The end times and the near future: the ethical engagements of Russian Old Believers in Romania

Despite growing insights into the secular practices of former socialist states, we are yet to grasp fully their resonance in religious lives. Taking socialist modernity and Old Belief as distinct ethical projects, in this article I discuss the ethical engagements of Russian Old Believers in socialist Romania as reflected in individual biographies. Their struggle to maintain an ascetic Orthodox culture in the midst of an intrusive atheist state was at odds with the urge to join a modernizing project that preached the collective good. This tension was managed through a temporary ‘secularization’ which allowed for differentiated generational commitments and the successful reproduction of their tradition within the socialist system. Old Believers’ return to the church in old age reveals their attempt to shape their lives through ethical action based on the obligation to continuity, to carry on the old faith. It shows how the pursuit of continuity in the Old Belief is a virtuous practice leading to moral exemplarity in a space of equivocal moralities.     

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.     

Empowered imagination and mental vulnerability: local theory of mind and spiritual experience in Vanuatu

‘Theory of mind’ in developmental psychology focuses on how children develop the ability to infer others’ beliefs, desires, and intentions. Anthropologists have taken up the notion of ‘theory of mind’ to explore the way cultural differences in representations of beliefs, desires, and intentions affect everyday lives. In Oceania, anthropologists have noted that inferences about others’ intentions are not accorded a privileged role in social interaction. In Vanuatu, I find, it is often the material, rather than immaterial, aspects of relatedness that are elaborated upon. People think about knowledge, creativity, meaning, and intention not as confined to a bounded mental or inner domain, but as discoverable through the body, and in the world at large. I argue here that this propensity to locate meaning and moral purpose as external to the mind corresponds to a ‘porous’ view of self and mind, and that this in turn may open people to experience vivid, intense, and often tangible forms of spiritual encounter.     

Outsiders and insiders: changing boundaries of radicalism,racism and class

Virdee's book adds enormously to our understanding of two interconnected processes: the ways in which racism and nationalism in England/Britain became totally intertwined and embedded in working-class views of the world, and how at certain key moments those racially cast out from that depressing maelstrom may become the champions of an anti-racist internationalism. I am fractionally less negative than the author about the seemingly total hold of racism/nationalism on the whole working class, and less certain about racialized ‘outing’ as the key to the DNA of universalist anti-racists. Using the Garibaldi mobilizations of 1862–64, I suggest he may have underestimated the potential and reasons for ‘insider’ working-class resistance to racism/nationalism, and suggest greater caution in arguing an association between ‘racialized outsiders’ and internationalist views.     

The politics of fear: what does it mean to those who are otherized and feared?

Islamophobia has, of late, created a tendency to conflate all Muslims as belonging to a single nation of Islam that does not recognize and respect boundaries imposed by western geopolitics. This has been done by some to create and by others to generate a sense of exclusive unity that would separate all Muslims and make them into ‘others’ within western societies. It is the contention of this paper that such calls both embody and ignore the diversities of Islam as understood and practised by its adherents. Furthermore by ‘otherizing’ the entire community of Muslims in the West, the singular label of ‘Islamism’ marginalizes and may even silence the vibrant contestations among Muslims about their faith and its teachings; these include questions posed by women who may be described as feminists. The attributes of Islamism, ascribed to the faith by public, the media and politicians in the West and adopted by some Muslims primarily as a politically unifying force, are very different from the fluidity and flexibility that has been a historic part of lived Islam. Many Muslims may well aspire to belong to the umma: people of Islam conceptualized as crossing ethnic, racial, geographical and political boundaries. But Muslims in general and Muslim women in particular do not wish to do so at the expense of being otherized and conforming to the negative stereotypes ascribed to them that mask their fluid identities and, in the case of ‘white’ women, their close ties with their kinship networks. The multiplicity of Muslim's identities sits more easily within the permeable unbounded umma applicable to the global as well as the local without necessarily always privileging one or other identity.     

Managing ethical challenges around misattributed parentage within the clinical context: Insights from an African moral theory

This study argues the thesis that a set of guidelines ‐ firmly rooted in a particular interpretation of African moral theory, specifically, Ubuntu – will do a better job than current medical ethics frameworks, in addressing ethical challenges around misattributed parentage within the clinical context. Incidental information such as information with significant personal/health implications raises unique challenges for medical professionals. For example, withholding information of misattributed paternity accidentally discovered in clinical interactions may be seen by a patient as a violation of his/her right‐to‐know. Contrarily, disclosure where a patient has not requested information – or where establishing paternity is not the purpose of clinical visit/interaction – may be taken by the patient as a violation of his/her right ‘not‐to‐know’. Resolving these challenges remain a herculean task. African moral theory contains an under‐emphasized value for addressing such ethical challenges around misattributed parentage in the field of transplant. I seek to contribute this knowledge; and enhance clinician‐patient relationship. This study builds off three completed systematic reviews, which aimed to answer the following questions: “what are the ethical challenges regarding information health professionals face within the clinical contest?” and “what core aspects (or common themes) of Ubuntu can be identified in existing literature describing the same?” In this present study, I applied the definition of Ubuntu which captures the core aspects of the theory in ethical literature on the same, to address ethical issues around unsought information of misattributed parentage in the field of transplant.     

