Ritual and Power in Medicine: Questioning Honor Walks in Organ Donation.

Honor walks are ceremonies that purportedly honor organ donors as they make their final journey from the ICU to the OR. In this paper, we draw on Ronald Grimes' work in ritual studies to examine honor walks as ceremonial rituals that display medico-technological power in a symbolic social drama (Grimes, 1982). We argue that while honor walks claim to honor organ donors, ceremonies cannot primarily honor donors, but can only honor donation itself.

Secular Dreams and Myths of Irreligion: On the Political Control of Religion in Public Bioethics.

Full-Blooded religion is not acceptable in mainstream bioethics. This article excavates the cultural history that led to the suppression of religion in bioethics. Bioethicists typically fall into one of the following camps.

At the Edge of Everydayness.

Near Death Experiences (NDEs) do not fit easily into the typical philosophies that ground and animate medical science and medical practice. By appealing to their scientifically based everyday philosophies, practitioners will sometimes be dismissive of patients' NDEs. However, reality and our conscious experience of reality always seem to overflow our scientific explanations, whether those explanations are biological, social, or psychological.

When is somebody just some body? Ethics as first philosophy and the brain death debate.

I, along with others, have been critical of the social construction of brain death and the various social factors that led to redefining death from cardiopulmonary failure to irreversible loss of brain functioning, or brain death. Yet this does not mean that brain death is not the best threshold to permit organ harvesting-or, as people today prefer to call it, organ procurement. Here I defend whole-brain death as a morally legitimate line that, once crossed, is grounds for families to give permission for organ donation.

From Anticipatory Corpse to Posthuman God.

The essays in this issue of JMP are devoted to critical engagement of my book, The Anticipatory Corpse The essays, for the most part, accept the main thrust of my critique of medicine. The main thrust of the criticism is whether the scope of the critique is too totalizing, and whether the proposed remedy is sufficient. I greatly appreciate these interventions because they allow me this occasion to respond and clarify, and to even further extend the argument of my book.

Maturing the minor, marginalizing the family: on the social construction of the mature minor.

The doctrine of the mature minor began as an emergency exception to the rule of parental consent. Over time, the doctrine crept into cases that were non-emergent. In this essay, we show how the doctrine also developed in the context of the latter part of the 20th century, at the same time that the sexual revolution, the pill, and sexual liberation came to be seen as important symbols of female liberation--liberation that required that female minors be granted the status of a mature minor.

Families, dependencies, and the moral ground of health savings accounts.

Health Savings Accounts have been marginalized in the West. In Singapore, however, they are foundational to the financing of health care. In this brief essay, I shall begin to sketch a justification for Health Savings Accounts.

Transhumanism, metaphysics, and the posthuman god.

After describing Heidegger's critique of metaphysics as ontotheology, I unpack the metaphysical assumptions of several transhumanist philosophers. I claim that they deploy an ontology of power and that they also deploy a kind of theology, as Heidegger meant it. I also describe the way in which this metaphysics begets its own politics and ethics.

Echo calling narcissus: what exceeds the gaze of clinical ethics consultation?

Guiding our response in this essay is our view that current efforts to demarcate the role of the clinical ethicist risk reducing its complex network of authorizations to sites of power and payment. In turn, the role becomes susceptible to various ideologies-individualisms, proceduralisms, secularisms-that further divide the body from the web of significances that matter to that body, where only she, the patient, is located. The security of policy, standards, and employment will pull against and eventually sever the authorization secured by authentic moral inquiry.

Reviving the conversation around CPR/DNR.

This paper examines the historical rise of both cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and the do-not-resuscitate (DNR) order and the wisdom of their continuing status in U.S. hospital practice and policy.

Foucauldian diagnostics: space, time, and the metaphysics of medicine.

This essay places Foucault's work into a philosophical context, recognizing that Foucault is difficult to place and demonstrates that Foucault remains in the Kantian tradition of philosophy, even if he sits at the margins of that tradition. For Kant, the forms of intuition-space and time-are the a priori conditions of the possibility of human experience and knowledge. For Foucault, the a priori conditions are political space and historical time.

Biopolitics, Terri Schiavo, and the sovereign subject of death.

Humanity does not gradually progress from combat to combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law finally replaces warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination. (Foucault, 1984, 85) In this essay, I take a note from Michel Foucault regarding the notion of biopolitics. For Foucault, biopolitics has both repressive and constitutive properties.

Rejecting medical humanism: medical humanities and the metaphysics of medicine.

The call for a narrative medicine has been touted as the cure-all for an increasingly mechanical medicine. It has been claimed that the humanities might create more empathic, reflective, professional and trustworthy doctors. In other words, we can once again humanise medicine through the addition of humanities.

Ethics, justification and the prevention of spina bifida.

During the 1970s, prenatal screening technologies were in their infancy, but were being swiftly harnessed to uncover and prevent spina bifida. The historical rise of this screening process and prevention programme is analysed in this paper, and the role of ethical debates in key studies, editorials and letters reported in the Lancet, and other related texts and governmental documents between 1972 and 1983, is considered. The silence that surrounded rigorous ethical debate served to highlight where discussion lay-namely, within the justifications offered for the prevention of spina bifida, and the efficacy and benefits of screening.

Hero or has-been: is there a future for altruism in medical education?

The term 'altruism' is often used without definition, leading to contradictions in what we expect from medical students. In this reflection paper, we critique the concept of 'altruism' from the perspective of moral philosophy and social psychology and challenge its unquestioned usage within the medical education literature, especially that emerging from the USA. We will argue that 'altruism' is a social construction with a particular history, stemming from Kantian philosophy and perpetuated within newer disciplines such as social psychology.