Jonathan Beever

The Porosity of Autonomy: Social and Biological Constitution of the Patient in Biomedicine

The nature and role of the patient in biomedicine comprise issues central to bioethical inquiry. Given its developmental history grounded firmly in a backlash against 20th-century cases of egregious human subjects abuse, contemporary medical bioethics has come to rely on a fundamental assumption: the unit of care (and the unit of value) is the autonomous self-directing patient. In this article we examine first the structure of the feminist social critique of autonomy. Then we show that a parallel argument can be made against relational autonomy as well, demonstrating how this second concept of autonomy fails to take sufficiently into account an array of biological determinants, particularly those from microbial biology. Finally, in light of this biological critique, we question whether or to what extent any relevant and meaningful view of autonomy can be recovered in the contemporary landscape of bioethics.

Meaning Matters: The Biosemiotic Basis of Bioethics

If the central problem in philosophical ethics is determining and defining the scope of moral value, our normative ethical theories must be able to explain on what basis and to what extent entities have value. The scientific foundation of contemporary biosemiotic theory grounds a theory of moral value capable of addressing this problem. Namely, it suggests that what is morally relevant is semiosis. Within this framework, semiosis is a morally relevant and natural property of all living things thereby offering us an ecological, as opposed to merely environmental, ethic. A consequence of this semiotic theory is that living things are accorded inherent moral value based on their natural relational properties—their ability to signify. This consequence establishes a hierarchy of inherent moral value based on the scope of signification: the larger the Umwelten, the greater the value. This paper argues that a robust semiotic moral theory can take into account a much wider scope of inherent value.. These consequences have positive ramifications for environmental ethics in their recognition of the natural ecological networks in which each organism is bound. This presentation of a biosemiotic model of value offers a justificatory strategy for our contemporary moral intuitions concerning our semiotic/moral relationships with living things while also productively pushing our normative ethical boundaries.

Reflexive Principlism as an Effective Approach for Developing Ethical Reasoning in Engineering

An important goal of teaching ethics to engineering students is to enhance their ability to make well-reasoned ethical decisions in their engineering practice: a goal in line with the stated ethical codes of professional engineering organizations. While engineering educators have explored a wide range of methodologies for teaching ethics, a satisfying model for developing ethical reasoning skills has not been adopted broadly. In this paper we argue that a principlist-based approach to ethical reasoning is uniquely suited to engineering ethics education. Reflexive Principlism is an approach to ethical decision-making that focuses on internalizing a reflective and iterative process of specification, balancing, and justification of four core ethical principles in the context of specific cases. In engineering, that approach provides structure to ethical reasoning while allowing the flexibility for adaptation to varying contexts through specification. Reflexive Principlism integrates well with the prevalent and familiar methodologies of reasoning within the engineering disciplines as well as with the goals of engineering ethics education.

Using scaffolded, integrated, and reflexive analysis (SIRA) of cases in a cyber-enabled learning infrastructure to develop moral reasoning in engineering students

Each year thousands of new engineers join the workforce and face novel issues raised by radical technological advances. Concurrently, changing societal responses to new technologies introduce novel conflicts in research and development that challenge the scope of established professional codes of ethics. These issues create a critical demand for new approaches for developing moral reasoning for ethical decision-making. Our multidisciplinary team of engineering, communication, and ethics educators has developed and tested a novel pedagogical framework of Scaffolded, Integrated, and Reflexive Analysis (SIRA) of ethics cases to enhance development of moral reasoning that extends beyond case-based analyses. Implemented as a series of two-week cyber-enabled learning modules, with cases from several engineering disciplines, this theory-based, data-driven, cyber-enabled framework for ethics education has applicability across a broad spectrum of disciplines and provides engineering educators with limited ethics training a tested framework and set of resources and modules to adapt and use in their own disciplines. In this paper, we discuss our work in progress on the SIRA framework, its implementation, and our assessment of changes in moral reasoning and student satisfaction when utilizing this model.

