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It appears that the publications of Goldney and Schioldann (2000, 2001a,b, 2002) touched a chord, namely, the quality of the basic literature of contemporary suicidology and the usage of certain words and concepts. This paper adds two comments to this discussion. The first comment focuses on the usage of "altruistic," "egoistic," and "anomic" suicide. The second is a comment on the reception of Le Suicide.

Academician P.V. Simonov is known, first of all, as the founder of "Information theory of requirements and behaviour". He was the first, who declared that requirements are the main original source of behaviour's activity, evolution's regulator, the origin of creation and motive power of individual and collective actions of human beings and animals. In our paper we analyze some positions of Simonov's conception about "agoists" and "altruists", which has the grate practical value and are very actual today.

João Cabral de Melo Neto's poem "Morte e vida severina" focuses primarily on the satisfaction of human needs and on the condição severina--i.e., the poverty, hunger, joblessness, injustice, and early death that characterizes much of life in Northeast Brazil. In two episodes of the poem, human life is presented as a value ideal: during the dialog between the master carpenter and the protagonist Severino (a retirante, or migrant fleeing drought-stricken areas of the Northeast) and likewise during the birth of another Severino, on the banks of the Capibaribe River in Recife.

Latin America and the Caribbean form a region of great variations yet marked by cultural resemblances. The origins of the region's countries, of their wealth, and also of their problems are quite similar. Indeed, there are clear points of contact in the most basic aspects, such as each society's worldview. Throughout the region there is a very strong democratizing trend that seeks more just and more educated societies. Science plays a key role in the development as a powerful weapon for tolerance and equity and therefore should be disseminated among the greatest possible number of Latin Americans. Red POP the network for the Popularization of Science and Technology in Latin America and the Caribbean - was created to help reach this goal. Under the auspices of ORCYT-UNESCO, Red POP is an interactive network of centers and programs that work to bring science and technology to the public at large. It fosters exchange, skill-acquisition, and resource use among its members. Based on the network's experience, we explore to what extent science museums favor equity in their home societies.

The notions of individual and collective ethics were first explicitly defined in the biostatistical literature in 1971 to motivate a mathematical solution to a posed ethical dilemma. This paper reviews key antecedents to these concepts and traces explicit references to them over time, primarily in the biostatistical literature. Following a historical exposition of these texts, a critical thematic analysis shows the following: the normative force of these concepts has not been adequately argued. Individual and collective ethics do not solve the problem of how to use accumulating data to inform ethical action. The notions of the "individual" and the "collective" are too vague to prompt clear moral imperatives, especially in difficult cases. These concepts have not been successfully linked to a standard ethical framework. Finally, the paper concludes with the observation that a systematic, comprehensive ethical framework must be identified to fulfill the intuitions behind individual and collective ethics.

The relative proportion of reports of events in the life of Jesus versus reports of his teachings are compared across the Qur'an and a sample of the New Testament (Luke 2-21). A much larger number of teachings (74) appear to be mentioned in the New Testament; at the same time, there are more teachings than events (52) reported, while the opposite is true (15 events, 3 teachings) in the Qur'an. The difference is significant statistically (p < .002). More research is needed to assess the sources of such differences.

The oppression of Chinese women is typically blamed on Confucianism. We present a version of Confucianism that relies on the metaphysics of the I Ching, one of the "canonical" Confucian texts, and on more characteristic Confucian doctrines. These metaphysical, anthropological, and ethical beliefs would, if fully implemented, replace the early Confucian hierarchy based partly on gender with a hierarchy based on virtue. This would in turn legitimate the full participation of women in society. Through the "canonical" Confucian texts we reconstruct the philosophical grounds for a Confucian vision of gender equity as grounded in a Confucian view of human nature and human excellence.

This essay places the early modern origins of the ethico-legal structure of medicine, in which eventually by exclusion or inclusion, dental activity shared, in the Humanist environment of the Italian Renaissance as it was imported into England in the first years of the sixteenth century. There were two linked stages to this, the first supported by the genius of Thomas Linacre (1460-1524), and the second by the administrative ability of Sir Thomas More (1478-1535). This paper concentrates on the evidence for the intellectual basis of More's medical legislation, and that which was made shortly after his death.

