I just had a paper come out in the Journal of Military Ethics entitled “The War on Terror and the Ethics of Exceptionalism“, JME 8.4 (2009):  265-288.  These ideas also figure into the current book project (as Chapter 3), but work as a stand-alone paper as well.  The basic idea is to try to think through how the contemporary advent of terrorism challenges traditional norms and what “exceptionalism” amounts to in light of terroristic threats.  The middle sections aim at a conceptual understanding of exceptionalism and the last one considers the ethics of making exceptions.  Comments welcome!

Last year, I published an edited volume, Physicians at War:  The Dual-Loyalties Challenge (Springer).  This came out of my fellowship at the American Medical Association, where I was interested in the use of physicians in hostile interrogations.  The book looks at how medical and non-medical spheres can collide, such as in times of war:  imagine that physicians could serve the greater good while, at the same time, violating principles of medical ethics.  What should they do?  Are professional ethics abrogable in times of conflict, or do they always trump other ethical considerations?  In addition to a general theoretical framework for this project, essays are about specific challenges:  torture, weapons development, triage, and so on. 

I wanted to post about the book now since three reviews have just come out of it, all well-written and in good journals.  If you have thoughts on the project, please let me know.  Also note that, while the hardback is expensive, Springer is rolling out a new plan for $25 on-campus copies; please check with your library regarding availability.  And here are the reviews:

Review by Christian Enemark in Journal of Military Ethics 7.4 (2008):  320-322.  Review by Michel Davis in Studies in Ethics, Law, and Technology 3.2 (2009):  1-4.  Review by Jason Gatliff in Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 6.3 (2009):  391-392.

I wrote a paper about the social and ethical implications of nanomedicine–i.e., the use of nanoscale technologies as applied to medicine–which has just come out in the American Journal of Bioethics.  It was featured as a target article, which means that various people wrote responses to the paper and then I got to write a response to the responses.  I cannot post their responses, but you can read the response to the responses if you like.  For access to the responses to which I responded, you need a subscription to AJOB, which you should have; it’s a fantastic journal!  I thank Summer Johnson, Ellen McGee, Ron Sandler, and Tihamer Toth-Fejel for their dialogue, and please pass along any comments on the original paper.

I am teaching two courses this fall, both of which I am pretty excited about.  The undergraduate course is philosophy of science, and it’s being taught online.  This new format is really fun and offers all sorts of new possibilities.  One of my students, for example, is taking the class from France; military students have taken them while deployed in the past as well.  The graduate course celebrates the sesquicentennial of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species.  A couple of years ago, I did a graduate seminar on the Darwinian corpus more broadly; this went really well but was just too much reading.  I’m really looking forward to focusing on Origin, and students are signed up from several different departments around campus.