Cass R. Sunstein’s 2016 book The Ethics of Influence: Government in the Age of Behavioral Science provides an extremely informative introduction to the science and ethics of the exercise of “influence” over others. As a longtime physician employed in both the public and private sectors, I now recognize that most of my formal training has been in the hard sciences, with little, if any, training in the appropriate influence of the decision-making processes of my patients and/or other health care professionals in institutional settings. Breast cancer screening is an excellent example of the conflicts of modern medicine, highlighting our collective inability to effectively “nudge” others in the pursuit of health and/or organizational effectiveness and efficiency. Using the framework of Sunstein’s ethical values of welfare, autonomy, dignity, and self-government, I discuss many of the conflicting issues in a nationwide breast cancer screening program and the effects of these issues on client nudging to determine whether mammography screening is ethical.

The hijacking and purposeful crashing of airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, prompts questions about why the passengers and crew of those airplanes did not act to prevent these attacks, as did at least some passengers on a hijacked flight that crashed in Pennsylvania. We argue, first, that humans have an evolved cognitive bias that leads to the expectation that antagonists hope to survive conflict and, second, that highly credible information to the contrary is needed to overcome this bias. Absent such information, the passengers on at least two airplanes incorrectly interpreted the game being played as a hawk-dove version of a conflict-of-interest game, when it was actually a “suicidal terrorism” variant of that family. Given that other terrorists may have been in the air and ready to act, the airlines' policy of not informing passengers about such events could have risked disabling them from reacting forcefully when force alone was advisable.

Dr. Jack Kevorkian, a retired pathologist from Royal Oak, Michigan, created an instant sensation on June 4, 1990, when he assisted Janet Adkins in committing suicide by lethal injection. Kevorkian's activities, and the ineffectual efforts of public officials to stop him, generated social conflict, issue expansion, and political theater. In this case, political theater involved acts of civil disobedience that resulted in arrests, three high-profile criminal trials, and three subsequent acquittals. As the participants in the conflict tried to generate public support for their respective positions, the debate degenerated into name-calling, hyperbole, and rights talk. This kind of public discourse limits the potential for self-governance and leads to reliance on the courts or other methods of conflict resolution.

So that the reader can better adjudge possible disagreements, we would like to begin by stating, at the very outset, the thesis argued in our book, Darwinism, Dominance, and Democracy (Somit and Peterson, 1997). As Peter Corning correctly reports in his commentary (2000), we contend that “the most important reason for the rarity of democracy is that evolution has endowed our species, as it has other primates, with a predisposition for hierarchically structured social and political systems” (1997: 1). In short, we argue that Homo sapiens has a “genetic bias” toward authoritarian political societies characterized by hierarchy, dominance, and submission.

After decades of supporting fetal tissue research, in March, 1988 the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) banned the use of federal funds for fetal tissue transplantation research in humans involving tissue from electively aborted fetuses. The ban was not imposed because it is unethical to transplant tissue from electively aborted fetuses; such tissue may be transplanted into animals. Nor was it imposed because it is unethical for women to donate tissue after elective abortion; women may donate such tissue for purposes other than transplantation into humans. The ban was narrowly focused on the transplantation of tissue from electively aborted fetuses into humans. It stemmed from two beliefs: (1) that it is wrong for women to abort their fetuses for the purpose of donation, and (2) that there is no way to prevent women from aborting their fetuses for the purpose of donation if the tissue may be donated for transplantation.

This article argues that an evolutionary psychological perspective could be useful for developing second-generation models of rationality. The standard model of complete rationality is inadequate primarily on the grounds that it generates predictions inconsistent with empirical data. The model is extremely useful and should not, nor cannot, realistically be dismissed. It accurately predicts outcomes in markets and openly competitive situations. However, behavioral phenomena that the standard theory has trouble explaining—such as mass contribution to public goods, types of cooperation, and altruism—are usually treated as “anomalies.” These outcomes are too prevalent and important to be treated as such. I attempt to build upon Elinor Ostrom's proposal to generate new models of rationality, which recognize the use of heuristics, norms, and rules, and are able to better account for empirical findings. I argue that second-generation models would benefit from the acknowledgment of social roles—but more specifically, evolved social roles. Evolved social roles are intuitive bundles of norms, expectations, and social strategies that shape an individual's player type. If we extend rationality to incorporate underlying bio-psychological mechanisms, such as evolved social strategies and evolved social roles, then we gain an understanding of a wider array of decision-making processes and social phenomena.

