Generous Questions

Episode 3: Nancy Jecker – the chronically ill, the newly deceased

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Prof. Nancy Jecker came to Queen's University Belfast to speak at this philosophy conference on the ethics of chronic illness, and I used that opportunity to ask her about her philosophical interests and work.

We talked about life and death – in particular, lives lived with chronic illneses, and the ways that a person's story doesn't end just at the moment that they die. We talked about intergenerational ethical issues (for example, about caring for the dependent elderly). She introduced me to the concept of an 'itai hoteru', which are Japanese hotels-for-the newly-deceased, and the 421-problem in China.

Here are some links to help you find out more about Nancy and her work:

  • Nancy Jecker's webpage at the philosophy department at the University of Washington
  • A list of Nancy Jecker's publications from PhilPapers.org - many with links to the articles. Don't forget that if you need help getting access to paywalled articles, you can try contacting authors and politely asking them whether they'd be happy to send you a .pdf. Using the hashtag #icanhazpdf on twitter can be sometimes be useful as well.
  • Here's Nancy's piece on itai hoteru in the journal Bioethics: 'What do we owe the newly dead? An ethical analysis of findings from Japan's corpse hotels workers', co-authored with Eriko Miwa. It's behind a paywall at this link, but you can read a pre-print version on her ResearchGate page here.
  • In the episode Nancy talks about using the 'capabilities approach' to justice in her work on intergenerational justice and the ethics to do with ageing. Over on the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy you can find this entry on Amartya Sen's 'capabilities approach', which is a good overview. But more recently people are discussing Martha Nussbaum's version of this approach, so you might find it useful to skip down to §7.
  • We mention the 4-2-1 problem (or 4:2:1 problem, strictly, since it's about ratios), and here's an accessible article in io9 which talks more generally about China's looming population crisis. 'The Unintended Consequences Of China's One-child Policy' by George Dvorsky.
  • We briefly talked about 'Parfit's non-identity problem' without really explaining it. It's a problem that Derrick Parfit proposes in the final section of his book Reasons and Persons (1984, chapter 16). The problem is summarised in this (slightly challenging, not hugely accessible) entry of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. You can see Parfit discussing it in person over on this YouTube video, again, not entirely accessible to people who are new to philosophy.

    • Please do feel encouraged to get in touch to send any thoughts, responses, ideas, reactions, feedback or ideas about this episode or any of the others, I'd love to hear from you. To do that, you can just head over to the contact page.

    The theme music is from li_serios05 by TVO on Broken20 records under Creative Commons license BY-NC-SA.

    A transcript of this conversation is available, you just need to click on the button that says 'transcript'. The transcripts for each episode have been beautifully prepared by Becci.

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    Generous QuestionsBy Joe Morrison