Editorial Note

Unlike our last couple of issues, the essays in this issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal are on dramatically different topics with no unifying theme. What unifies them instead is that they take up difficult issues in practical ethics that philosophers have traditionally examined abstractly, by planting them in their real-world, embodied context marked by social and material struggles and power inequalities.

In his ground-breaking and richly textured paper, “The Role of Doctors in Hunger Strikes,” Yechiel Michael Barilan takes up the painful and challenging issue of when force-feeding hunger-striking prisoners in order to save their lives is ethically appropriate. To the extent that philosophers have addressed this issue, they have generally done so as a familiar and abstract conflict between respecting autonomy and paternalistic beneficence. Barilan instead argues that how we conceptualize hunger-striking as an act during wartime or political conflict will frame how we see the ethics of force-feeding. He describes three conceptual paradigms that he finds in the scholarly and policy literature, and proposes a fourth. Hunger strikes, briefly, have been understood as acts of communication, as psychiatric crises, or as violent acts designed to coerce a result. Barilan thinks each of these paradigms has its uses and limitations, and he proposes a fourth: a hunger striker may be understood as a wounded combatant, using the tools available to her or him in the face of being disabled by imprisonment.

Barilan’s essay is steeped in historical detail and shows sensitivity to the enormous real-world complications of the issue, including our intense pain and revulsion at witnessing starving bodies; the physical torture involved in the actual act of force-feeding, and the compromises of capacity that can go along with food deprivation. His focus is not on giving a formula for action, but on showing us how different conceptual lenses will give us different nuanced views on this ineliminably embodied and socio-politically located issue.

Elise Smith examines the ethics of attributing authorship in multidisciplinary collaborations, by way of a careful theoretical analysis of the concept of authorship and the values at stake in assigning it. Her essay, “A Theoretical Foundation for the Ethical Distribution of Authorship in Multidisciplinary Publications,” begins with the point that in contemporary academic publication, assigned authorship often does not track size of contribution at all. Ghost authorship and honorary authorship are common, and different fields have different and conflicting institutional norms for assigning and ordering authors. Moreover, multidisciplinary co-authorship is increasingly the gold standard in science and medicine. While fraud in authorship is a real ethical and epistemological concern, it is by no means obvious what an ‘accurate’ or ‘honest’ assignment of authorship involves. Smith teases apart several conceptual components of authorship itself; to take just one example, there is a difference between being responsible for a claim and deserving credit for it. Using her conceptually rich and intentionally messy conceptualization of authorship, Smith identifies and defends four competing principles for proper assignment of authorship: desert, just recognition, transparency, and collegiality. Her essay addresses a topic of both ethical and epistemological significance.

In “A Defense of The-Risks-of-Daily-Life,” Ariella Binik examines possible standards of acceptable risk for participants in pediatric research that offers no direct medical benefit. This standard has been hotly contested for the last couple of decades. This is so particularly in light of cases such as the Kennedy Krieger Institute Lead Paint Study, in which many felt that the risk posed to children—especially vulnerable children from poor, overwhelmingly Black families—was unacceptably high, while the judge hearing the case famously imposed what many felt was a standard of acceptable risk that was unreasonably stringent. Binik analyzes several contenders for an acceptable risk standard, and ends up defending the view that the risks should be no more than those faced in the daily life of children who are flourishing and not unduly burdened. However, she rejects the traditional defense of such a standard, which appeals to reasonable risk trade-offs and the argument that such a standard prevents participants’ risk level from being raised by participating. Instead, she argues...