Emancipating ethics: an autonomist reading of Islamic forms of life in Russia

This article advances a framework aimed at capturing the political life of ethical intensity by putting autonomist theory in resonance with ethnographic material pertaining to quietist Muslim milieus in post-Soviet Russia. The emancipatory and prefigurative potential of collective projects of self-legislation – in this case, ‘halal living’ – are explored through the notions of ethical form of life and Rule/Law. It will be argued that autonomist theory (a) is helpful in conceptualizing the friction between ethical projects (however quietist) and dominant moral/political orders; (b) has the potential to broaden anthropological conversations on virtue beyond existing fault lines (notably between what I call ‘traditionist’ and ‘liberal’ theoretical families) as well as conceptual silos (‘religion', ‘secularity’); and (c) can help us envision a radical, politically engaged anthropology of ethics.     

The (extra)ordinary ethics of being HIV‐positive in rural Papua New Guinea

HIV/AIDS continues to be intimately entwined with the moral domain, and thus a positive diagnosis can cast doubt on a person's moral status. I draw on recent literature in the anthropology of ethics and morality, as well as feminist moral philosophy, to analyse the post‐diagnosis practices of HIV‐positive women in Papua New Guinea as they attempt to recuperate their moral personhood and make their ethical commitments visible to others. I argue that they carve out a repertoire of (extra)ordinary ethics from the ‘ordinary’ domain and that their practices tend towards a deontological ethics, rather than a virtue ethics, orientation.     

Within a Range of Possibilities: Morality and Ethics in Social Life

Despite its now common currency the anthropological concept of morality remains underdeveloped. One anthropologist who has made several important attempts to work out a more precise theoretical concept of morality is Joel Robbins. In his most recent contribution to this endeavor Robbins addresses the tension in anthropology between what he calls the morality of reproduction and the morality of freedom. In this article, I suggest an alternative solution to the problem of conceiving the distinction between a nonconsciously enacted morality and the conscious awareness of ethical dilemmas and moral questioning. I will support this distinction with ethnographic and life-historical material from my research on the moral lives of some Muscovites.     

Rights and responsibilities in rural South Africa: implications for gender,generation, and personhood

In the rural Eastern Cape, South Africa, contests over the meaning and merit of human rights feature prominently in intergenerational and intergendered conflicts. In this article I identify and analyse a tension between amalungelo (a socially embedded and relational form of rights) and irhayti (a Xhosaization of the English ‘[human] right’) as a means of exploring the interpersonal tensions that arise through the production and contestation of the subject positions that human rights set in motion. Using the examples of elders’ complaints of neglect, and of young men's accusations of human rights violations on the part of women, I ground this investigation in men's and elders’ explanations of how human rights enable morally reprehensible actions, and are implicated in what they perceive to be a climate of interpersonal neglect. In analysing these claims, I show that gendered and generational conflict in this region is grounded in uncertainty about the content of gendered and generational subject positions themselves, and speaks to the relative moral value of autonomous versus relational forms of personhood. Moreover, I show that where inequality and interdependence are intrinsic to the ways in which gendered and generational subject positions are constituted and understood, human rights serve both to destabilize the content of these subject positions in ways that render appropriate gendered and generational sociality unclear, and also to bring into question the relative moral value of autonomous versus more relational forms of personhood.     

Fostering caring relationships: Suggestions to rethink liberal perspectives on the ethics of newborn screening

Newborn screening (NBS) involves the collection of blood from the heel of a newborn baby and testing it for a list of rare and inheritable disorders. New biochemical screening technologies led to expansions of NBS programs in the first decade of the 21st century. It is expected that they will in time be replaced by genetic sequencing technologies. These developments have raised a lot of ethical debate. We reviewed the ethical literature on NBS, analyzed the issues and values that emerged, and paid particular interest to the type of impacts authors think NBS should have on the lives of children and their families. Our review shows that most authors keep their ethical reflection confined to policy decisions, about for instance (a) the purpose of the program, and (b) its voluntary or mandatory nature. While some authors show appreciation of how NBS information empowers parents to care for their (diseased) children, most authors consider these aspects to be ‘private’ and leave their evaluation up to parents themselves. While this division of moral labor fits with the liberal conviction to leave individuals free to decide how they want to live their private lives, it also silences the ethical debate about these issues. Given the present and future capacity of NBS to offer an abundance of health‐related information, we argue that there is good reason to develop a more substantive perspective to whether and how NBS can contribute to parents’ good care for children.     

