Recent ucsd_libraries_oabooks items

The History and Future of Bioethics: A Sociological View

Wed, 1 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Seemingly every day society faces a new ethical challenge raised by a scientific innovation. Human genetic engineering, stem cell research, face transplantation, synthetic biology – all were science fiction only a few decades ago, but are now all are reality. How do we as a society decide whether these technologies are ethical? For decades professional bioethicists have served as a mediator between a busy public and decision-makers, helping people understand their own ethical concerns, framing arguments, discrediting illogical claims and lifting up promising ones. These bioethicists operate in multiple venues such as hospital decision-making, institutions that conduct research on humans, and recommending ethical policy to the government. While functioning quite well for many years, the bioethics profession is in crisis. Policy-makers are less inclined to take the advice of bioethics professionals, with many observers saying that bioethics debates have simply become partisan...

The Red and the Real: An Essay on Color Ontology

Wed, 1 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This book offers a new approach to longstanding philosophical puzzles about what colors are and how they fit into the natural world. The author argues for a role-functionalist treatment of color — a view according to which colors are identical to certain functional roles involving perceptual effects on subjects. The author first argues (on broadly empirical grounds) for the more general relationalist view that colors are constituted in terms of relations between objects, perceivers, and viewing conditions. He responds to semantic, ontological, and phenomenological objections against this thesis, and argues that relationalism offers the best hope of respecting both empirical results and ordinary belief about color. He then defends the more specific role-functionalist account by contending that the latter is the most plausible form of color relationalism.

This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to the generous support of the University of California...