Human beings and their microbiomes are interrelated. Now what is the nature of their relation? In this paper, I claim that human beings have microbiomes as parts of themselves. In other words, rather than merely being casually associated with human beings, those microbiomes that reside in/on/around people are constituent parts of human beings. I argue this by reference to organismal homeostasis as understood as a systems-level phenomenon. To support my argument, I provide a survey of contemporary scientific literature surrounding the (...) composition, location, structure, and function of the human microbiome(s). Finally, I cash out this finding by developing the idea of the “constitutive publicity” of the human organism. By this I mean that the human organism is not a “private” entity that then finds itself in the world, but rather that it is constantly created, suffused by, and contributing to the “public” world. (shrink)

The prospect of shared decision-making with animals is an elusive one. Its elusiveness comes largely from how difficult it is to assess the linguistic abilities of animals, whether that be their ability to ‘speak’ or their ability to maintain propositional values. In this paper, I suggest a path to shared decision-making with animals that attempts to avoid these deadlocks by using resources from biosemiotics and _Umwelt_ theory. I begin with an examination of the general structure of decision-making, demonstrating its future-orientation, (...) comparison of imagined futures, and assessment of what things matter to participants in decision-making. Animals’ capability of having things matter to them, due to their residence in _Umwelten_, offers a means to shared decision-making with animals via a process I call ‘imaginative adjuncting.’. (shrink)

Ethics exists among beings that can relate to one another and who can create change in one another. Although this may appear as a simple truism, the implications of relation and change in bioethics are manifold. For instance, one can relate not only to others, but also can enter into self-relation by relating to oneself. Self-relation problematizes autonomy insofar as one does not have immediate access to all of oneself and so therefore also does not immediately fully determine oneself in (...) the way that an uncomplicated understanding of autonomy might imply. This article proceeds as a preliminary exposition of the concepts of relation and change as they apply to bioethics, particularly as they inform autonomy, action theory, and the porous subject. (shrink)