Property as sovereignty in micro: the state/property nexus and the Cyprus Problem

This article shows that landed property can be an exercise of state sovereignty in micro. I argue that property tightly relates to statehood and that the concept of ‘community’ offers us a lens with which to investigate that relation. Property's ‘communal’ character in Cyprus often transcends individual rights to ownership. A house belongs not to an individual, but to persons in their capacity as members of either the Greek-Cypriot or Turkish-Cypriot constitutional communities of the Republic. Focusing on the moral and political claims that ensue from this premise, I show how refugee Cypriots encounter and rearticulate the state in a variety of institutions as they lay claims to property (periousia) – their own or others’. Consequently, I argue that thinking through ‘community’ contributes to understandings of the linkage between property and statecraft (what I call the state/property nexus). In turn, this allows us to better comprehend statehood in post-conflict domains.     

Contentious connections: infrastructure,dignity, and collective life in Accra,Ghana

Infrastructural systems have emerged as productive ethnographic sites for analysing political subjectivities and rationalities. Through the case of shared electricity and prepaid meters in the compound housing system of Accra, Ghana, I suggest that infrastructures’ political potential lies in their imaginative and hermeneutic abilities to foster desires for dignity, sustain well-being, and question moral ideals of collective life. In contrast to recent anthropological work that has emphasized the material basis of infrastructures as ‘techno-political’ devices materializing certain logics of rule and governance, I reclaim a poetics of sociality whereby infrastructures mobilize a politics of (unwanted) collective life. Through the ‘electricity stories’ circulated by tenants, I chart how the moral economy of infrastructure in a context of collective precarity redistributes marginalization and freedom in ways that always exceed political rationales of energy reforms and policies.     

‘Don't be so serious’: ethical play,Islam, and the transcendent

Modes of play and playfulness are central to ethics, yet have not been as rigorously considered by anthropologists as have more earnest forms of ethical life. In this article, I argue that attention to play reframes recent anthropological debates about ethical transcendence and immanence. I do so through a consideration of the Islamic discourse of ‘calculation’ (ḥisāb), an idiom by which Muslims articulate their hoped-for state in the hereafter through the imagery of a divine accounting of good and bad deeds. Drawing on ethnography from the Indonesian province of Aceh, I show how ḥisāb cultivates forms of epistemological play through which Muslims explore the inscrutability of transcendence. Such play reveals the socially and theologically emergent qualities of transcendent truths and values, suggesting hidden affinities between transcendent stances and more immanent forms of ethical life.     

Medicalization as a moral problem for preventative medicine

Preventive medicine is sometimes criticised as it contributes to medicalization of normal life. The concept ‘medicalization’ has been introduced by Zola to refer to processes in which the labels ‘healthy’ and ‘ill’ are made relevant for more and more aspects of human life. If preventive medicine contributes to medicalization, would that be morally problematic? My thesis is that such a contribution is indeed morally problematic. The concept is sometimes used to express moral intuitions regarding the practice of prevention and health promotion. Through analysis of these intuitions as well as some other moral concerns, I give an explication of the moral problems of medicalization within the context of preventive medicine.     

Embracing precarity across species: Muslim ethics and care for stray dogs in Russia

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Saint Petersburg between 2015 and 2016, this article puts work on postsocialist precarity in conversation with scholarship on piety and interspecies care in Muslim contexts to explore how Aliya, a low-income Slavic convert to Islam, responded to social and economic hardships by tending to stray dogs. In doing so, she did not turn away, turn inwards, or turn political in the conventional sense of the word. Instead, she engaged in what I term ‘embracing precarity’, which I define as a response to uncertainty, grounded in Islamic spirituality, ethics, and care. By embracing canine tactility – often in departure from cultural norms concerning stray dogs in Islam and at the risk of deepening her own vulnerability – Aliya embarked on a path towards God with nonhuman others. The emergent relatedness between her and the dogs illustrates how striving for an ethical Muslim life amid uncertainty may open one up to experimentation, improvisation, and becoming with precarious others in a pursuit of a relationship with God and a favourable afterlife.     

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.     

Artificial womb technology and clinical translation: Innovative treatment or medical research?

In 2017 and 2019, two research teams claimed ‘proof of principle’ for artificial womb technology (AWT). AWT has long been a subject of speculation in bioethical literature, with broad consensus that it is a welcome development. Despite this, little attention is afforded to more immediate ethical problems in the development of AWT, particularly as an alternative to neonatal intensive care. To start this conversation, I consider whether experimental AWT is innovative treatment or medical research. The research–treatment distinction, pervasive in regulation worldwide, is intended to isolate research activities and subject them to a greater degree of oversight. I argue that there is a tendency in the literature to conceptualize AWT for partial ectogenesis as innovative treatment. However, there are sufficiently serious ethical concerns with experimental AWT that mean that it must not be first used on humans on the basis that it is a ‘beneficial treatment’. First, I outline the prospects for translation of AWT animal studies into treatment for human preterms. Second, I challenge the conceptualizations of experimental AWT as innovative treatment. It must be considered medical research to reflect the investigatory nature of the process and guarantee sufficient protections for subjects. Identifying that AWT is research is crucial in formulating further ethico-legal questions regarding the experimental use of AWT. Third, I demonstrate that clinical trials will be a necessary part of the clinical translation of AWT because of requirements laid out by regulators. I consider the justification for clinical trials and highlight some of the crucial ethical questions about the conditions under which they should proceed.