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Feminist Care Ethics Confronts Mainstream Philosophy, Maurice Hamington, Maggie Fitzgerald

Philosophy Faculty Publications and Presentations

Editorial for the Special Issue "Feminist Care Ethics Confronts Mainstream Philosophy"

This Special Issue of Philosophies is devoted to dialogue between feminist care ethics and mainstream philosophical figures and concepts. As care ethics has evolved from its origins in the 1980s, it is clear that it does not always fit neatly within traditional philosophical categories. Yet, the philosophical implications of the ethics of care are robust and extend beyond ethics as such, with care theorists positing ontological, epistemological, and political significance to its approach. Despite these implications, and the growing acceptance of care ethics in a variety of academic literatures, …

Care Ethics, Bruno Latour, And The Anthropocene, Michael Flower, Maurice Hamington

Philosophy Faculty Publications and Presentations

Bruno Latour is one of the founding figures in social network theory and a broadly influential systems thinker. Although his work has always been relational, little scholarship has engaged the relational morality, ontology, and epistemology of feminist care ethics with Latour’s actor–network theory. This article is intended as a translation and a prompt to spur further interactions. Latour’s recent publications, in particular, have focused on the new climate regime of the Anthropocene. Care theorists are just beginning to address posthuman approaches to care. The argument here is that Latourian analysis is helpful for such explorations, given that caring for the …

Diagnostic Justice: Testing For Covid-19, Ashley Graham Kennedy, Bryan Cwik

Philosophy Faculty Publications and Presentations

Diagnostic testing can be used for many purposes, including testing to facilitate the clinical care of individual patients, testing as an inclusion criterion for clinical trial participation, and both passive and active surveillance testing of the general population in order to facilitate public health outcomes, such as the containment or mitigation of an infectious disease. As such, diagnostic testing presents us with ethical questions that are, in part, already addressed in the literature on clinical care as well as clinical research (such as the rights of patients to refuse testing or treatment in the clinical setting or the rights of …

Moving Beyond ‘Therapy’ And ‘Enhancement’ In The Ethics Of Gene Editing, Bryan Cwik

Philosophy Faculty Publications and Presentations

Since the advent of recombinant DNA technology, expectations (and trepidations) about the potential for altering genes and controlling our biology at the fundamental level have been sky high. These expectations have gone largely unfulfilled. But though the dream (or nightmare) of being able to control our biology is still far off, gene editing research has made enormous strides toward potential clinical use. This paper argues that when it comes to determining permissible uses of gene editing in one important medical context—germline intervention in reproductive medicine—issues about enhancement and eugenics are, for the foreseeable future, a red herring. Current translational goals …