Roger Scruton is currently Research Professor for the Institute for the Psychological Sciences where he teaches philosophy at their graduate school in both Washington and Oxford. He is a writer, philosopher, and public commentator and has specialized in aesthetics with particular attention to music and architecture. In his book Beauty, Scruton explores various notions of beauty and comes to the conclusion that beauty is not determined by subjective feelings, but universal values that are rooted in rational thought. In the following excerpt Scruton  discusses beauty in the form of art.

A century ago Marcel Duchamp signed a urinal with the name ‘R. Mutt’, entitled it ‘La Fontaine’, and exhibited it as a work of art. One immediate result of Duchamp’s joke was to precipitate an intellectual industry devoted to answering the question ‘What is art?’ The literature of this industry is as tedious as the never-ending imitations of Duchamp’s gesture. Nevertheless, it has left a residue of scepticism. If anything can count as art, what is the point or the merit in achieving that label? All that is left is the curious but unfounded fact that some people look at some things, others look at others. As for the suggestion that there is an enterprise of criticism, which searches for objective values and lasting monuments to the human spirit, this is dismissed out of hand, as depending on a conception of the art-work that was washed down the drain of Duchamp’s ‘fountain’.

The argument is eagerly embraced, because it seems to emancipate people from the burden of culture, telling them that all those venerable masterpieces can be ignored with impunity, that TV soaps are ‘as good as’ Shakespeare and Radiohead the equal of Brahms, since nothing is better than anything and all claims to aesthetic value are void. The argument therefore chimes with the fashionable forms of cultural relativism, and defines the point from which university courses in aesthetics tend to begin – and as often as not the point at which they end.

There is useful comparison to be made here with jokes. It is as hard to circumscribe the class of jokes as it is the class of artworks. Anything is a joke if somebody says so. A joke is an artefact made to be laughed at. It may fail to perform its function, in which case it is a joke that ‘falls flat’. Or it may perform its function, but offensively, in which case it is a joke ‘in bad taste’. But none of this implies that the category of jokes is arbitrary, or that there is no such thing as a distinction between good jokes and bad. Nor does it in any way suggest that there is no place for the criticism of jokes, or for the kind of moral education that has an appropriate sense of humour as its goal. Indeed, the first thing you might learn, in considering jokes, is that Marcel Duchamp’s urinal was one – quite a good one first time round, corny by the time of Andy Warhol’s Brillo boxes and downright stupid today.

Last week Jennifer Burns, author of Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, appeared on The Daily Show.  Below you can watch her interview with Jon Stewart.  Then scroll down and read the top three questions everyone has been asking her since her appearance.

1. Is Jon Stewart as short as they say? I met Jon a few minutes before the show started in the “Green Room,” which is where guests wait before going on air. Basically, so many people told me he was so short that I was expecting a midget to walk in the door. Compared to that preconception, Stewart is not that short! I certainly think I’m taller than him, but his stature didn’t really make an impression. What struck me instead was how quick and smart he is, with an immediate rapid fire patter and stream of jokes. I was also surprised at how he looked different in real life than on TV. There are subtle distortions to the face on camera and in person he was leaner with more defined features. He has mesmerizing blue eyes which I focused on during the interview so I could keep up with what he was saying!

2. What does Jon Stewart say to you after the interview is over and the cameras are still rolling? I wish I could remember! I have no recollection of our last exchange, it was probably some basic thank you’s or pleasantry, and I think he probably helped me step off the stage. By the time I exited the set, I had completely forgotten what we talked about – it must have been a psychological reaction to the high pressure of the situation. Our conversation came back to me in great detail when I watched the show later that evening.

3. Are you mad he plumped the books of two Daily Show staffers at the end of the show? Not at all! It was a huge honor to be chosen for the show and has exposed my book to a wide and enthusiastic audience who might not have heard of it otherwise. There’s nothing like TV for legitimating intellectual production! Seriously, I appreciate that Jon Stewart is both a consummate entertainer and a really smart guy who values books and ideas, and I think his ability to blend humor and serious discussion is a great gift to contemporary America.

Frederick Grinnell is Professor of Cell Biology and founder of the Program in Ethics in Science and Medicine at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas. His newest book, Everyday Practice of Science: Where Intuition and Passion Meet Objectivity and Logic offers an insider’s view of real-life scientific practice. Grinnell demystifies the textbook model of a linear “scientific method,” suggesting instead a contextual understanding of science. Scientists do not work in objective isolation, he argues, but are motivated by interest and passions.  In the article below he looks at a recent article in Nature about defining death.  Read previous posts by Grinnell here and visit his website here.

An editorial in Nature (1 October, 2009) entitled “Delimiting death” supports the proposal to reconsider the legal definition of death. “Ideally,” writes the Nature editor, “the law should be changed to describe more accurately and honestly the way that death is determined in clinical practice.” The current definition uses the criteria: (1) irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions, or (2) irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem. However, assessing ‘irreversible’, ‘all functions’ and ‘entire brain’ becomes to some degree a matter of physician judgment. In cases involving organ procurement for transplantation, the physician is under pressure to obtain donor organs that are as fresh as possible. The situation becomes conflicted. “Physicians know that when they declare that someone on life support is dead, they are usually obeying the spirit, but not the letter, of this law. And many are feeling increasingly uncomfortable about it.”

