‘Agent Plus’ and ‘Practical Reasoner’: A Comparative Study of the Ethical Person

This paper explores an understanding of the person in terms of practical reason. Based on my fieldwork among the Jenu Kurumba and on ethnographic data on four other communities, I analyse how these five communities conceptualise the ethical person. To understand these concepts, I consult studies of an anthropology of ethics concerned with practical reason. Additionally I draw on Charles Taylor's concept of the ‘agent plus’ and Alasdair MacIntyre's notion of the ‘practical reasoner’. I argue that both Neo-Aristotelian notions are fundamentally important for understanding the concepts of the ethical person among the five cultural formations investigated in this paper.     

Autoethnographic Challenges: Confronting Self,Field and Home

Anthropologists working at ‘home’ or in realms of the familiar often share a considerable sense of connection with participants. In these contexts, the researcher's potential position as an ‘insider’ offers particular opportunities for utilising self as a key resource. Through my own fieldwork at ‘home’ in Melbourne as an ‘insider’ among Bosnian migrants, I was confronted with the challenge of using my self to understand others' experiences. In this paper I discuss the autoethnographic process and consider how its application enabled me to consciously understand my own experiences and utilise my experiential self to inform my study.     

Anthropology in conversation with an Islamic tradition: Emmanuel Levinas and the practice of critique

As an alternative to approaching Islam as an object for anthropological analysis, this article develops the idea of an anthropologist participating in conversations going on within an Islamic tradition. The idea of a conversation is developed through the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and his ideal of knowing as an ethical relation with an infinite other. Levinas opposes a sterile and oppressive relation of ‘totality’, where the knowing self encompasses the other within concepts and thought that originate in the self, with a critical and creative relation of ‘infinity’, in which the alterity of the other is maintained and invites conversation that brings the self into question. In the article, recent disciplinary discussions of how anthropology should engage with alterity, which have been framed in terms of ontology and post‐secular anthropology, are examined in the light of Levinas's ideal of knowing as ethical and critical practice.     

Being harmed while doing good: affective injuries in a community development programme,Medan, Indonesia

Complaints, accusations, and failures of gratitude are everyday experiences for volunteers in community‐driven development in Medan, Indonesia. In this article I develop the analytic of ‘affective injury’ to describe the force of such encounters: the sensation of having one's ethical self questioned or put at risk that manifests as an immediate force or lingering hurt. While humanitarian and development workers are all susceptible to affective injuries, I argue that they operate on a different register for developers who belong to, and have an enduring relationship with, the ‘community’. The ways local volunteers respond to, and seek to recover from, affective injuries are distinct from reflective responses to ethical dilemmas. The suppression of, or diversion from, thoughts that could derail self‐understanding is a hindrance to reflexive development practice.     

Sickening Bodies: How Racism and Essentialism Feature in Aboriginal Women's Discourse about Health1

In the last decade there has been much interest in the concepts of ‘racism’ and ‘essentialism’ and the ways in which these notions have been appropriated by Aboriginal people to demarcate a specifically Aboriginal space (Cowlishaw 1986; Lattas 1993; Langton 1981; Morris 1988; Muecke 1992). Central to these concerns is the issue of black/white relations and the specificities of racial oppression. Following these concerns in this article I explore the nexus between the metaphorical dismemberment of self and the corporeal dismemberment of sickness which is reflected in the high mortality rates and disease patterns of Aboriginal people. I extend Fanon's concept that racism has the power to alienate ‘a man of colour’ from his own self-image to argue that it more than metaphorically breaks the human body (Fanon 1991). I provide a window into a much neglected area of research: how notions of illness and social relatedness are constructed in particular socio-historical circumstances. I explore the meanings of illness as expressed at the level of community and as a form of embodiment associated with unequal colonial relations. I focus on indigenous exegeses which articulate Aboriginal women's experience of illness and their sense of identity. I draw on the work of Leder (1990) to foreground a phenomenological view where selfhood is continually confronted by circumstances that make present the ‘body’ as a ‘sharp and searing presence threatening the self’. I also apply Sansom's (1982) model of illness and the significance of carers in an Aboriginal community to demonstrate a world-view of personhood that is diffused with other persons and things rather than a world-view that entails a highly individuated and bounded self. In this world-view adequate healing requires a reconstitution of social relations and a re-ordering of the racialised status quo.     

