Historical research on domestic servants has a long tradition. Research, however, has become more systematic from the 1960s onwards thanks to social historians, historians focusing on the family, historical demographers and (particularly from the 1970s) women's and gender historians. For a long time, scholars assumed that domestic service (especially by live-in workers) would decline, or even disappear, because of household modernization, social progress, and development of the welfare state. The (largely unexpected) “revival” of paid domestic and care work in the past three decades has prompted sociologists and other social scientists to focus on the theme, opening new opportunities for exchange between historians and social scientists. This article provides a review of the research on these issues at a global level, though with a focus on Europe and the (former) European colonies, over the past fifty years, illustrating the different approaches and their results.

Bioethicists are sometimes thought to have heightened obligations by virtue of the fact that their professional role addresses ethics or morals. For this reason it has been argued that bioethicists ought to “whistleblow”—that is, publicly expose the wrongful or potentially harmful activities of their employer—more often than do other kinds of employees. This article argues that bioethicists do indeed have a heightened obligation to whistleblow, but not because bioethicists have heightened moral obligations in general. Rather, the special duties of bioethicists to act as whistleblowers are best understood by examining the nature of the ethical dilemma typically encountered by private employees and showing why bioethicists do not encounter this dilemma in the same way. Whistleblowing is usually understood as a moral dilemma involving conflicting duties to two parties: the public and a private employer. However, this article argues that this way of understanding whistleblowing has the implication that professions whose members identify their employer as the public—such as government employees or public servants—cannot consider whistleblowing a moral dilemma, because obligations are ultimately owed to only one party: the public. The article contends that bioethicists—even when privately employed—are similar to government employees in the sense that they do not have obligations to defer to the judgments of those with private interests. Consequently, bioethicists may be considered to have a special duty to whistleblow, although for different reasons than those usually cited.

In his 1950 movie Rashomon, the famed Japanese director Akira Kurosowa presented a tale of a deadly crime that took place in a grove, which was witnessed by four individuals. Each of these individuals then proceeded to report what they saw in mutually contradictory ways. The movie has since received the ultimate honor of having a phrase coined in popular culture to describe its central message. The “Rashomon effect” is used to describe those occasions when a single event is perceived in contradictory, although perhaps equally plausible, ways by the different witnesses on hand, telling us at least as much about the internal dynamics within the witnesses to the event as about the event itself.

It is a common belief that obesity is wholly or partially a question of personal choice and personal responsibility. It is also widely assumed that when individuals are responsible for some unfortunate state of affairs, society bears no burden to compensate them. This article focuses on two conceptualizations of responsibility: backward-looking and forward-looking conceptualizations. When ascertaining responsibility in a backward-looking sense, one has to determine how that state of affairs came into being or where the agent stood in relation to it. In contrast, a forward-looking conceptualization of responsibility puts aside questions of the past and holds a person responsible by reference to some desirable future state of affairs and will typically mean that he or she is subjected to criticism, censure, or other negative appraisals or that he or she is held cost-responsible in some form, for example, in terms of demanded compensation, loss of privileges, or similar. One example of this view is the debate as to whether the obese should be denied, wholly or partially, free and equal access to healthcare, not because they are somehow personally responsible in the backward-looking sense but simply because holding the obese responsible will have positive consequences. Taking these two conceptions of responsibility into account, the authors turn their analysis toward examining the relevant moral considerations to be taken into account when public policies regarding obesity rely on such a conception of responsibility.

Scott's Northern Party, led by Victor Campbell, after almost a year at Cape Adare was moved south by Terra Nova. They landed at Evans Cove for five weeks’ sledging in the Wood Bay area. Bad ice-conditions prevented the vessel from returning. Campbell's party, stranded with little food and only summer equipment, faced the 1912 winter alone. For shelter they dug a snow-cave and there survived for seven months, living mainly on seals and penguins. Finally in early spring they sledged 230 miles back to Scott's party at Cape Evans. The small snow-cave provided little privacy. Authors have mentioned how Campbell divided the cave into two virtual messes, one for the ratings, the other for the officers, with the associated naval implications that conversations in one mess were not to be ‘paid attention to’ in the other. Still, at times, private exchanges were needed. Hooper describes one silent conversation between Campbell and Levick found in the latter's cave-diary, and mentions some others relating to health matters. This paper describes one drawing and nine new written conversations between Campbell, Levick and Priestley found in a field-notebook held in the Victor Campbell Collection at the Memorial University of Newfoundland. The conversations are transcribed, interpreted, and placed in the context of the life in the snow-cave. All were written during September, their last month there, and show that officers often needed to converse silently in writing and, furthermore, that the two-mess concept was not a satisfactory context for private conversations.

This section provides reactions to current and emerging issues in bioethics.

CQ welcomes readers’ comments on papers published in the journal. Please send submissions to T. Kushner at kushnertk@gmail.com.

The specialty of psychiatry has a long-standing, virtually monolithic view that a desire to die, even a desire for a hastened death among the terminally ill, is a manifestation of mental illness. Recently, psychiatry has made significant inroads into hospice and palliative care, and in doing so brings with it the conviction that dying patients who seek to end their suffering by asserting control over the time and manner of their inevitable death should be provided with psychotherapeutic measures rather than having their expressed wishes respected as though their desire for an earlier death were the rational choice of someone with decisional capacity. This article reviews and critiques this approach from the perspective of recent clinical data indicating that patients who secure and utilize a lethal prescription are generally exercising an autonomous choice unencumbered by clinical depression or other forms of incapacitating mental illness.

Respect for persons protects patients regarding their own healthcare decisions. Patient informed choice for altruism (PICA) is a proposed means for a fully autonomous patient with decisionmaking capacity to limit his or her own treatment for altruistic reasons. An altruistic decision could bond the patient with others at the end of life. We contend that PICA can also be an advance directive option. The proxy, family, and physicians must be reminded that a patient’s altruistic treatment refusal should be respected.