Prisoners ’ competence to die: hunger strike and cognitive competence
AbstractSeveral bioethicists have recently advocated the force-feeding of prisoners, based on the assumption that prisoners have reduced or no autonomy. This assumed lack of autonomy follows from a decrease in cognitive competence, which, in turn, supposedly derives from imprisonment and/or being on hunger strike. In brief, causal links are made between imprisonment or voluntary total fasting (VTF) and mental disorders and between mental disorders and lack of cognitive competence. I engage the bioethicists that support force-feeding by severing both of these causal links. Specifically, I refute the claims that VTF automati...
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - June 14, 2018 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Fredrik Svenaeus: Phenomenological bioethics: medical technologies, human suffering, and the meaning of being alive
(Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics)
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - June 11, 2018 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Comforting when we cannot heal: the ethics of palliative sedation
AbstractThis essay considers whether palliative sedation is or is not appropriate medical care. This requires one to consider (a) whether, in addition to the good of health, relief of suffering is also a proper end of medicine; (b) whether unconsciousness can ever be a good for a human being; and (c) how double-effect reasoning can help us think about difficult cases. The author concludes that palliative sedation may be proper medical care, but only in a limited range of cases. (Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics)
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - June 1, 2018 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Sedation and care at the end of life
AbstractThis special issue ofTheoretical Medicine andBioethics takes up the question of palliative sedation as a source of potential concern or controversy among Christian clinicians and thinkers. Christianity affirms a duty to relieve unnecessary suffering yet also proscribes euthanasia. Accordingly, the question arises as to whether it is ever morally permissible to render dying patients unconscious in order to relieve their suffering. If so, under what conditions? Is this practice genuinely morally distinguishable from euthanasia? Can one ever aim directly at making a dying person unconscious, or is it only permissible ...
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - June 1, 2018 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Proportionate palliative sedation and the giving of a deadly drug: the conundrum
AbstractAmong the oldest extant medical ethics, the HippocraticOath prohibits the giving of a deadly drug, regarding this act as an egregious violation of a medical ethic that is exclusively therapeutic. Proportionate palliative sedation involves the administration of a deadly drug. Hence it seems to violate the venerable Hippocratic promise associated with the dawn of Western medicine not to give a deadly drug. Relying on distinctions commonly employed in the analysis and evaluation of human actions, this article distinguishes physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia, as acts that necessarily violate the prohibition agai...
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - June 1, 2018 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Physician-assisted dying: thoughts drawn from Albert Camus ’ writing
AbstractPhysician-assisted dying (assisted suicide and euthanasia) is currently an intensely discussed topic in several countries. Despite differences in legislation and application, countries with end-of-life laws have similar eligibility criteria for assistance in dying: individuals must be in a hopeless situation and experience unbearable suffering. Hopelessness, as a basic aspect of the human condition, is a central topic in Albert Camus ’ philosophical workThe Myth of Sisyphus, which addresses the question of suicide. Suffering in the face of a hopeless situation, and the way doctors approach this suffering, is the ...
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - March 20, 2018 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
The ethics of separating conjoined twins: two arguments against
AbstractI argue that the separation of conjoined twins in infancy or early childhood is unethical (rare exceptions aside). Cases may be divided into three types: both twins suffer from lethal abnormalities, only one twin has a lethal abnormality, or neither twin does. In the first kind of case, there is no reason to separate, since both twins will die regardless of treatment. In the third kind of case, I argue that separation at an early age is unethical because the twins are likely to achieve an irreplaceably good quality of life —thegoods of conjoinment—that separation takes away. Evaluation of this possibility requi...
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - February 14, 2018 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Antoine Suarez, Joachim Huarte (eds): Is this cell a human being? Exploring the status of embryos, stem cells and human - animal hybrids
(Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics)
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - February 13, 2018 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
A new path for humanistic medicine
AbstractAccording to recent approaches in the philosophy of medicine, biomedicine should be replaced or complemented by a humanistic medical model. Two humanistic approaches, narrative medicine and the phenomenology of medicine, have grown particularly popular in recent decades. This paper first suggests that these humanistic criticisms of biomedicine are insufficient. A central problem is that both approaches seem to offer a straw man definition of biomedicine. It then argues that the subsequent definition of humanism found in these approaches is problematically reduced to a compassionate or psychological understandi...
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - February 10, 2018 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Inmaculada de Melo-Mart ín: Rethinking reprogenetics: enhancing ethical analyses of reprogenetic technologies. Oxford University Press, New York, 2017, 288 pp, ISBN 9780190460204
(Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics)
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - February 10, 2018 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
How (not) to think of the ‘dead-donor’ rule
AbstractAlthough much has been written on the dead-donor rule (DDR) in the last twenty-five years, scant attention has been paid to how it should be formulated, what its rationale is, and why it was accepted. The DDR can be formulated in terms of either a Don’t Kill rule or a Death Requirement, the former being historically rooted in absolutist ethics and the latter in a prudential policy aimed at securing trust in the transplant enterprise. I contend that the moral core of the rule is the Don’t Kill rule, not the Death Requirement. This, I show, is how the DDR was understood by the transplanters of the 1960s, who s...
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - February 6, 2018 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Miriam Solomon, Jeremy R. Simon, and Harold Kincaid (eds): The Routledge companion to philosophy of medicine
(Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics)
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - November 7, 2017 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Marcum, James A. (ed): The Bloomsbury companion to contemporary philosophy of medicine
(Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics)
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - November 6, 2017 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Thomas Schramme and Steven Edwards (eds): Handbook of the philosophy of medicine
(Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics)
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - November 6, 2017 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Philosophy of medicine 2017: reviewing the situation
AbstractIn this introduction to a special subsection ofTheoretical Medicine and Bioethics comprising separate reviews of the SpringerHandbook of the Philosophy of Medicine,The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Medicine, andThe Bloomsbury Companion to Contemporary Philosophy of Medicine, I compare the three texts with respect to their overall organization and their approach to the relation between the science and the art of medicine. I then indicate two areas that merit more explicit attention in developing a comprehensive philosophy of medicine going forward: health economics and systematic relations within the field as...
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - November 6, 2017 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