“Darwin und die englische Moral”: The Moral Consequences of Uexküll's Umwelt Theory

Uexküll’s 1917 critique of what he calls the “English morality”, written during World War I, points the contemporary reader toward important implications of the translation of descriptive scientific models to normative ethical theories. A key figure motivating biosemiotics, Uexküll presents here a darker side: one where his Umwelt theory seems to motivate a bio-cultural hierarchy of value and worth, where some human beings are worth more than others precisely because of the constraints of their Umwelten. The first English translation of this essay, introduced here, gives scholars access to Uexküll’s lines of thought, historical context, and normative interpretations. It is particularly pertinent for contemporary attempts to develop a biosemiotic ethics based, among other things, on the Umwelt theory.

Interconnectedness and Interdependence: Challenges for Public Health Ethics

An increasing number of contemporary voices in both bioethics and environmental ethics have grown dissatisfied with the schisms, abysses, and raging torrents that continue to flow between those two...

Baudrillard's simulated ecology

Jean Baudrillard, the scholar and critic of postmodernity, struggled with questions of postmodern ontology: representation of the real through the semiotic process of signification is threatened with the rise of simulacra, the simulated real. With this rise, seductive semiotic relationships between signs replace any traditional ontological representamen. This struggle has implications for environmentalism since the problems of contemporary environmental philosophy are rooted in problems with ontology. Hence the question of postmodern ecology: can the natural survive postmodern simulation? Baudrillards communicative analysis of semiotic postmodernity can both support and extend ecosemiotic theses in response to these questions, questions that must be answered in order to explore our paradoxical understandings of the natural and confirm an understanding of environmentalism for postmodernity. In this paper I will argue for the merit of a semiotic understanding of postmodernity, develop the idea of ecology in this context, and then compare Baudrillards approach to the contemporary development of ecosemiotics.

The epistemic and ethical onus of ‘One Health’

This paper argues that the practical reach and ethical impact of the One Health paradigm is conditional on satisfactorily distinguishing between interconnected and interdependent factors among human, non-human, and environmental health. Interconnection does not entail interdependence. Offering examples of interconnections and interdependence in the context of existing One Health literature, we demonstrate that the conversations about One Health do not yet sufficiently differentiate between those concepts. They tend to either ignore such distinctions or embrace bioethically untenable positions. We conclude that careful conceptual differentiation can prevent One Health stakeholders either from over-reaching or under-reaching the practical and ethical boundaries of this developing paradigm.

Empathic Perspective-Taking and Ethical Decision-Making in Engineering Ethics Education

Ethical decision-making within engineering has not been broadly studied, although there is a growing body of evidence supporting the view that missteps in ethical decision-making result in changes in organizational culture and in disasters which in turn negatively impact a broad number of stakeholders. The ethical decision-making framework we propose in this paper builds on the notion of empathy as central, although not sufficient in of itself, to the ethical decision-making process. We build on work outside of engineering on the role of empathy in ethical reasoning along with an emerging model of empathy within engineering, drawing on literature in the fields of philosophy, social psychology, neuroscience, and engineering education. We first discuss what empathy is and how empathy informs ethical decision-making in general, with a specific focus on the cognitive form of empathy or what we call empathic perspective-taking. Next we explore methods through which engineers might empathically think and act in ethically challenging situations. Finally, we explore a range of engineering contexts and cases that highlight the role empathy plays in coming to an ethically justifiable decision in specific contexts. We conclude with the suggestion that engineering ethics educators need to develop effective tools for developing and assessing empathic perspective-taking to promote ethical decision-making within the practice of engineering.

The Porosity of Autonomy: (Some) Replies to Open Peer Commentaries on “The Porosity of Autonomy: Social and Biological Constitution of the Patient in Biomedicine”

The Porosity of Autonomy: (Some) Replies to Open Peer Commentaries on “The Porosity of Autonomy: Social and Biological Constitution of the Patient in Biomedicine” Jonathan Beever & Nicolae Morar To cite this article: Jonathan Beever & Nicolae Morar (2016) The Porosity of Autonomy: (Some) Replies to Open Peer Commentaries on “The Porosity of Autonomy: Social and Biological Constitution of the Patient in Biomedicine”, The American Journal of Bioethics, 16:4, W4-W6, DOI: 10.1080/15265161.2016.1145757 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2016.1145757