The Nature piece might be dismissed as adding nothing new to the discussion except for the provocative, two part, conceptual definition of death that the editor proposes: (1) “the person is no longer there” and (2) “can never be made to return.” The first part of this definition helps makes clear the symmetry between the most contentious issues of modern bioethics – endings and beginnings of life. The person is no longer there; we can harvest the body for organs. The person is not yet there; we can harvest the body (embryo) for stem cells.

Franz Rosenzweig’s metaphorical description of death — “His I would be only an It if it were to die.” –no longer is just a metaphor. The meaning of human death emerges according to the organization of human life. For a newly formed embryo, death means loss of viability of a single cell. After several cell divisions, loss of viability of a single cell no longer equals death. Rather, death becomes equivalent to development arrest. After 3-4 months of gestation, once the cardiovascular system develops, it becomes reasonable to speak of cardiovascular death. After 6-7 months, once the central nervous system develops, it becomes reasonable to speak of brain death. After development of modern life support systems, once machines can replace heart and brain functions, it becomes reasonable to speak of the person and the body as separated entities. Modern medical technology has succeeded in separating the I from the “living” It. Modern social thinking remains conflicted about accepting this separation.

Using Nature’s conceptual definition of death as a point of departure is unlikely to produce a more easily implemented legal definition of death for two reasons. First, nobody knows the answer to the question “Where is the person?” Indeed, trying to answer this question has become the central focus of cognitive neuroscience research with no consensus in sight except that – which would return us to the current definition of death — the person will be gone after cessation of brain function. Those who support using human embryos for research up to 14 days of embryo life select 14 days not because they know when the person has arrived but rather because they agree that before day 14 the person could not yet have arrived. Second, both from technical and practical points of view, the statement “can never be made to return” will add the word ‘never’ to the ambiguous list of other terms, i.e., irreversible, all functions and entire brain, about which the Nature editor complains. Therefore, given the inherent ambiguity, trying to decide the moment of an organ donor’s death with certainty will continue to have the potential to create a conflicted (or so it might feel) situation of choosing to sacrifice one life to save another. Clinical judgment still will be required as always is the case in the practice of clinical medicine.

If changing the legal definition of death cannot solve the practical problem, is there an alternative? One approach might be to change the informed consent process so as to involve organ donors more explicitly in the choosing process. Some donors will want to gift their organs only after certainty of death. Their wishes oblige physicians to act cautiously in declaring death, even if it means potentially reducing the value of the organs. However, other donors might view themselves as more involved participants whose advanced directives encourage their physicians to act to maintain the value of their organs, even if doing so means instructing the physician to obey the spirit and not necessarily the letter of the law. Instead of deriving a new definition of life’s end as proposed by the Nature editorial, we should aim for better public understanding of how modern medical technology has made defining life’s end so difficult.

Stephen T. Asma is Professor of Philosophy at Columbia College Chicago, where he holds the title of Distinguished Scholar.  His newest book, On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears, is a wide-ranging cultural and conceptual history of monsters-how they have evolved over time, what functions they serve, and what shapes they are likely to take in the future.  It is with this monstrous perspective (sorry I know it is an awful pun) that Asma looks at Where the Wild Things Are in honor of its release this weekend.

With hindsight it seems fitting that Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are (1963) first appeared in cultural space somewhere between Elvis Presley and the Beatles. Where the Wild Things Are is a rock’n’roll story, about being misunderstood, rebelling against authority, letting your hair down, and generally indulging in the Dionysian rumpus. It’s not surprising, then, that the new film version (Warner Brothers) is brought to us by skateboarding music-video director Spike Jonze and literary mega-hipster Dave Eggers.

As the movie’s trailer reminds us, “Inside all of us is a wild thing.” And in our therapeutic era, we generally accept that it is good and healthy to visit our wild things –to let them off their chains, let them howl at the moon. You can also taste some of this Romanticism in the recent relish of the Woodstock anniversary, with its celebration of noble primitivism. But the hippy view of “the wild” is quite sunny, whereas Sendak (who lost family during the Holocaust) wanted to acknowledge some of the darker aspects of uncivilized life (even, or especially, through the eyes of a child). Despite these darker notes, however, Where the Wild Things Are still affirms the idea that danger, at least in small doses, is good for you. And this latest fascination with beasties, together with the approach of Halloween, reminds us that we have a love/hate relationship with monsters generally. We are simultaneously attracted and repulsed by them.