Technology is rampant, exponentially growing beyond the bounds normally comprehensible by the human mind. Many of these technologies are so fundamentally disruptive that they challenge the very practice of science. Discoveries once unimaginable except in science fiction are appearing at such a rapid rate that there is no time to evaluate their moral and ethical implications in a deliberate and measured fashion. Genetic engineering, human cloning, tissue engineering, intelligent robotics, nanotechnology, suspended animation, regeneration, and species prolongation are but a few that will revolutionize what it means to be human and what the ultimate fate of the species may be. Unless these issues are addressed at this time, we shall face the consequences of an uncontrolled and unprepared future.

Evolutionary ethics has a long history, dating all the way back to Charles Darwin. Almost immediately after the publication of the Origin, an immense interest arose in the moral implications of Darwinism and whether the truth of Darwinism would undermine traditional ethics. Though the biological thesis was certainly exciting, nobody suspected that the impact of the Origin would be confined to the scientific arena. As one historian wrote, 'whether or not ancient populations of armadillos were transformed into the species that currently inhabit the new world was certainly a topic about which zoologists could disagree. But it was in discussing the broader implications of the theory...that tempers flared and statements were made which could transform what otherwise would have been a quiet scholarly meeting into a social scandal' (Farber 1994, 22). Some resistance to the biological thesis of Darwinism sprung from the thought that it was incompatible with traditional morality and, since one of them had to go, many thought that Darwinism should be rejected. However, some people did realize that a secular ethics was possible so, even if Darwinism did undermine traditional religious beliefs, it need not have any effects on moral thought. Before I begin my discussion of evolutionary ethics from Darwin to Moore, I would like to make some more general remarks about its development. There are three key events during this history of evolutionary ethics. First, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of the Species (Darwin 1859). Since one did not have a fully developed theory of evolution until 1859, there exists little work on evolutionary ethics until then. Shortly thereafter, Herbert Spencer (1898) penned the first systematic theory of evolutionary ethics, which was promptly attacked by T.H. Huxley (Huxley 1894). Second, at about the turn of the century, moral philosophers entered the fray and attempted to demonstrate logical errors in Spencer's work; such errors were alluded to but never fully brought to the fore by Huxley. These philosophers were the well known moralists from Cambridge: Henry Sidgwick (Sidgwick 1902, 1907) and G.E. Moore (Moore 1903), though their ideas hearkened back to David Hume (Hume 1960). These criticisms were so strong that the industry of evolutionary ethics was largely abandoned (though with some exceptions) for many years. Third, E.O. Wilson, a Harvard entomologist, published Sociobiology: The New Synthesis in 1975 (Wilson E.O. 1975), which sparked renewed interest in evolutionary ethics and offered new directions of investigation. These events suggest the following stages for the history of evolutionary ethics: development, criticism and abandonment, revival. In this paper, I shall focus on the first two stages, since those are the ones on which the philosophical merits have already been largely decided. The revival stage is still in progress and we shall eventually find out whether it was a success.

Two interrelated universal practices, humanitarian medicine and immunization, pose certain ethical problems. To shed light on the matter, we present some historical reference points indispensable to an understanding of contemporary vaccination programs, focusing especially on certain anthropological issues posed by this practice as far as representations of the body and of health within populations. Two examples of humanitarian vaccination practices, one used among an autochthonous population and the other among young people on the street, serve to illustrate some thoughts on management of the body and on the resistance displayed by these groups. We then propose paths to follow in re-examining the ethics of vaccination.

According to Plato, the society as reflected in Homer's epics is one without state power. In a society without state power, the act of revenge which the offended party prosecutes on the offender is the only disciplinary force, which should be endorsed by the ethical concepts of the society. Though the ethics of Homeric society has been analyzed before, there has been no theory on the ethical structure of Homeric society analyzed from the viewpoint of a society without state power. This study attempts to address this issue. Six concepts, "oath", "honor", "guest", "blood", "food" and "revenge" have been extracted from Homeric epics in comparison with the ethical structure of the Albanian Kanun. The ethical structure of Homeric society appears to belong to the category of the ethics of a society without state power, as represented by the ethical structure of the Kanun. Plato explicitly criticizes the ethical value system of Homeric society, which he thinks is alienated from the idea of Good.

