier in his Elementary Forms of Religious Life. It is characteristic of human beings that two opposite principles confront each other within them: soul and body, concept and sensation, moral activity and sensory appetites. Although this inherent inconsistency of man has been long recognized by philosophical thought, no doctrine explanation to it has been provided to date. While empiricist monism has proved to be unable to explain how (...) concepts emerge from sensations and disinterestedness develops from self-interest, absolute idealism, on the contrary, cannot deduce sensations from concepts. Although theories suggested by Plato and Kant do not bypass the problem of dualism, they only rephrase it and make no progress in solving it. According to Durkheim, dualism of human nature stems from the fact that all religions are founded on dividing all things into the sacred and the profane. This division, in turn, is explained by coexistence of collective and individual origins in the human being. Sacred things arise out of the collective origin that enables individual consciousnesses to fuse into communion. Collective origin does not act with constant strength, but intensifies during the periods of effervescence, when it subdues the individual origin. Since the importance of the social aspect of man increases over time, there is no reason to believe that complete consent between individual and society is possible that would endow man with internal harmony. (shrink)