Check out this article and project that will be of interest to people working in the university system. Turns out, even fully funded PhD students are taking out massive loans to cover basic costs and stay afloat during the summer. … Continue reading
“The academic job market is structured in many respects like a drug gang, with an expanding mass of outsiders and a shrinking core of insiders. Even if the probability that you might get shot in academia is relatively small (unless … Continue reading
In the wake of Adrienne Asch’s passing, I take the opportunity to share some of my thoughts about the contributions of disability studies to my teaching. I teach an introductory class in ethics and the goal is to get the … Continue reading
It’s truly gratifying to see an international United Nations agency taking a strong interest in women’s health and rights. UNAIDS (the Joint United Nations Programme on It afflicts individuals of viagra samples from doctor nearly every race, gender and age. … Continue reading
Over the last week news outlets—from Der Spiegel to the Wall Street Journal—have reported that Germany has become the second country to permit a “third” gender option for the birth of children (Australia was the first). These reports suggest that … Continue reading
October 11 was the International Day of the Girl Child. I have to admit that I wasn’t very aware of it until one of the mailing lists to which I subscribe sent me a reminder, along with details of a … Continue reading
In his July 11, 2014 Op-Ed piece in the New York Times, Nicholas Kristoff quotes The Lancet’s most recent nutritional survey as indicating that 804,000 children die annually from “suboptimal breast-feeding,” more than the WHO’s estimate of deaths from malaria. … Continue reading
I’ve been puzzled and concerned for a long time about the huge disparity in the US in the way the distinction between direct killing and actions that predictably lead to death is treated. For those who espouse a critically important distinction here, it is always wrong to end a pregnancy, just as it is always wrong to end a life in case of dreadful illness. For many this issue appears to eclipse all others.
Those whose alleged main moral concern appears to be preventing such direct killing (in the centrally bioethical context) maintain a powerful and well-funded campaign to get their own way. (I say alleged because, as we all know, many have no problem with capital punishment and/or war). Where the law fails to reflect their views, they find ways to ensure that the relevant services are unavailable anyway, by intimidation, violence, or economics. This state of affairs supplies an unending series of dramatic cases where the principle is maintained at all costs, even where no lives are saved, cases that, not surprisingly, draw to themselves an enormous amount of attention from those who do not accept the unvarying wrongness of direct killing.
Continue readingThis article focuses on the positive aspects of being vulnerable. As the author points out, the state of vulnerability is taken as one that should be avoided; we do not think that being vulnerable can be a positive state. However, … Continue reading
Several weeks ago, I heard an interesting report on visualizing pain on NPR’s “Morning Edition.” Here’s their published article on the story:
“Doctors Use Brain Scans To ‘See’ And Measure Pain”
The notion of objectively measuring the subjective is compelling. Evidence for ephemeral sensations like pain offers potentials for verifying experiences of particularly vulnerable patient populations. Accounts by patients whose experiences are often doubted or denied — patients like women, children, people with disabilities — can gain veracity through visible displays in brain scans. In this article, the AP notes special benefits for those who might literally lack a voice or the communication abilities to report pain: babies, people with dementia, people with paralysis that impedes speech. The AP also identifies potential benefits in understanding neurological differences between, say, physical and emotional pain, and in developing new treatments that act more directly on specific pain mechanisms and reduce dangers of addiction to medication.
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