The development of bioethics, spurred by the Nazi era and initiated in recent times largely in the United States, appears to be taking hold across at least the Western world. To date it lacks the necessary trappings of a true profession: that is, it lacks self-definition, criteria, and a method of assuring that those who call themselves bioethicists not only have appropriate training but function appropriately. Partly this is because the very term "appropriate" has not been defined! These are tasks that the new guard, with perhaps the advice and help of those of us from the old guard, will have to address. The development of bioethics has been mainly focused on those who had good access to healthcare. Those with a lack of access have been given short shrift. Basic healthcare provided to all within a given society has been the case in virtually all industrialized countries except for the United States since at least World War II, and even longer in most cultures. Here in the United States, our main bioethics societies, and bioethicists as individuals, have tended to concentrate on individualistic ethics and its problems (euthanasia, abortion, termination of care, IVF, etc.) and have, to a large measure, practiced "rich man's ethics." The lack of access to healthcare as well as many other faults have been labeled "system errors" and are in general considered to be beyond the responsibility of the bioethical profession. They tend to be shrugged off. We have been inclined to "join the establishment" and in so doing have often forgotten our own mission. We have spent a good deal of time discussing the ownership of a dead man's sperm and have made relatively little contribution to an equitable distribution of healthcare. In many respects, we have sold out. In my view, this is an evasion of social responsibility--social responsibility being one of the hallmarks of an honest profession. Until we come to terms with our mission--a mission that cannot merely be self-serving--we shall not be regarded as a profession. And that is a shame.

Stem cell research in the United States is inevitably connected with the politics of abortion. Since 1973, when the Supreme Court Roe v Wade decision legalized abortion, the US government has refused to fund embryo research, including IVF, because Congress feared this would encourage women to have abortions. IVF and infertility research have taken place in an unregulated private sector. Bush's decision allowing federal funds for research on stem cells derived before 9 August 2001 may be the first use of federal finds, though the overall ban on embryo research still stands. This paper examines 30 years of US refusal to fund embryo research, cultural background, religious beliefs as these affect stem cell research, as well as the ethical issues related to creating blastocysts to specifically derive stem cells, and therapeutic cloning.

This article looks at the public debate which took place in the first half of the twentieth century and has repercussions to the present day. It was about the ethical stance of scientists, and how science should be organized. In particular, it examines the positions taken by Professor F. Soddy, F.R.S. and Nobel Laureate, who stressed the responsibility of scientists for the uses made of their research, Professor Michael Polanyi, F.R.S., who emphasised the obligation of scientists to the truth and the essential role of morality in the organization of science, and Professor J.D. Bernal, F.R.S., who insisted that science was practiced for utilitarian reasons and should be consciously developed for the good of society.

Researchers and technologists involved in the development of weapon systems can take their work to such extremes as to cause unplanned injury or death to others and lasting damage to the environment, reviewed here. In some cases innocent human casualties and ecological harm may actually be programmed and achieved. An analysis is proffered, attributing blame, and indicating efforts to correct the situation. The ethics involved are "complexified",a moral boundaries are exceeded, and humanity is transgressed as it develops solutions to the problem.

Bauman's attempt to develop a sociological theory of morality turning around fundamental premises of Durkheim's approach fails in the last analysis, since in Bauman's view the 'moral party of two' does not constitute a social situation. It is argued that the necessary condition to think sociologically about morality is the concept of reciprocity and thus one can arrive at a view of morality in postmodernity consistent with Bauman's earlier theory of practice. If Bauman's idea about responsibilty as the core of morality is transformed to the idea of an appeal of history to compassion and is supplemented with the idea of reciprocity as an emerging norm it is possible to outline a sociological theory of moral practice according to postmodern conditions.

Late modernity has been witnessing the erosion of the dimorphic sexual paradigm that, in both strong and weak forms, has characterized human history as we know it. Recent discoveries in biology and the social sciences have combined with altered patterns in human sexual behavior to raise critical new questions about the inherited paradigm. Religions of the West whose sacred texts, mythologies, and codes of behavior assume that maleness and femaleness are exclusive and complementary types of sexuality-each of which determines sexual identity, reproductive role, social role, and the sex of one's partner-increasingly must grapple with both theoretical evidence for and experiential evidence of polymorphous human sexuality. Inherited categories of dimorphic sexuality not only are challenged but become less and less intelligible.