Reframing placebo in research and practice

The terms 'placebo' and 'placebo effects' cause confusion among patients, practitioners and scientists. This confusion results in both the adoption of practices that have no evidence of specificity yet considerable risk (such as surgery for low back pain) or the elimination of clinical practices proven to facilitate healing because they are not 'better than placebo' (such as acupuncture for low back pain). In this article, I discuss these issues and introduce the concept of optimal healing environment as a framework for disentangling what is useful from placebo research for adopting into clinical practice in a manner that is ethical and evidence-based.     

On Agonising: Street Charity and First Ethics

To agonise is to “undergo great mental anguish through worrying about something,” according to the New Oxford Dictionary of English. I suggest that agonising in this sense is a fundamental response to any ethical dilemma. It has a long intellectual and literary lineage. In this essay, I agonise over the dilemmas posed by street beggars, their intrusiveness and their appeal to our intuitive sense of social duty. I explore the discomfort we may feel at their presence, and the value that discomfort may have for the evolution of our ethical lives.     

‘A good neighbour is not one that gives’: detachment,ethics, and the relational self in Kenya

Since Mauss, anthropologists have been drawn to gifts because they are understood to index the moral, often in contrast to the amorality of the market. Giving is considered to bring people closer together, weaving them into the fabric of sociality. However, in Korogocho, a low‐income informal settlement in Nairobi, women recognize the dangers of giving and of closeness. Not only could others be a burden on them, but they could also be a burden on others. Thus, women seek ways in which they can detach from one another. Beginning with the assumption of the relational self, I argue that this detachment is an ethical practice that can be best understood as what I term a ‘care for relationships’. In making this argument, this article aims to contribute to debates within the anthropology of ethics and morality concerning social relationships by showing the way in which relationships might be the explicit object of ethical practices.     

Friendship,bitching, and the making of ethical selves: what it means to be a good friend among girls in a London school

This article explores the relationship between friendship, personhood, and ethics among girls in a London school. While a Western ideal of friendship is posited as a personal, private, and spontaneous relationship between autonomous individuals, I argue that girls’ friendships are a complex entanglement and interaction between forensic and mimetic dimensions of the self. Girls’ ideals of friendship, and practices of making friends, suggest forensic pre‐constituted selves acting with volition in order to become closer to other selves. However, bitching, exclusion, and breaking friendships foreground mimetic dimensions as girls shape each other and themselves according to gendered ethical criteria. Examining these analytical strands offers insight into how individuality is produced through sociality in everyday life.     

Ambivalent moralities of cooperation and corruption: Local explanations for (under)development on a Philippine island

Concepts of development are inevitably loaded with value judgements concerning what constitutes ‘proper’ social and economic organisation. Focusing on the cultural politics of development on Siquijor, an island in the Central Visayas region of the Philippines, this paper explores these often tacit ideals. It considers one of the key idioms Siquijodnon use in explaining how development is brought about—cooperation—and some of its locally perceived opposites—‘crab mentality’, politicking and corruption—which contain powerful moral critiques of self and society. On Siquijor, local discourses of development have it that widespread poverty in the Philippines demonstrates a failing of Filipinos to live up to supposedly universal norms of ethical socio‐economic conduct. However, I argue that attention to local norms of moral economy reveal the ambivalence underlying these notions of development, particularly in relation to the roles of individualism and reciprocity in socio‐economic organisation.     

