The Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal (KIEJ) offers a scholarly forum for diverse views on major issues in bioethics, including analysis and critique of bioethics theories such as principlism and feminist perspectives in bioethics; the work of federal bodies such as the President's Council on Bioethics; and a wide range of topics such as enhancement technologies, health care reform, stem cell research, and organ transplantation. Select issues include "Bioethics Inside the Beltway," an inside look at bioethics activities on the federal level. The KIEJ is the official journal of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics (KIE).

Notre société est-elle en manque de morale à la suite du déclin de certaines valeurs et de la mort des idéologies qui ont façonné nos sociétés occidentales ? Que signifie cette extraordinaire demande d'éthique qui s'exprime en médecine, dans la conception et l'application des nouvelles technologies, dans le monde des affaires et dans les questions relatives à l'environnement ? Les uns parlent d'un retour à la morale, de renouveau moral alors que d'autres affirment l'urgence de renouveler complètement la réflexion éthique pour aborder les nouveaux défis auxquels est confrontée la conscience actuelle. Quelle distinction faire entre le retour à la morale et l'apparition de certaines questions d'ordre éthique ? Quels liens établir entre ces phénomènes ? Dans cet ouvrage, l'auteur distingue la morale de l'éthique et présente une manière particulière d'aborder ces questions pour favoriser le dialogue le plus large et le plus ouvert possible entre les différents intervenants.

À une époque où les progrès biotechnologiques connaissent une croissance fulgurante, les scientifiques préconisent une solution inédite au problème de la pénurie d'organes: la xénotransplantation, c'est-à-dire la transplantation d'organes animaux chez l'être humain. Cet ouvrage est consacré à l'analyse d'une question juridique qui en découle, soit le brevet sur l'animal qui s'inscrit dans le débat plus général du brevet sur le vivant. Afin de circonscrire la problématique, l'auteure procède à une analyse comparative du droit canadien, européen et américain sur la question. Elle souligne également les préoccupations éthiques inhérentes au débat, ainsi que les enjeux économiques qu'il soulève.

This collection of essays puts into dialogue the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas with a variety of English and rabbinic writings from the Middle Ages, when literature was regarded as ethical discourse, and reading itself, when rightly performed, was seen as a moral act.

Levinas and Medieval Literature takes the unique approach of connecting Christian allegory, talmudic hermeneutics, and Levinasian interpretation. Levinas’s philosophy illuminates what it means to classify medieval texts as profoundly ethical; and the medieval works, in their aurality, fragmentation, and layered narrative structures, provide a crucial context for understanding Levinas’s “difficult reading” and his underappreciated aesthetics.

These discussions draw inspiration from Levinas who, as a philosopher and talmudic commentator, continues premodern traditions in a postmodern key. In their view, Levinas’s “postmodern” method of reading, his ethical sensibilities, his very language, appear anachronistically medieval. At the same time, they discover that Levinas hyperbolically amplifies the themes with which medieval writings resonate: hospitality, onto(theo)logy, infinity, theodicy, Creation, eros, the maternal, the Face, substitution, and pardon. They find in medieval interpretive practices the very concerns with ethical reading that powerfully engaged Levinas.

Encountered dialogically, these mutual themes and concerns of the medievals and Levinas inform and transform our sense of intellectual history.

Reexamining Emmanuel Levinas's essays on Jewish education, Claire Elise Katz provides new insights into the importance of education and its potential to transform a democratic society, for Levinas's larger philosophical project. Katz examines Levinas's "Crisis of Humanism," which motivated his effort to describe a new ethical subject. Taking into account his multiple influences on social science and the humanities, and his various identities as a Jewish thinker, philosopher, and educator, Katz delves deeply into Levinas's works to understand the grounding of this ethical subject.

Directly challenging the prevailing interpretation, Corey Beals explores the ideas of twentieth-century philosopher Emmanuel Levinas's concept of love, love's relation to wisdom, and how love makes the Other visible to us. Distinguishing love from other types of wisdom, Beals argues that Levinas's"wisdom of love"is a real possibility, one which grants priority to ethics over ontology.

A prominent scholar of the life and work of Emmanuel Levinas, Richard A. Cohen collects in this volume the most significant of his writings on Levinas over the past decade. With these essays, Cohen not only clearly explains the nuances of Levinas’s project, but he attests to the importance of Levinas’s distinctive insights for philosophy and religion. Divided into two parts, the book’s part one considers Levinas’s philosophical project by bringing him into dialogue with Western thought, including Plato, Aristotle, Kant, even Shakespeare, as well as twentieth century thinkers such as Heidegger, Husserl, Sartre, and Buber among others. In part two, Cohen addresses Levinas’s contribution to religious thought, particularly regarding his commentary on and approach to Judaism, by using the interpretive lens of Levinas’s Talmudic writing, “A Religion for Adults.”

Throughout the book, these seminal essays provide a thorough illumination of Levinas’s most original insight and significant contribution to Husserlian phenomenology — which permeates both his philosophical and religious works — that signification and meaning are ultimately based on an ethically structured intersubjectivity that cannot be understood in terms of language and being. Cohen succeeds in defending and clarifying Levinas’s commitment to the primacy of ethics, his “ethics as first philosophy,” which was the hallmark of the French phenomenologist’s intellectual career.

Grâce à ses progrès constants, la médecine offre aujourd'hui la possibilité d'assurer la survie de plusieurs prématurés. Pouvons-nous décider de ne pas tout tenter pour sauver un nouveau-né? En droit, à qui revient cette décision? Du point de vue de l'éthique, comment délibérer pour parvenir à une décision aussi éclairée que possible? Comment l'équipe soignante doit-elle se comporter pour être bienfaisante à l'égard des parents? Des experts se sont penchés sur ces questions.