On fun and freedom: young women's moral learning in Indonesian Islamic boarding schools

This article analyses the role of fun and freedom in the moral learning of young women students in two Indonesian Islamic boarding schools. Recent debates about Islam and ethical subject formation have centred on the assumed tension between Islam and freedom. I examine decisions about television viewing and dress to illustrate both the flexibility and fixity of moral values and evaluation in girls’ lives. I argue that anthropologists of morality and Islam should take seriously moments of fun as important instances for ‘moral ludus’ or ‘moral play’ – the testing, shifting, and reshaping of the boundaries of moral behaviours that involve balancing the demands of various social fields and the larger ethical community in which a person is embedded. I suggest that these moments be viewed not as ruptures or instances of hypocrisy but as everyday occurrences of embedded agency in the lives of piety-minded individuals.     

ON THE MORALITY OF GUINEA‐PIG RECRUITMENT

Can it be wrong to conduct medical research on human subjects even with their informed consent and even when the transaction between the subjects and researchers is expected to be mutually beneficial? This question is especially pressing today in light of the rise of a semi‐professional class of ‘guinea pigs’– human research subjects that sell researchers a right of access to their bodies in exchange for money. Can these exchanges be morally problematic even when they are consensual and mutually beneficial? I argue that there are two general kinds of concern one can have about such transactions – concerns about the nature of what is sold and concerns about the conditions in which the selling occurs. The former involves worries about degradation and the possible wrongness of selling a right of access to one's body. These worries, I argue, are not very serious. The latter involves worries about coercion, exploitation, and undue influence – about how, by virtue of their ignorance, impulsiveness, or desperation, guinea pigs can be taken advantage of by medical researchers. These worries are quite serious but I argue that, at least in cases where the exchange between guinea pigs and researchers is consensual and mutually beneficial, they do not raise insurmountable moral problems.     

Careers: people who make lab animal research happen

What attracts individuals to laboratory animal research? Why do they stay? What do they enjoy about dealing with rodents and other small animals on a day-to-day basis? And why do they think it's a career others will enjoy, too? Here, we profile several lab animal professionals.     

Catching the pulse: money and circulation in a Sri Lankan marketplace

This article traces the movement, management, and generation of money in a Sri Lankan wholesale vegetable market, pulling into focus certain local economic and moral logics. What traders do with cash is revealing. I argue that how traders use money – the way it is handled, risked, spent, and lent – exhibits skill, implies hierarchy, and cultivates social connections. Exploring idioms of economic activity such as ‘catching the pulse’ and ‘rolling the money’, the article examines relations between different kinds of trader. Moving money through businesses permits participation in the complex communication network of the market. This is central to existing in the social world of the trader. I argue that following money notes – rather than commodities – as they travel around the marketplace and between the hands of transactors renders ethnographically observable the formations of personhood and long‐term relations that take place in the market.     

WHY MORAL PHILOSOPHERS ARE NOT AND SHOULD NOT BE MORAL EXPERTS

Professional philosophers are members of bioethical committees and regulatory bodies in areas of interest to bioethicists. This suggests they possess moral expertise even if they do not exercise it directly and without constraint. Moral expertise is defined, and four arguments given in support of scepticism about their possession of such expertise are considered and rejected: the existence of extreme disagreement between moral philosophers about moral matters; the lack of a means clearly to identify moral experts; that expertise cannot be claimed in that which lacks objectivity; and that ordinary people do not follow the advice of moral experts. I offer a better reason for scepticism grounded in the relation between moral philosophy and common‐sense morality: namely that modern moral philosophy views even a developed moral theory as ultimately anchored in common‐sense morality, that set of basic moral precepts which ordinary individuals have command of and use to regulate their own lives. Even if moral philosophers do nevertheless have a limited moral expertise, in that they alone can fully develop a set of moral judgments, I sketch reasons – grounded in the values of autonomy and of democracy – why moral philosophers should not wish non‐philosophers to defer to their putative expertise.     