Sendak’s monsters are just repulsive enough to be alien, foreign, and mysterious, but they’re also vaguely cute and familiar enough for us to identify with them and recognize our emotional selves in them. Sendak claimed in later interviews that the monsters were based loosely on his boyhood perceptions of his frightening aunts and uncles. Like a distant relation, our uncanny monsters are alien aspects of our own identity –they are parts of who we are, unfamiliar aspects of our psyches. This common way to read monsters –as primitive, uncivilized versions of ourselves –is obvious in Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or the forthcoming Universal Pictures remake The Wolfman, starring Anthony Hopkins and Benicio del Toro. Monster stories have a cathartic function, in the sense that they give our tamed, repressed impulses a brief holiday of Bacchanalian revelry. And after these virtual trips to our own hearts of darkness, we can better return to our everyday social world of compromise, accommodation, and compliance. On this account, the monster story is the favorite genre of our reptilian brains (the real home where the wild things are).

However, every era has its own uses and abuses of monsters. The lesson of Shelley’s Frankenstein, for example, is often taken as a liberal lesson in tolerance: we as a society must not create outcasts, or persecute those who are different. Or consider that the medieval mind was obsessed with giants and mythical creatures as God’s punishments for the sin of pride. And the medieval period also began the Church’s long fascination with demon possession. For the Greeks and Romans, monsters were prodigies –warnings of impending disaster.

Besides the cuddly monsters of Where the Wild Things Are, our present day fascination seems dominated by zombies, vampires, and serial killers. Why are we so entranced by these specific creatures –why do we love to hate them?

Not only are there more zombies around these days, but they seem to be getting faster and more aggressive. Gone are the slow lumbering goons of the George Romero-era zombies, and in their stead we have lightning fast undead predators. Zombies, just like vampires, serial killers and most other monsters are terrifying because you cannot really reason with them. Unlike your other enemies, you cannot appeal to monsters to recognize that you’re a good hearted person, or you’ve got kids, or you really understand their pain, or you only want to understand them in the name of science. They’ll pummel you and eat you anyway. There’s not much common ground, in terms of rationality or emotional solidarity. One suspects there is a link between a decade of American fear of terrorists, and a rise in zombie monsters that do not respond to negotiation.

But zombies also have unique qualities that trigger the dynamic of love/hate, attraction/repulsion. Everybody wants to live forever. That’s a given. If you can’t remember wanting to live forever, then you’re probably a successful and functional adult. But the inner narcissist –the one that thinks he’s God and wants to live forever –is still in you somewhere, buried deep. The zombie, like the vampire, is a kind of immortal: chop his leg off, he’s still coming; blow a hole in his chest, he’s still coming. His life span is indefinite and he’s indestructible. So the little narcissist inside us really likes the immortal aspect of the zombie and the vampire. We unconsciously crave that kind of staying power and durability, but our narcissistic desire to cheat death is impossible to sustain in the face of mature experience. Reality regularly reminds us, as we are growing up, that we will not cheat death. No one actually cheats death. To carry on in the fantasy world of the narcissistic inner-child is impossible given the brute facts of our animal mortality. So the universal urge to live forever must be repressed, as we grow up. This repression means that the desire must be transformed from positive to negative –from something we like, to something disgusting (just like in potty training).

We love to hate zombies because they simultaneously manifest our craving for immortality, and our more mature realization that the flesh always decays. As “living dead,” all zombies elicit those conflicting impulses in our psyche. The more disgusting they are, the more we are reminded of our inevitable decomposition, but the more they keep getting up and chasing, the more we are delighted by the promise of immortality. The psyche seems to carry out an unconscious vacillation: the zombies live on forever, those lucky sods, but wait…they’re disgusting and repellent and…and…run!

Vampires are a much more glamorized and sexualized version of the attraction/repulsion dynamic. From Polidori’s original Vampyre, to Stoker’s Dracula, to today’s teen vampires of Twilight, the blood drinkers are, generally speaking, totally hot. The play of sexual taboos in vampire stories is well appreciated. But in addition to the always titillating presence of neck-kissing and the exchange of bodily fluids, we have to recognize that vampires are romantic monsters. They are incarnations of the irresistible but damaging femme fatal for boys, and the “bad boy” or cad for girls. A vampire is frequently an archetype of the charismatic, handsome, man, who seduces women by his very indifference toward them. Women find him alluring and seek chase, only to discover too late that they are broken upon his heartless unmovable nature. The vampire holds out the promise of love, but alas lacks even humanity.

Vampires and zombies share another well-spring of horror: you could easily become one. You or your loved one is just a little bite away from contracting the disease. In the age of AIDS, swine flu, SARS, and myriad pandemic anxieties, it’s easy to see why monsters who transmit their monstrosity through bites (both sexual and gustatory) are especially frightening. In the medieval mind, monsters and demons were metaphysically different from you and I, and in the unlikely event that you were transformed into one you could be sure it was the result of serious sin. Nowadays, however, casual, accidental contact can make you “one of them.”

One suspects that losing one’s humanity, or becoming one of them, is also at play in our dread fascination with serial killers –real and imagined monsters. We have extensive media coverage, and corresponding public appetite, for real serial killers like Jeffrey Dahmer, Charles Manson, John Wayne Gacy, Ed Gein, as well as the popular fictional characters Norman Bates, Sweeney Todd, Hannibal Lecter, Freddy Krueger, Leatherface, Michael Myers, and so on. Why are so many of us repelled, disgusted, and morally outraged, but also willing to lay out cash to see psychotic murderers hang people on meat hooks, sever limbs, and of course eat their innocent victims?

