Designer Babies: A Discursive Justification of a Moral Dilemma

Abstract

Eight mature graduate students formed a simulated Citizen Jury to deliberate on the ethics of the genetic engineering of an embryo for the singular purpose of enhancement of the offspring. After three separate sessions the “jurors” came to a rational majority consensus disavowing such a practice, and delineating the reasons for the negation. These include issues of freedom and autonomy, inequality, the negation of natural evolution, and the implications for future generations. Parts of the verbatim deliberations as well as some reflections following the deliberations are presented.     

Reflections on Reflections:

No abstract available for this article.     

Cry Babies and Pollyannas: Infants Can Detect Unjustified Emotional Reactions

Infants are attuned to emotional facial and vocal expressions, reacting most prominently when they are exposed to negative expressions. However, it remains unknown if infants can detect whether a person's emotions are justifiable given a particular context. The focus of the current paper was to examine whether infants react the same way to unjustified (e.g., distress following a positive experience) and justified (e.g., distress following a negative experience) emotional reactions. Infants aged 15 and 18 months were shown an actor experiencing negative and positive experiences, with one group exposed to an actor whose emotional reactions were consistently unjustified (i.e., did not match the event), while the other saw an actor whose emotional reactions were justified (i.e., always matched the event). Infants' looking times and empathic reactions were examined. Only 18‐month‐olds detected the mismatching facial expressions: Those in the unjustified group showed more hypothesis testing (i.e., checking) across events than the justified group. Older infants in the justified group also showed more concerned reactions to negative expressions than those in the unjustified group. The present findings indicate that infants implicitly understand how the emotional valence of experiences is linked to subsequent emotional expressions.     

Babies,Bath Water and Sexual Abuse

No abstract available for this article.     

The Return of the Market?: Reflections on the Real "Conservative Tradition" in U.S. Policy Discourse

This article examines the ideological continuity underlying recent changes in U.S. policy, arguing that both the "liberal" policies of the 1960s and the "free market" conservatism of the 1980s were based upon the presuppositions of neoclassical economic theory. I first consider the intellectual assumptions of postwar liberalism, emphasizing the degree to which the dominant paradigm of the period accepted the neoclassical framework. Next I examine the conservative neoclassical critique of liberal ideas that developed in the 1970s. The economic upheavals of that decade demonstrated the limits of a postwar liberalism that was only ambiguously committed to state intervention. The result was the reassertion of a more consistent market model in economic policy discourse. I conclude by considering the ideological effects of the dominant neoclassical paradigm today in directing attention away from crucial social problems, particularly those that result from market forces themselves in a rapidly changing global economy.     

Ideal Speech and Feminist Discourse:

Abstract

This essay examines the candidate recruitment and training programs of four leading women's organizations. Author interviews with political directors, as well as an examination of the groups' literature, provide the insiders' accounts of their electoral activities and perceptions of the importance of future such endeavors by women's groups. The essay assesses the value of these electoral activities and potential for real political impact.     

Transmitting Ideals: Constructing Self and Moral Discourse on Loveline

Loveline is a late‐night radio advice show currently airing on progressive rock stations in the United States. Callers present their most intimate troubles to the show's DJ–doctor advice‐giving team, revealing themselves to an audience of faceless millions. I analyze three distinct interactional phases through which Loveline callers and hosts symbolically transform troubled selves: with each problem revealed, each embarrassing joke made, each specific recommendation given, a moral discourse is constructed. Loveline incrementally builds a distinctive way of conceptualizing right and wrong, closely tied to standards of a whole, happy, healthy selfhood. And while the notions of a moral discourse and an ideal self are fundamentally modern, Loveline's distinctive combination of mass‐mediated anonymity, intimate subject matter, satiric tone, and fragmented interaction patterns conveys these modern concepts over the radio waves and into a postmodern world.     

叙利亚危机的媒体话语与话语政治分析

叙利亚危机持续三年多,受到了全球媒体的关注。本文以叙利亚、美国、俄罗斯和中国四个国家主要媒体2013年8月至11月对叙利亚危机的报道为语料,从话语分析和话语政治视角探讨话语选择背后的权力和意识形态动因,考察不同意识形态的国家媒体如何从各自立场和利益出发,对同一社会现实进行不同的话语建构,从而揭示出同一事件蕴藏的媒体话语之间的博弈与意识形态之间的竞争。本研究是基于五层次话语政治分析框架的案例分析和实证研究,可以为中国政府的中东战略和对外话语体系建构提供参考。     

Theory and Formalization: Some Reflections on Experience

I describe in this paper some of my efforts in developing formal theories of social processes. These include work on models of occupational mobility, on models to describe the emergence of expectations out of performance evaluations, and on the graph theory formulation of the Status Characteristics theory. Not all models have been equally significant in developing theory. However, the graph theory formulation has played a central role in the growth of the Expectation States program. It has been involved in the generalization of theories, the integration of theories, and in the construction of highly sensitive tests of theories that would be impossible without the inferential capacities of formalization.