Evolutionary genetics and ecology of sperm-dependent parthenogenesis

Sperm-dependent (or pseudogamous) forms of parthenogenetic reproduction occur in a wide variety of animals. Inheritance is typically clonal and matroclinous (of female descent), but sperm are needed to initiate normal development. As opposed to true parthenogenesis (i.e., sperm-independent reproduction), pseudogamous parthenogenetic lineages must coexist with a ‘sperm donor’— e.g., males from a conspecific sexual lineage, conspecific hermaphrodites, or males from a closely related sexual species. Such sperm donors do not contribute genetically to the next generation. The parasitic nature of sperm-dependent parthenogenesis raises numerous ecological and evolutionary questions. How do they arise? What factors help stabilize coexistence between the pseudogamous parthenogens and their sperm donors (i.e., ‘sexual hosts’)? Why do males waste sperm on the asexual females? Why does true parthenogenesis not evolve in pseudogamous lineages and free them from their dependency on sperm donors? Does pseudogamous parthenogenesis provide compensatory benefits that outweigh the constraints of sperm-dependence? Herein, we consider some genetic, ecological, and geographical consequences of sperm-dependent parthenogenesis in animals.     

From connection to contagion

This essay proposes that we ‘think data’ with a complex legacy of work, once disavowed and now resurgent in social theory, on crowd formations. I propose this move because social media platforms’ mobilization of data – the extractions, ever-shifting reaggregations, and micro-targeting, on the one hand, and our engagements, re-tweets, acts of sharing, and production of virality, on the other – has fuelled such anxious concern about the very things that animated much crowd theory in the first place. Key among these concerns are the force of emotional contagion and the threat of social dissolution; the composition of ‘the social’ by elements that well exceed the human; and pressing questions about the media through which energetic forces travel, often with lightning speed. What questions might be enabled by attending to the resonance between crowd theory's ‘anti-liberal’ preoccupations and contemporary concerns over how social media platforms crowd us?     

Parental virtue: a new way of thinking about the morality of reproductive actions

In this paper I explore the potential of virtue ethical ideas to generate a new way of thinking about the ethical questions surrounding the creation of children. Applying ideas from neo‐Aristotelian virtue ethics to the parental sphere specifically, I develop a framework for the moral assessment of reproductive actions that centres on the concept of parental virtue. I suggest that the character traits of the good parent can be used as a basis for determining the moral permissibility of a particular reproductive action. I posit three parental virtues and argue that we can see the moral status of a reproductive action as determined by the relationship between such an action and (at least) these virtues. Using a case involving selection for deafness, I argue that thinking in terms of the question ‘would a virtuous parent do this?’ when morally assessing reproductive action is a viable and useful way of thinking about issues in reproductive ethics.     

RETRACING LIBERALISM AND REMAKING NATURE: DESIGNER CHILDREN,RESEARCH EMBRYOS,AND FEATHERLESS CHICKENS

Liberal theory seeks to achieve toleration, civil peace, and mutual respect in pluralistic societies by making public policy without reference to arguments arising from within formative ideals about what gives value to human life. Does it make sense to set aside such conceptions of the good when it comes to controversies about stem cell research and the genetic engineering of people or animals? Whether it is reasonable to bracket our worldviews in such cases depends on how we answer the moral questions that the use of these biotechnologies presuppose. I argue that the moral language of liberal justice – of rights and duties, interests and opportunities, freedom and consent, equality and fairness – cannot speak to these underlying concerns about what the human embryo is, why the natural lottery matters to us, and whether ‘animal nature’ is worth preserving. I conclude that liberal theory is incapable of furnishing a coherent or desirable account to govern the way we use our emerging powers of biotechnology.     

Health care and the principle of fair equality of opportunity: a report from The Netherlands

In The Netherlands, the public funding of a number of health care services is controversial. What can we learn from this about the moral concerns that underlie these judgements? And, if there is anything to learn, can we use this improved understanding to scrutinise the adequacy of particular decisions concerning the public funding of health care services? In the present paper, I will analyse three cases: corrective surgey, In Vitro Fertilisation and liver transplantation. I will summarise the arguments that have been used to support or to challenge the public funding of these services. I will then assess the merits of Daniels’fair equality of opportunity account of justice in health care. Can this account improve our understanding of the moral concerns underlying our judgements about the public funding of these services? Can it serve to scrutinise the adequacy of particular decisions that are made concerning the public funding of health care services? My answer to both questions will be a qualified yes. Daniels’account can provide guidance, but not because we can deductively infer from it what is right and what is wrong. Instead, I will argue for a more casuistic use of the concept of fair equality of opportunity.     