Before the 1950s, very few people would have suggested that a serial killer was anything like you, or I, or churchgoing folks. And yet, now it is commonplace for people to think of psychopaths as just slight (albeit horrifying) deviations on the otherwise normal brain or psyche. A murdering psychopath is not a demon-possessed creature or an offspring of Cain, but a guy who failed to develop normal levels of human compassion. Most of us believe that the exact causes of monstrous serial killing will be found eventually in brain science or developmental psychology or some combination, but we don’t think that Gacy, Dahmer, Hannibal Lecter, or Leatherface, are metaphysically different from us. We have secularized the evil of such psychopaths only recently, and maybe this is one reason why we love to hate them.

Just as Sendak’s monsters give us a kind of Rousseauian view of going “back to the wild” (wherein the authentic self is discovered, uncorrupted by society), so too Leatherface and similar monsters of “torture porn” give us a kind of Freudian view of going native. We’re attracted to serial killers because they lack conscience, hurt their enemies with impunity, and feel very little. They do the stuff we might do, if we had not been socialized properly. We’re attracted to their animalistic primitive powers. But we’re simultaneously repulsed by them because they lack the precise qualities that make us human.

If Rousseau and the hippies are right, then our inner primitive monsters will be more like Sendak’s beasties; weird, a little dangerous, but ultimately helpful. If, however, Freud is right about the kinds of monsters inside us, then we shouldn’t go too often or too long to where the wild things are.

Like rock’n’roll, the wild primitivism of monsters is tempered by bourgeois (and simply human) needs for security, safety and stability. Howlin’ Wolf is sanitized into Elvis, the “long haired” Beatles have to wear suits, the mud-soaked Woodstock kids are ready to go home after the weekend, and Sendak’s little “Max” misses his mom and leaves his monsters to return to “his very own room where he found his supper waiting for him, and it was still hot.”

Robert Veatch is Professor of Medical Ethics at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University. He received the career distinguished achievement award from Georgetown University in 2005 and has received honorary doctorates from Creighton and Union College. His new book, Patient, Heal Thyself: How the “New Medicine” Puts the Patient in Charge, he sheds light on a fundamental change sweeping through the American health care system, a change that puts the patient in charge of treatment to an unprecedented extent. In the original article below, Veatch looks at how the empowerment effected Michael Jackson’s medical decisions and the responsibility of his doctor.

Dr. Conrad Murray is the doctor who apparently administered a fatal dose of the anesthetic, propofol, to Michael Jackson in a desperate attempt to respond to his cries for help in getting some sleep. He has received rough treatment from the media. Jackson’s death has been ruled a homicide and the media are reporting that he will be charged with manslaughter. I think that judgment is too quick and want to come to the doctor’s defense.

The case is, of course, being tried in the press before we have all the details, but the likely scenario is emerging. Making some plausible assumptions, I think a case can be made for the doctor’s decisions. Let me assume, for purposes of discussion, that the doctor did not intend to kill Michael (He was reportedly being paid $150,000 a month to be Michael’s full time physician. Even if he had completely abandoned his duty to serve the patient, he would be a fool to intend the death.) Let me assume that the lethal effects were foreseeable, but not inevitable side effects of a very potent drug. Let me also assume that Michael had been informed by Dr. Murray how dangerous the drug was and how unusual it was to use it for this purpose. Possibly, he had even told Michael that the drug’s labeling did not include the use of propofol outside of a hospital and that almost all physicians would refuse to use it this way.

With these assumptions, a prosecutor will have a difficult time accusing the doctor of a crime. It is not even clear to me that “homicide” is the right term for the death. First, it is important to realize that “off-label” uses of drugs by doctors is not illegal. It is done all the time when a physician becomes convinced that it in the patient’s interest. Second, it is critical to understand that medical choices about what is in a patient’s interest are directly dependent on the patient’s goals and values. They cannot simply be read out of a textbook as if medical science can prove what is in a particular patient’s interest. (Think about whether aggressive chemotherapy is in a terminal cancer patient’s interest or whether an abortion is in the interest of a pregnant woman.) The patient’s interest is necessarily a subjective matter about which only the patient can have direct knowledge.

It seems clear that Michael was in the advanced stages of insomnia and was in excruciating agony from persistent lack of sleep. That is an awful situation about which patients often have to make desperate choices. None of us can know what was in Michael’s head that caused the insomnia or led him to plea for pharmacological intervention. We do know that other drugs had been used even that fateful night (benzodiazepines that are often used to reduce anxiety and induce sleep). These other drugs had failed to solve the problem and made the use of the propofol even more dangerous, something Dr. Murray surely knew and presumably had told Michael.

