This article considers the question of the genetic enhancement of virtue from the standpoint of Aristotle's ethical theory. I argue that the direct genetic enhancement of Aristotelian virtue would not be possible, since virtue requires habituation. Nevertheless, Aristotle's view of the physiological preconditions for acquiring virtue entails that we could genetically enhance our receptivity for successful habituation into virtue. I caution against one danger for such attempts, which I call "the bigger they are the harder they fall" problem. I argue that Aristotle's emphasis on the indispensability of habituation for the acquisition of virtue means that genetic enhancement could be useful only within the context of a society of virtuous people who can already successfully bring up children into virtue. It is therefore unlikely to serve as a panacea for our woes if we begin with the premise that our society is in a crisis with respect to virtue.
The articles in this issue examine the ethics of intervention in medical affairs across many different domains-from intimate relationships to medical resource allocations, from public health policy to epistemic practices among medical practitioners, to making mental health treatment more precise. While spanning seemingly disparate territories, these contributions converge on a central insight: ethical intervention demands careful attention to context, purpose, and particularity.
Libertarian debates on abortion have not advanced beyond the seminal theory of evictionism developed by Walter Block. Indeed, despite being subject to waves of intralibertarian critique, evictionism has managed to remain the leading libertarian theory of abortion. Part of the reason for this lies in the unsatisfactoriness of alternative libertarian accounts of abortion such as the implicit contract framework. This paper moves the libertarian debate on abortion beyond evictionism by proposing a novel assumption-of-risk model which holds that, by engaging in consensual intercourse, a woman voluntarily assumes the foreseeable risk of generating a dependent self-owner. This assumption of risk transforms a mother's juridical position such that her antecedent moral power to enforce her secondary remedial claim-right to terminate bodily interference is disabled. The Hohfeldian disabilities generated on the part of the mother correlate with immunities, on the part of the fetus, from being liable to the enforcement of its mother's moral power to enforce her secondary remedial claim-right to remove it.
Vulnerable individuals have taken their own lives while in relationships with chatbots. Not only did the chatbots not discourage them from taking their lives but they also actively encouraged it. Another man suffering hallucinations took the life of his mother when a chatbot affirmed his delusions. Yet people continue to insist that chatbot therapists and chatbot doctors are a good thing. I acknowledge that generative artificial intelligence (AI), mimicking human rational capacities, will be better than humans at some things. Drawing on the work of Martin Buber in I and Thou, I show that an AI can only treat reality as an It, as an object to be manipulated, and cannot actually enter into an I-Thou relation the way that humans do, and I further argue that when caught up with another, there is a vicarious experiencing, a shared experience, of what I will call Thou-Thou relating. An AI device cannot be pulled into this Thou-Thou form of relation; it cannot encounter a human as Thou, because it is not a subject and lacks affectivity that enables shared experience. It is this vicarious fellow-feeling that often prompts the doctor or the therapist to act.
As Clinical Ethics Consultation (CEC) becomes more institutionalized, concerns about its legitimacy and efficacy have grown. We defend a realist orientation, according to which CEC has normative force only if its recommendations answer to stance-independent reasons, not to individual preferences and institutional policies. Public justification can and should proceed through familiar means (e.g., shared mid-level norms and transparent procedures) so that stakeholders can scrutinize the reasoning. We show how neutrality, admirable as a procedural virtue, hollows CEC when treated as a master ideal, leaving hard cases to defaults and institutional inertia. In its place, we develop moral expertise as sustained, transparent reasoning that integrates the clinical picture with the profession's content-full standards. We then construe warranted deference as rational trust in contrastive reason-tracking rather than deference to role. Our comparative thesis holds that shared norms successfully handle routine cases, but persistent disagreement and institutional pressure call for a realist grounding that secures determinate, action-guiding recommendations. On such realist understanding, CEC remains normatively accountable and oriented toward getting things right.