Cruising: ‘Moral Panic’ and the Cronulla Riot

In this paper I draw on ethnography I undertook amongst locals in the Cronulla area after the riot of December 2005. A number of the young beach goers I came across had been on a P&O ‘schoolies cruise’ at the time of the riot. For two weeks the students depended on the media for information about what was going on in their suburbs. Sailing back, I was told, a pumped‐up chorus of ‘Shi‐ire!’ and ‘White Pride!’ rang out over Sydney Heads, as expectations climbed high of the ship being met by gangs of Middle Eastern youths, ready for the fight. Back on the beach, months later, bodies baking in the sun try to reconcile the thought of riot with what they know about Australia, and Cronulla, as a place of laid back, leisurely, lazily tolerant people. How can the two scenes of bodily excess be brought together? What are the limits of the ‘moral panic’ idea, in relation to the Cronulla riot? How do the competing truths of major discourses on Cronulla misrepresent the community in question?     

Humanity at the Edge: The Moral Laboratory of Feeding Precarious Lives

At the heart of anthropology and the social sciences lies a notion of human existence according to which humans and animals share the basic need for food, but only humans have the capacity for morality. Based on fieldwork in a pig laboratory, a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), and a dementia nursing home, we follow practices of feeding precarious lives lacking most markers of human personhood, including the exercise of moral judgment. Despite the absence of such markers, laboratory researchers and caregivers in these three sites do not abstain from engaging in questions about the moral status of the piglets, infants, and people with dementia in their care. They continually negotiate how their charges belong to the human collectivity and thereby challenge the notion of ‘the human’ that is foundational to anthropology. Combining analytical approaches that do not operate with a fixed boundary between human and animal value and agency with approaches that focus on human experience and virtue ethics, we argue that ‘the human’ at stake in the moral laboratory of feeding precarious lives puts ‘the human’ in anthropology at disposal for moral experimentation.     

Moral Horizons of Land and Place

ABSTRACT

A recent ‘moral turn’ in anthropology has cast new light on morality as a subject of ethnographic inquiry, and on the making of moral meaning and judgment. This article, and the special issue it prefaces, contribute to this emergent literature through foregrounding and examining the moral dimensions of land and place. Taking up Didier Fassin’s injunction for a critical moral anthropology – rather than an anthropology of morality – we look to land and place as groundings for moral challenges and practices that are nevertheless not place-bound. A critical moral anthropology of land and place should be directed, we argue, to the interplay of mobility and emplacement, to the dynamics of landscape and ‘dwelling’, and to the multiplicities of expectation and meaning that surround the making and exploitation of resources. In contexts of global and local change, land and place offer productive grounds from which to consider the moral horizons – both spatial and temporal – of our world and our discipline.     

Making secular ‘French’ medical ethics: transcendent morality and patient subjectivities in southern French hospitals

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with physicians and nurses working in two state-funded southern French hospitals, this article explores why and how medical care providers connected their everyday deliberations about patient care to what they considered to be distinctively French forms of medical responsibility. Many healthcare professionals saw French medical morality in opposition to ‘Anglo-Saxon’ discourses of individual autonomy and transactional choice. In contrast to such ‘transactionalism’, they insisted that ‘French’ ethics required limits that transcended particular circumstances. And yet it was difficult for doctors and nurses working in secular and increasingly neoliberal hospitals to argue against individual transactionalism in an overtly moral register, one that might appear religious and paternalist. Through a close look at two different cases – one in assisted reproduction and one in palliative care – I show how the language of folk psychoanalysis provided some health professionals with a way out of this impasse. Care providers used pseudo-psychoanalytic accounts of patient subjectivities to depict individuals as incapable of knowing, let alone ‘owning’ or rationally mastering, themselves. This, in turn, suggests that some aspects of French secularity may be far less Protestant and liberal than contemporary anthropological work tends to assume.     