Now the question for Dr. Murray and for Michael Jackson is, given his desperate situation, is the only drug that will give him some sleep worth the very great risk of side effects, even death? Surely, for most of us the answer would be negative, but that doesn’t mean it was Michael’s answer. Given that he had apparently received the drug many previous times without side effects, I don’t see how we can claim that Michael would be wrong to decide that the risk would be worth it in his case. Deciding whether the drug is “worth it” is a value judgment, not a scientific fact that the doctor can look up in a book. Even if almost everyone else would have decided not to try the desperate off-label use, I don’t know how we can say Michael’s gamble was wrong for him.

But, you might say, even if Michael’s judgment was understandable, surely Dr. Murray was wrong to go along with his patient’s demand. Surely, other physicians would not have agreed. A physician is supposed to be a responsible professional who has the right not to go along with a patient’s very unusual and risky demand. Most physicians would have refused to provide the propofol (at least outside of a hospital) and that is understandable, but this does not prove that Michael’s value judgment about the risk was wrong or that Dr. Murray was wrong to comply. Some medical issues are appropriately judged by what is called a “standard of care.” The correctness of the physician’s behavior is judged by what his colleagues similarly situated would have done. This, however, is not a decision that should be judged by that standard. If it is possible that Michael had made a rationally defensible decision that the risk was worth it for him, then a physician is within his rights to decide to cooperate in a legal behavior if he so chooses. He surely would have had the right not to provide the dangerous drug for off-label use, but he also has the right to decide it is a tolerable risk. If he does so after the patient is adequately informed, I don’t see how we can fault him assuming that the lethal effect was not intended.

This turns out to be crucial for the rest of us if we are to get high-quality, rational medical care. We have for many years recognized that most powerful, valuable drugs have anticipated side effects. If we choose to take the risk and the side effect occurs, we don’t say that the choice was a mistake. If the side effect is death, we don’t say it was a homicide. Provided the intended beneficial effects are good enough, we say that the side effect is tolerable even if it is foreseen. That, in fact, is precisely the justification for doctors’ use of narcotics to control severe pain in cancer patients even though they know that the side effect can be respiratory depression and even death. Most ethical systems have long acknowledged that such “unintended, but foreseen” deaths are tolerable. Normally, such a death is not deemed a “homicide.” Just may be, if we put ourselves in Michael’s shoes and plug in the value judgments he made, we can understand why Dr. Murray, apparently with great reluctance, was willing to go along. I can’t fault him if that was what he did.

Virginia Held is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York Graduate School.  She is a past president of the the American Philosophical Association (Eastern Division).  Her most recent book, How Terrorism is Wrong: Morality and Political Violence, offers a moral assessment of various forms of political violence, with terrorism as its focus.  She asks tough questions such as: “Why is terrorism wrong?” and “On what grounds should we judge when the use of violence is morally acceptable?”  In the excerpt below Held attempts to define terrorism as an act separate from war and crime.

Understanding how to define terrorism is notoriously difficult…Governments characteristically define terrorism as something only their opponents can commit and as something only those who seek to change polices or to attach a given political system or status quo can engage in.  The definition used by the U.S. State Department, for instance, has included the claim that it is carried out by “subnational groups or clandestine agents.”…This is obviously unsatisfactory.  …as Israeli and U.S. political scientists Neve Gordon and George López, respectively, say, “Israel’s practice of state-sanctioned torture also qualifies as…political terrorism.  It is well known that torture is not only used to extract information or to control the victim; it is also used to control the population as a whole.”…

There can also be state-sponsored terrorism when the government of one state funds and supports terrorism carried out by members of groups or states not under its control.  The United States routinely lists a number of countries (e.g., Iran and Syria) that, it claims, support terrorist groups elsewhere…

Terrorism is certainly violence… One can doubt that Al Qaeda has a political objective in the sense in which many people understand politics, but since it aims at the religious domination of the political, its violence is indeed political…Its aim to expel U.S. and European forces from the Middle East is clearly political.  War is also political violence on a larger scale, though if the most alarming plans of current terrorist groups were successful, they would often amount to war as currently understood…

Two important definitional questions have to do with whether the targeting of civilians must be part of the definition of terrorism and whether such targeting turns other political violence into terrorism.  Many of those who write about terrorism incorporate the targeting of civilians into their definitions…

There are serious problems with a definition of terrorism that sees “the deliberate killing of innocent people,” as Walzer puts it, to be its central characteristic or what distinguishes it from other kinds of political violence and war and makes it automatically morally unjustifiable in the same way that murder is.  First, consider some of the descriptive implications.  If targeting civilians must be part of terrorism, then blowing up the Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983 and killing hundreds of marines, and blasting a hole in the U.S. destroyer Cole and killing seventeen sailors in Yemen in October 2000 would not be instances of terrorism, and yet they are routinely offered as examples of terrorism…

Even more awkward for the proposed definition that includes the killing of civilians as its defining characteristic is that we would have to make a very sharp distinction between the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center, which was certainly terrorism, and the attack that same day and with entirely similar means on the Pentagon, which on this definition would not be counted as terrorism (although some civilians work at the Pentagon, it is a primarily military target.  This seems very peculiar.