The age of puberty in many populations has declined steeply over recent centuries and may be declining still. Consequently, today's children tend to experience the hormonal stresses of rapid development at younger ages than did their ancestors, around whose later, if not more gradual, maturation traditional behavioral expectations formed. Little has been made of this “rush to puberty” outside the life sciences. This article reviews its historical documentation, scholarly appreciation, epidemiological correlations, putative physiological and environmental explanations, sociological implications, and largely latent politics.

Will the Human Genome Project'S (HGP) social policy research program function as an “enhancer” and “promoter” for the entire “sequence,” or will it result in missense and nonsense mutations? The jury, of course, is still out, but we believe it is more properly viewed as a key promoter that is integral to the proper functioning of the HGP itself.

Over and above fairness, the concept of justice presupposes that in any community no one member's wellbeing or life plan is inexorably dependent on the consumption or exploitation of other members. Renunciation of such use of others constitutes moral sociability, without which moral considerability is useless and possibly meaningless. To know if a creature is morally sociable, we must know it in its community; we must know its ecological profile, its species. Justice can be blind to species no more than to circumstance. Speciesism, the recognition of rights on the basis of group membership rather than solely on the basis of moral considerations at the level of the individual creature, embodies this assertion but is often described as a variant of Nazi racism. I consider this description and find it unwarranted, most obviously because Nazi racism extolled the stronger and the abuser and condemned the weaker and the abused, be they species or individuals, humans or animals. To the contrary, I present an argument for speciesism as a precondition to justice.

The Enlightenment bequeathed to us the notion that the human mind can and should dominate over nature—that there is nothing we cannot know or should not attempt. And, in fact, there is something to be said for this position, since a truthful historian has to admit that standards of living have generally been greatly bettered by the technology of the last two centuries. Without confidence in our ability to remake nature, the great medical advances of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would never have been possible: antisepsis, the discovery of the tuberculosis bacillus, sulfa drugs, the polio vaccine. Like twentieth-century researchers who faced polio and smallpox, Mark Walker has perhaps identified the central ethical malady of our twenty-first century civilization—how the lack of virtue impedes our moral progress. And just as biological researchers sought to use science to eradicate these diseases, so Walker seeks to use genetic manipulation to eradicate evil.

The small group is a major cause in the formation of attitudes, beliefs, and behavior. The group forms the primary reference for the individual in terms of the socialization of norms and values and the establishment of loyalties. This led Golembiewski (1978:28) to write:

Why should social scientists be interested in using molecular genetic data? Here are five reasons:

Founded in 1980, the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences (APLS) sought to establish biopolitics as a recognized field and to integrate biologically based research methods into mainstream political science. The association's founders established these goals to encourage a generation of scholars and promote the spread of biopolitical knowledge. There was early success when the American Political Science Association (APSA) recognized biopolitics as an organized section. However, this development did not leave an appreciable imprint on the political science profession and the experiment conjoining the two did not last long. The other goal of the founders, to integrate biologically based research methods into mainstream political science, faced more formidable obstacles and still faces challenges, though not without some progress.

In the famous (some would say infamous) final chapter of his discipline-defining volume, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, biologist Edward O. Wilson invited us to consider humankind as if we were zoologists from another planet. In this light, Wilson said, “the humanities and social sciences shrink to specialized branches of biology” (1975:547). One of the functions of the new discipline of sociobiology, Wilson suggested, was “to reformulate the foundations of the social sciences…” (1975:4). Wilson cautioned, however, that it “remains to be seen” whether or not the social sciences can be “truly biologized” in this fashion.

The history of Margaret Mead's Samoan research is an important anthropological issue. In 1925, Franz Boas, “the father of American anthropology,” faced by what he called “the difficulty of telling what part of our behavior is socially determined and what is generally human,” arranged for his 23-year-old-student, Margaret Mead, to go to Samoa in Western Polynesia. Her task was to obtain, under his direction, an answer to “the problem of which phenomena of adolescence are culturally and which physiologically determined.” In 1928, in Coming of Age in Samoa, after a woefully inadequate period of fieldwork, Mead concluded, unreservedly, that the phenomena of adolescence are due not to physiology, but to “the social environment.”