Community Standards in Obscenity Adjudication

Evolution of STS ethical standards: adjudication, policy making, and education.

r William Beaumont provided one of the earliest Ddiscussions of ethics specifically related to surgery and in particular to surgical research when, in 1833, he described his experiments with Alexis St. Martin’s gastric fistula [1]. Dr Beaumont was one of the first scientists in any field who obtained the consent of the research subject, mentioned requirements that would avoid harm to the resear...

Community standards

I introduce a model of community standards relevant to the judicial determination of obscenity. Standards are defined as subjective judgments restricted only by a simple reasonableness condition. Individual standards are aggregated to form the community standard. Several axioms reflect legal concerns. These require that the community standard (a) preserve unanimous agreements, (b) become more p...

Community standards.

Utilitarian Adjudication

In this paper I offer a defense of the view that judges should decide cases in accordance with act utilitarianism: i.e., in whatever way maximizes overall well-being. To advance this thesis, I first briefly give reasons for dissatisfaction with the commonsense thought that judges should just decide cases as the law requires. I then briefly argue for the claim that all moral agents, including ju...

Sex and obscenity in medieval art.

©FSRH J Fam Plann Reprod Health Care 2009: 35(1) Contemporary evidence When researching early or ‘forbidden’ historical subjects it can be a considerable challenge finding primary sources that give a first-hand experience of contemporary events. In some periods, such as post-Roman, there is very little documented evidence, to the point where we only know of the existence of some kings purely fr...