IS GLOBAL ETHICS MORAL NEO‐COLONIALISM? AN INVESTIGATION OF THE ISSUE IN THE CONTEXT OF BIOETHICS

This paper considers the possibility and desirability of global ethics in light of the claim that ‘global ethics’ in any form is not global, but simply the imposition of one form of local ethics – Western ethics – and, as such, a form of moral neo‐colonialism. The claim that any form of global ethics is moral neo‐colonialism is outlined using the work of a group of ‘developing world bioethicists’ who are sceptical of the possibility of global ethics. The work of virtue ethicists is then introduced and compared to the position of the developing world bioethicists in order to show that the divide between ‘Western’ and ‘non‐Western’ ethics is exaggerated. The final section of the paper turns to the practical arena and considers the question of global ethics in light of practical issues in bioethics. The paper concludes that practical necessity is driving the creation of global ethics and thus the pertinent question is no longer ‘Whether global ethics?’, but ‘Why global ethics?’.     

Morality, adapted

Over the last few decades, scientists have been busy debunking the myth that nonhuman animals relate to each other in a primarily competitive, aggressive way. What they have found is that many species of animal, including many of those most closely related to humans, display a remarkable range of cooperative, "prosocial" behavior. In fact, it appears that some animal societies adhere to a moral code. What is preventing us, then, from saying that the members of these societies are moral beings? Nothing important, according to a recent book. Probing further into this question, I suggest that in fact quite a lot is at risk in making this move. To integrate nonhuman animals fully into the moral domain, we may have to adapt our conception of morality in some very troublesome ways.     

Diet, embodiment, and virtue in the mechanical philosophy

This paper considers the relationship between diet, embodiment, nature and virtue in several seventeenth-century natural philosophers, all of whom sought to overcome or to radically reform inherited ideas about the self as a hylomorphic compound of form and matter, but who nonetheless were not entirely ready to discard the notion that the self is intimately united with the body. One implication of this intimate union, for them, is that what one does with the body, including what one puts into it, is directly relevant to the supreme end of achieving a virtuous life. I thus consider food—its preparation and its consumption—as a link between natural and moral philosophy in the early modern period, showing in particular the parallels between the search for the diet that is ‘natural to man’, on the one hand, and the project of establishing rules of virtue on the other. Key to discerning these parallels, I argue, is an understanding of early modern ideas about diet and eating as rooted in the Stoic notion of oikeiôsis, which may be translated as ‘assimilation’ or ‘appropriation’, and which, as recent work by Lisa Shapiro has shown, played an important role in early modern ideas about a bodily contribution to the human good. The most general thesis is that dietary questions were far more important in early modern philosophy than has yet been recognized: nearly every prominent natural philosopher was preoccupied with them. A narrower thesis is that this parallelism between natural philosophy and moral philosophy is reflected in the conception of cooking as both a fundamental physiological process (‘coction’) as well as the most basic form of social existence.     

Failure and moral distinction in a Ukrainian marketplace of ideas

This essay examines the generative effects of claiming moral failure within a Ukrainian liberal movement for media reform in post-Maidan, pre-invasion Ukraine. The reformers wished to reorganize news reporting around the ideals of autonomy, balanced objectivity, impartiality, and corrigibility, which they believed underpinned Western media. They decried most Ukrainian media as failing such standards, highlighting the individual moral failure of journalists bankrolled by oligarchs in return for favourable media representation. In turn, those from whom the reformers tried to distinguish themselves morally mocked them as ‘grant-eaters’ for their dependence on Western democracy promotion grants. This tussle pitted material success against yearnings for moral and professional probity. Developing Selka's idea of moral distinction, I argue that while the reformers’ pursuit of virtuous difference was sincere, their structural vulnerability vis-à-vis the mainstream media also made morality more salient as the basis for agonistic differentiation.