If one tries with this definition to include (rather than exclude) these cases as instances of terrorism and if one thinks that, instead of those who are technically “civilians,” one simply means those who are not now shooting at one-like the Marines, when they were asleep, or the colonels at their desks in the Pentagon-and suggests that only those presently engaged in combat are legitimate targets, one will make it illegitimate for the opponents of terrorism to target terrorists when they are not actually engaged in bombings and the like.  Moreover, distinguishing when members of the armed forces are actual present threats that may be targeting (as distinct from only potential threats because they are not resting) has not been part of the distinctions worked out so far, which assert that noncombatants should not be targeted…

An even more serious problem with a proposal to tie the definition of terrorism to the targeting of civilians but to include the attack on the Pentagon among instances of terrorism (because members of the armed forces working at the Pentagon are not currently engaged in combat) is that it puts the burden of being a “legitimate tarter” on the lowest levels of the military hierarchy-the ordinary soldiers, sailors, pilots, and support personnel-and exempts those who give them their orders, send them into combat, and make them instruments of violence.

Furthermore, if attacking civilians is the defining characteristic of terrorism, a great many actions that are typically not called terrorism would have to be considered terrorist actions: the bombings of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, London, and all of those other places where civilians live and become targets, as well as where the aim to spread fear and demoralization among wider groups was surely present.  Perhaps we should just get used to calling all these “acts or terrorism.”  But perhaps we should find a definition of terrorism that does not ask us to.

What many discussions of terrorism try, of course, to do is to come up with a definition such that what they do is terrorism and and unjustified, whereas what we and our friends do is not terrorism but justified self-defense.  Building the targeting of civilians into the definitions is often used to accomplish this since “intentionally killing innocent people” seems by definition wrong and unjustified…

…In sum, then, I decline to make the targeting of civilians a defining feature of terrorism, even though terrorism very frequently targets noncombatants.  Terrorism is political violence that usually spreads fear beyond those attacked, as others recognize themselves as potential targets.  This is also true of much warfare…Terrorism’s political objectives distinguish it from ordinary crime.  Perhaps more than anything else, terrorism resembles small-scale war.  It can consists of single events, such as the Oklahma City bombings, though it is usually part of a larger campaign, whereas war is always composed of a series of violent events.  Importantly, there are many kinds of terrorism, just as there are many kinds of war.

Ronald Munson is Professor of Philosophy of Science and Medicine at University of Missouri-St. Louis.  His new book, The Woman Who Decided to Die: Challenges and Choices at the Edges of Medicine, takes readers to the very edges of medicine, where treatments fail and where people must cope with helplessness, mortality, and doubt. In the excerpt below Munson takes us to the crux of medical ethics, with questions about the right to die.

I think the case can be made that the world of American medicine changed decisively at two in the morning on April 14, 1975, when Julie Quinlan of Landing, New Jersey, was awakened by a telephone call.

She was crying when she hung up the phone. “Karen is very sick,” she said to her husband, Joseph. “She’s unconscious, and we have to go to Newton Hospital right away.”

…Karen was in a comatose state for unknown reasons and was being given oxygen through a mask taped over her nose and mouth. It wasn’t clear that she would live.

…Blood and urine tests indicated that Karen hadn’t consumed what would usually be considered a dangerous amount of alcohol. But she had been on a very strict diet and had eaten nothing that day before having two gin-and-tonics at the party. The tests also detected the presence in her blood of .6 milligrams of aspirin combined with the tranquilizer Valium. Two milligrams would have been toxic, five lethal. So why she had stopped breathing was a mystery, yet it was during the brief period she was alone in the bedroom that part of her brain died, apparently from oxygen depletion.

About a week after Karen failed to regain consciousness, her parents moved her to St. Clare’s Hospital… Dr. Robert J. Morse, a neurologist, and Dr. Arshad Javed, a pulmonary internist, became her physicians. They conducted additional studies to rule out several possible causes of her coma… The neurological tests and X-ray studies confirmed, however, that Karen’s brain had undergone extensive damage.

…By early July, Karen’s physicians and her mother, sister, and brother had come to believe that Karen would never regain consciousness…

THE PRIEST AND THE LAWYERS

The Quinlans’ parish priest, Father Thomas Trapasso, assured the Quinlans that the ethical principles of the Roman Catholic Church didn’t require the continuation of extraordinary measures to support a life after any realistic hope of recovery was gone.

…On July 31, 1975, after Karen had been in a coma for three and a half months, Julie and Joseph Quinlan gave Drs. Morse and Jared their permission to take their daughter off the ventilator. They signed a letter authorizing the discontinuance of all extraordinary procedures and absolving the hospital from all legal liability that might result from Karen’s death. “I think you have come to the right decision,” Dr. Morse told them.

But the next morning Dr. Morse called Joseph Quinlan and said, “I have a moral problem about what we agreed on last night…” The next day, Dr. Morse called again. “I find I will not do it,” he said. “And I’ve informed the administrator at the hospital that I will not do it.”

