Editorial Note.
Published in Kennedy Institute of Ethics journal
Contextualized Autonomy and Liberalism: Broadening the Lenses on Complementary and Alternative Medicines in Preclinical ...
Published in Kennedy Institute of Ethics journal
Given advances in Alzheimer's disease (AD) research, some experts have proposed a state of "preclinical" AD to describe asymptomatic individuals displaying certain biomarkers. The diagnostic accuracy of these biomarkers remains debated; however, given economic pressures, this "diagnosis" may eventually reach consumers. Since evidence-based preventi...
Editorial Note.
Published in Kennedy Institute of Ethics journal
How Not to Argue for Selective Reproductive Procedures.
Published in Kennedy Institute of Ethics journal
Many bioethicists try to secure a moral requirement to select against disability, while wishing to avoid denigrating disabled people. Dan Brock's arguments are representative of this attempt. Brock argues that the harm of giving birth to a disabled child when an able child could be had in its stead is a "nonperson-affecting harm." The harm is creat...
Public Reasoning and Health-Care Priority Setting: The Case of NICE.
Published in Kennedy Institute of Ethics journal
Health systems that aim to secure universal patient access through a scheme of prepayments-whether through taxes, social insurance, or a combination of the two-need to make decisions on the scope of coverage that they guarantee: such tasks often falling to a priority-setting agency. This article analyzes the decision-making processes at one such ag...
The Role of Doctors in Hunger Strikes.
Published in Kennedy Institute of Ethics journal
In its Malta Declaration, The World Medical Association prohibits force-feeding of hunger strikers as "degrading and inhuman," even when this is the only way to save their lives. The European Court of Human Rights ruled that lifesaving force-feeding is compatible with the state's duty to protect the lives of prisoners. To understand how such extrem...
Editorial Note.
Published in Kennedy Institute of Ethics journal
The Duty to Rescue and Investigators' Obligations.
Published in Kennedy Institute of Ethics journal
We examine current applications of the moral duty to rescue to justify clinical investigators' duties of ancillary care and standard of care to subjects in resource-poor settings. These applications fail to explain why investigators possess obligations to research participants, in particular, and not to people in need, in general. Further, these ap...
A Theoretical Foundation for the Ethical Distribution of Authorship in Multidisciplinary Publications.
Published in Kennedy Institute of Ethics journal
In academia, authorship on publications confers merit as well as responsibility. The respective disciplines adhere to their "typical" authorship practices: individuals may be named in alphabetical order (e.g., in economics, mathematics), ranked in decreasing level of contribution (e.g., biomedical sciences), or the leadership role may be listed las...
(Queer) Family Values and "Reciprocal IVF": What Difference Does Sexual Identity Make?
Published in Kennedy Institute of Ethics journal
In this paper I employ the case of "reciprocal IVF" (R-IVF)-in which a female-female couple uses in vitro fertilization to allow one woman to be the genetic mother and the other the gestational mother of their child(ren)-to illuminate the role sexual identity might productively play in bioethics. Bioethicists who have taken up this issue have large...
