Under current medical practice, when a child is born with ambiguous genitalia, sex is assigned and medical/surgical intervention undertaken. This practice is criticized by the Intersex Society of North America and by feminist scholars. Together they are creating a "politics of difference" approach in which differences are not seen as "defects" to be corrected. This paper analyzes the reasons offered in support of current medical practice and of the politics of difference, and argues for a move toward the latter. Crucial to the determination that this move is warranted are justice concerns and the emergence of support groups and technologies that allow geographically separated individuals to form a relevant "group."

In the complex field of agricultural biotechnology, is there an approach that Christian ethicists can use to evaluate competing claims, multiple goods, and human rights issues in this important arena where humans and natures are intertwined? This paper is an attempt to apply Gibson Winter's three root metaphors (organic, mechanistic and artistic) as an ethical analysis that describes key socio-historical patterns in Western society and deciphers moral landscapes that undergird different forms of agricultural biotechnology. The paper also explores five key principles of the emerging "artistic" root metaphor that could guide more appropriate application and use of agricultural biotechnology.

Public policy analysis employs a discounting to translate future costs or benefits of alternative policies into a "present value" by reducing them, based on a discount rate and the number of years in the future when these outcomes will occur. In recent years, many professional ethicists, from both philosophical and religious perspectives, have criticized discounting as morally inadequate, particularly when assessing potential long-term environmental damage, such as that arising from global warming. This essay reviews the ethical objections to discounting and concludes that discounting is a necessary dimension of the moral assessment made in public policy analysis, ultimately helpful provided that policy makers also respect two constraints to ensure sustainability and equity.

This essay illustrates how insights gained from virtue ethics would reframe clergy ethics. By sketching virtue-oriented themes that have received scant attention in the current work on clergy ethics, I show how a virtue-informed clergy ethics focuses on moral growth and the everyday aspects of ministry instead of dilemmas and discrete actions. Those virtue-oriented themes include the role of prayer and friendship in the formation of the pastor's character, the refocusing of pastoral moral leadership on training parishioners for the Christian life, and the way virtue ethics changes what we perceive to be the central ethical issues of ministry and how we deliberate about them.

In this essay, I consider the role of anger in the moral life, especially in the Christian moral life. For this purpose it makes sense to explore three questions. First, how should we describe the phenomenon of anger? Second, what virtues and/or vices properly account for the affection? Finally, what theological assessments of the phenomenon are most fitting? In Parts I, II, and III below, I pursue a response to the first two questions through a kind of Aristotelian strategy that describes the mean of the virtue rightly disposing us to be (both) good and angry. The final three sections more overtly consider theological assessments. My concern throughout is to give an account of anger that helps us make the everyday discriminations appropriate to the Christian life, a life in which the work of love may complete and transform the terms of justice. Most specifically, I explore how the sin of pride deforms the creaturely self-respect that anger fittingly protects, and describe one sort of correction to that peril that is proposed within Christian tradition. I believe that mine is a partial account. Surely it may be complemented by other approaches that pursue different emphases; nevertheless, I think that what follows captures something essential about Christian evaluations of the human emotion at issue.