On the neurodynamics of the creation of consciousness

Consciousness is expected to have a specific temporal dynamics. The COrollary Discharge of Attention Movement (CODAM) model of consciousness is deduced from an engineering approach to attention and motor attention. This model is briefly described, as is support arising from brain dynamics, especially that for the attentional blink. The understanding of known temporal dynamics in the brain associated with the emergence of consciousness is then developed from CODAM, and specifically related to the N2 ERP brain signal. How the pre-reflective self, as content-free, interacts with the content of experience is discussed in terms of the possibility that such experience arises from some proto-self generated by body signals; experiments are described which indicate that no pre-reflective self based on body signals is observable. Only a content-free pre-reflective self is consistent with this data, as CODAM suggests. How such a pre-reflective self can be further fused to give temporal continuity of a sense of self is considered in terms of various mechanisms which could be present for preserving the sense of self. The observation of the N2 signal in hippocampal encoding is proposed as providing a justification for the encoding of the N2–P3 sequence of brain signals. This would correspond to episodic encoding of the sequence of experiences of the pre-reflective self; this will thereby provide the necessary control signals in time so that ‘I’ is experienced as part of the retrieval of such memories.     

Fixing a Match or Two: Cricket,Public Confession and Moral Regeneration

‘In a moment of stupidity and weakness I allowed Satan and the world to dictate terms to me. The moment I took my eyes off Jesus my whole world turned dark.’ With these words, the former South African cricket captain, Hansie Cronje, publicly confessed that he had been a cheat, attempted to make peace with the United Cricket Board, located his fall from grace within a peculiarly fundamentalist Christian frame of guilt and atonement, and subtly connected himself and his corruption with a set of understandings about the simultaneous rigidity and vulnerability of the moral order that have grown over the past two centuries to inform, underpin and idealise Afrikaner collective notions of self. That moral order and its vulnerabilities, I will suggest here, have framed a collective identity and a collective sense of both victimhood and entitlement, within which any act becomes acceptable and possible if it can be deemed necessary.     

Memory Interventions in the Criminal Justice System: Some Practical Ethical Considerations

In recent years, discussion around memory modification interventions has gained attention. However, discussion around the use of memory interventions in the criminal justice system has been mostly absent. In this paper we start by highlighting the importance memory has for human well-being and personal identity, as well as its role within the criminal forensic setting; in particular, for claiming and accepting legal responsibility, for moral learning, and for retribution. We provide examples of memory interventions that are currently available for medical purposes, but that in the future could be used in the forensic setting to modify criminal offenders’ memories. In this section we contrast the cases of (1) dampening and (2) enhancing memories of criminal offenders. We then present from a pragmatic approach some pressing ethical issues associated with these types of memory interventions. The paper ends up highlighting how these pragmatic considerations can help establish ethically justified criteria regarding the possibility of interventions aimed at modifying criminal offenders’ memories.     

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.     

Immune Balance: The Development of the Idea and Its Applications

It has long been taken for granted that the immune system’s capacity to protect an individual from infection and disease depends on the power of the system to distinguish between self and nonself. However, accumulating data have undermined this fundamental concept. Evidence against the self/nonself discrimination model left researchers in need of a new overarching framework able to capture the immune system’s reactivity. Here, I highlight that along with the self/nonself model, another powerful representation of the immune system’s reactivity has been developed in the twentieth century immunology. According to this alternative view, the immune system is not a killer of nonself strangers but a peace-maker helping to establish harmony with the environment. The balance view of the system has never become part of the dominant paradigm. However, it is gaining more and more currency as new research develops. Advances in mucosal immunology confirm that instead of distinguishing between self and foreign the immune system reacts to microbial, chemical and self-induced alterations to produce responses that counterbalance effects of these changes.     

Intention and Moral Enhancement

Recently philosophers have proposed a wide variety of interventions referred to as ‘moral enhancements’. Some of these interventions are concerned with helping individuals make more informed decisions; others, however, are designed to compel people to act as the intervener sees fit. Somewhere between these two extremes lie interventions designed to direct an agent's attention either towards morally relevant issues – hat‐hanging – or away from temptations to do wrong – hat‐hiding. I argue that these interventions fail to constitute genuine moral enhancement because, although they may result in more desirable outcomes – more altruism, more law‐following, and/or less self‐destructive behavior, they ignore a person's intentions, and often what makes an action right or wrong is the intent behind it.     