The Quinlans were upset and bewildered… They talked with the hospital’s attorney, and he told them that, because Karen was over twenty-one, they were no longer her legal guardians. They would have to go to court and be appointed to guardianship. After that, they would have the standing to ask the hospital to remove Karen from the respirator, and the hospital might or might not comply…

Joseph Quinlan consulted attorney Paul Armstrong…

…Paul Armstrong filed a plea with Judge Robert Muir of the New Jersey Superior Court on September 12, 1975. He requested that Joseph Quinlan be appointed Karen’s guardian so that he would have “the express power of authorizing the discontinuance of all extraordinary means of sustaining her life.”

Armstrong argued the case on three constitutional grounds. First, he claimed (following the lead of the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade) that there is an implicit right to privacy guaranteed by the Constitution and that this right permits individuals or others
acting for them to terminate the use of extraordinary medical measures, even when death may result…

Second, Armstrong argued that the First Amendment guarantee of religious freedom extended to the Quinlan case. If the court didn’t allow them to act in accordance with the doctrines of their church, their religious liberty would be infringed.

Finally, Armstrong appealed to the “cruel and unusual punishment” clause of the Eighth Amendment. He claimed that “for the state to require that Karen Quinlan be kept alive, against her will and the will of her family, after the dignity, beauty, promise and meaning of earthly life have vanished, is cruel and unusual punishment.”…

…On November 10, Judge Muir ruled against Joseph Quinlan…

APPEAL
Paul Armstrong immediately filed an appeal with the New Jersey Supreme Court. On January 26, 1976, the court convened to hear arguments…

This time the court’s ruling was favorable…the court stated, if Karen’s doctors believed she would never emerge from her coma, they should consult an ethics committee that should be established by St. Clare’s Hospital. If the committee accepted their prognosis, then the ventilator could be removed. If Karen’s present physicians were then unwilling to take her off the respirator, Mr. Quinlan was free to find a physician who would.

NOT IN THIS HOSPITAL
…The Quinlans expected Karen to die once she was off the machine, but she was soon breathing on her own without mechanical assistance…

TEN YEARS
Karen Quinlan continued to breathe on her own. She was given high nutrient feedings through a surgically implanted gastric tube, and she received regular doses of antibiotics to ward off bacterial infections…

…On June 11, 1985…Karen Quinlan finally died. She was thirty-one years old.

To most people in 1975, the case of Karen Quinlan seemed both astonishing and disturbing, and the whole country followed reports of the medical, moral, and legal issues as months passed and Karen neither died nor recovered consciousness. Most of us had never heard the phrase persistent vegetative state, which the neurologists used to describe her condition, and we were puzzled about its implications.

If Karen was trapped in some indefinite, ambiguous territory between life and death, how should we treat her? Were we duty-bound to keep her body functioning, even when she had no hope of recovery?

Today I am pleased to be able to bring you a new video from our friends at Meet the Author. Nigel Warburton is the author of Free Speech: A Very Short Introduction, and here he is explaining what inspired him to write the book, and what the key arguments in free speech are.

He has previously written for OUPblog here, and an excerpt from his book can be found here.  Check out the video after the break.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Leslie Francis is Professor of Philosophy, Professor of Law, and Adjunct Professor of Internal Medicine in the Division of Medical Ethics and Humanities at the University of Utah.  Margaret P. Battin is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Adjunct Professor of Internal Medicine in the Division of Medical Ethics and Humanities at the University of Utah.  Together with Jay A. Jacobson and Charles B. Smith, they wrote The Patient as Victim and Vector: Ethics and Infectious Disease which explores how traditional and new issues in clinical medicine, research, public health, and health policy might look different if infectious disease were treated as central. The authors argue that both practice and policy must recognize that a patient with a communicable infectious disease is not only a victim of that disease, but also a potential vector- someone who may transmit an illness that will sicken or kill others.  In the post below Francis and Battin look specifically at the H1N1 outbreak.

The recent outbreak of H1N1 influenza in Mexico has been greeted with great concern to prevent spread. Trips have been cancelled, travelers have been quarantined, schools have been closed, and sporting events will go uncontested. Preventing spread is important, to be sure, especially of a novel agent with unknown infectivity and lethality. But there is a down side to all the worry about spread: it encourages us to think of each other as vectors, sources of disease to be feared.

We are all vectors or potential; that’s a biological fact. But it’s only one side of our biology. We’re “way-station” selves, breeding grounds and launching pads for literally trillions of microorganisms, all the time—but we’re also recipients of them too. In short: we’re all victims,
just as we are vectors. We live in a state of perpetual uncertainty about whether we’re victims, vectors, or both, at any given time.

As we are caught up in the fear of pandemic spread, we need to remember our victim-side, too. There’s been some discussion of this in the press reports: stories of empty hotels, the cancelled U-17 Concacaf tournament, travelers quarantined in airports, workers without
childcare, or pigs slaughtered unnecessarily in Egypt. But there have been no comprehensive reminders that people stricken with the flu or suspected as vectors are victims as well and in need of support: medical care if they are ill, economic consideration if their livelihoods are
lost, and just plain concern when events that are important to them must be cancelled to enforce the social distancing that is hoped to prevent spread.