Blurring the germline: Genome editing and transgenerational epigenetic inheritance

Sperm, eggs and embryos are made up of more than genes, and there are indications that changes to non-genetic structures in these elements of the germline can also be inherited. It is, therefore, a mistake to treat phrases like ‘germline inheritance’ and ‘genetic inheritance’ as simple synonyms, and bioethical discussion should expand its focus beyond alterations to the genome when considering the ethics of germline modification. Moreover, additional research on non-genetic inheritance draws attention to a variety of means whereby differences can be inherited in offspring generations that do not rely on differences in germline structures. Research on these diverse forms of inheritance challenges the notion that there is some special form of ethical concern that falls on germline interventions in general, and on interventions to the nuclear genome within the germline in particular.     

Aboriginal ‘Difference’ and ‘Autonomy’ Then and Now: Four Decades of Change in a Western Desert Society

In just a few decades, Aboriginal people living near Australia's Western Desert fringe have experienced an extraordinarily intense trajectory of change: from a highly autonomous nomadic existence, through ‘first contacts’, the pastoral and mission frontiers, the devastating impacts of alcohol and of Western lifestyle diseases, the outstation movement, resource exploration and mining, a long but largely successful struggle for native title, and much else. In this paper, notions of ‘difference’ and ‘autonomy’ are used to explore these transformations. The situation among the Mardu is here linked to the gulf between government policies and lived Aboriginal experience. If the self‐management thrust of 1970s policies achieved partial restoration of Aboriginal autonomy, recent Federal Government policies are intent on intervention to reduce difference and claw back some of that autonomy. Their determination to force Aboriginal people out of their ‘dysfunctional’ ‘cultural museums’ (homeland settlements) and into greater economic engagement ignores the crucial underpinnings of security and identity among remote Aborigines. The retention of difference, albeit at considerable social cost and entrenched disadvantage, is still strongly preferred by Mardu to the kinds of engagement with the dominant society that not only assault their sense of self but also threaten to overwhelm whatever autonomy remains to them.     

Should human germ line editing be allowed? Some suggestions on the basis of the existing regulatory framework

The application of genetic editing techniques for the prevention or cure of disease is a highly promising tool for the future of humanity. However, its implementation contains a number of ethical and legal challenges that should not be underestimated. On this basis, some sectors have already asked for a veto on any intervention that modifies the human germ line, while supporting somatic line editing. In this paper, I will support that this suggestion makes no sense at all, because the somatic/germ line disjunctive has no moral relevance and, therefore, it should not play any role in legal terms. I will provide a number of reasons to hold this assumption, such as the non‐sacred nature of the germ line, the difference between germ line and human genome modification, or the moral importance of the presence of a will to create modified descendants. While doing so, I will provide some examples of the different approaches to germ line editing adopted by different regulations so as to demonstrate that, contrary to what is sometimes stated, a general ban on this practice is not the rule, but the exception. Additionally, I will show how alternative options which currently exist, such as a selective ban based on criteria different to the germ line/somatic line distinction, match better with the need to conciliate research needs and legitimate ethical concerns. Finally, I will introduce some further suggestions to this same purpose.     

L’homme souffrant en quête de sens: du récit de soi à l’identité narrative. Une réflexion à partir de Ricœur

The question of personal identity is central to any reflection on mankind and, therefore, immediately relevant to clinical anthropology. The notion of the continuity of personal identity over time represents Ric?ur’s contribution to the question. Upheaval and continuity in life are integrated into self-narrative, enabling temporal permanence of identity, which generates reflective consciousness and its concomitant ethical dimension. But from this anthropological point of view, the subject doesn’t construct a self and world through narrative. On the contrary, it is narrative elements that construct the subject, allowing the subject to make sense of his or her subjective life in the world. Through this narrative conception of the suffering individual, Ric?ur makes a distinct contribution to discourse in clinical anthropology in positing that suffering is a part of a person’s effort to recount their lives.