In pandemic planning, much effort has been devoted to preventing disease spread. We are seeing the importance of these measures in the current situation. As fears wane, or refocus on later, perhaps more virulent phases of an epidemic or on future emergences of new infectious diseases, however, it is equally important for us to plan for victims and to ask what we owe them. Such planning efforts may be particularly important to encourage the sharing of epidemiological data in the future, if the economic impacts on Mexico are dire and left unattended, where data sharing and international cooperation is crucial in disease control. That’s a prudential imperative, but it’s an ethical one, too. After all, we’re all in this together,working together not only to prevent the spread of infectious disease but also to mitigate the impact of disease where it strikes.

Nigel Warburton is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the Open University, as well as the author of a number of bestselling books on the subject. Below is an excerpt from his latest book, Free Speech: A Very Short Introduction, on liberty versus licence to say what you want. His previous blog for OUP is here.

Defenders of free speech almost without exception recognize the need for some limits to the freedom they advocate. In other words, liberty should not be confused with licence. Complete freedom of speech would permit freedom to slander, freedom to engage in false and highly misleading advertising, freedom to publish sexual material about children, freedom to reveal state secrets, and so on. Alexander Meiklejohn, a thinker who was particularly concerned to nurture the sorts of debates that are fruitful for a democracy made this point:

When self-governing men demand freedom of speech they are not saying that every individual has an unalienable right to speak whenever, wherever, however he chooses. They do not declare that any man may talk as he pleases, when he pleases, about what he pleases, about whom he pleases, to whom he pleases.

This is important. The kind of freedom of speech worth wanting is freedom to express your views at appropriate times in appropriate places, not freedom to speak at any time that suits you. Nor should it be freedom to express any view whatsoever: there are limits.

John Stuart Mill, the most celebrated contributor to debates about the limits of individual freedom, despite advocating considerably more personal freedom than most of his contemporaries were comfortable with, set the boundary at the point where speech or writing was an incitement to violence. He was also clear that his arguments for freedom only applied to ‘human beings in the maturity of their faculties’. Paternalism – that is, coercing someone for their own good – was in his opinion appropriate towards children, and, more controversially, towards ‘those backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered in its nonage’. But it was not appropriate towards adult members of a civilised society: they should be free to make their own minds up about how to live. They should also be free to make their own mistakes.

Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr’s memorable observation that freedom of speech should not include the freedom to should ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theatre captures an important point that is easily ignored when rhetoric about freedom takes over: defenders of freedom of speech need to draw a line somewhere. The emotive connotations of the word ‘freedom’ should not blinker us to the extent that we forget this. Allowing someone to shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre might cause a stampede resulting in injury of even death, and a hoax might also undermine theatregoers’ reactions to a genuine cry of ‘fire’. Holmes made his comment in a Supreme Court judgement (Schenck v United States) relating to the First Amendment. He gave this judgement in 1919, but the offending act, printing and circulating 15,000 anti-war leaflets to enlisted soldiers during wartime, took place in 1917. The pamphlets declared that the drafting of soldiers was a ‘monstrous wrong against humanity in the interest of Wall Street’s chosen few’. For Holmes the context of any expression in part determined whether it could justifiably be censored. While this expression of ideas night have had First Amendment protection in peacetime, the same ideas expressed during a war should be treated differently and did not merit that protection. Here the war effort could have been seriously undermined, so Holmes declared these special circumstances justified a special restriction on freedom:

The question in every case is whether the words are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. It is a question of proximity and degree. When a nation is at war many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight, and that no court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right.

Holmes, like Mill, was committed to defending freedom of speech in most circumstances, and, explicitly defended the value of a ‘free trade in ideas’ as part of a search for truth: ‘the best test of truth,’ he maintained, ‘is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market’. Holmes wrote passionately about what he called the ‘experiment’ embedded in the US Constitution arguing that we should be ‘eternally vigilant’ against any attempt to silence opinions we despise unless they seriously threaten the country – hence the ‘clear and present danger’ test outlined in the quotation above. Holmes as a judge was specifically concerned with how to interpret the First Amendment; his was an interest in the application of the law. Mill in contrast was not writing about legal rights, but about the moral question of whether it was ever right to curtail free speech whether by law, or by what he described as the tyranny of majority opinion, the way in which those with minority views can be sidelined or even silenced by social disapproval.

Both Mill and Holmes, then, saw that there had to be limits to free speech and that other considerations could on occasion defeat any presumption of an absolute right (legal or moral) to freedom of speech. Apart from the special considerations arising in times of war, most legal systems which Bradley preserve freedom of speech still restrict free expression where, for example, it is libellous or slanderous, where it would result in state secrets being revealed, where it would jeopardize a fair trial, where is involves a major intrusion into someone’s private life without good reason, where it results in copyright infringement (e.g. using someone else’s words without permission), and also in cases of misleading advertising. Many countries also set strict limits to the kinds of pornography that may be published or used. These are just a selection of the restrictions on speech and other kinds of expression that are common in nations which subscribe to some kind of free speech principle and whose citizens think of themselves as free.