Why good work in philosophical bioethics often looks strange
AbstractPapers in philosophical bioethics often discuss unrealistic scenarios and defend controversial views. Why is that, and what is this kind of work good for? My aim in the first part of this paper is to specify how philosophical bioethics relates to other types of work in bioethics, and to explain the role of the unrealistic scenarios and the controversial views. In the second part, I propose three strategies for doing research in philosophical bioethics that makes a valuable contribution to the bioethics community at large. (Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics)
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - December 6, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
The religious character of secular arguments supporting euthanasia and what it implies for conscientious practice in medicine
AbstractContemporary bioethics generally stipulates that public moral deliberation must avoid allowing religious beliefs to influence or justify health policy and law. Secular premises and arguments are assumed to maintain the neutral, common ground required for moral deliberation in the public square of a pluralistic society. However, a careful examination of non-theistic arguments used to justify euthanasia (regarding contested notions of human dignity, individual autonomy, and death as annihilation) reveals a dependence on metaethical and metaphysical beliefs that are not universally accepted in a pluralistic society. S...
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - November 30, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Whole body gestational donation
AbstractWhole body gestational donation offers an alternative means of gestation for prospective parents who wish to have children but cannot, or prefer not to, gestate. It seems plausible that some people would be prepared to consider donating their whole bodies for gestational purposes just as some people donate parts of their bodies for organ donation. We already know that pregnancies can be successfully carried to term in brain-dead women. There is no obvious medical reason why initiating such pregnancies would not be possible. In this paper, I explore the ethics of whole-body gestational donation. I consider a number ...
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - November 18, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Johnson, James A., Douglas E. Anderson, and Caren C. Rossow. Health Systems thinking: a primer. Burlington, MA: Jones & amp; Bartlett Learning, 2020. 138 pp. ISBN 9781284167146
(Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics)
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - November 15, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
The criticism of medicine at the end of its “golden age”
AbstractMedicine is increasingly subject to various forms of criticism. This paper focuses on dominant forms of criticism and offers a better account of their normative character. It is argued that together, these forms of criticism are comprehensive, raising questions about both medical science and medical practice. Furthermore, it is shown that these forms of criticism mainly rely on standards of evaluation that are assumed to be internal to medicine and converge on a broader question about the aim of medicine. Further work making medicine ’s internal norms explicit and determining the aim of medicine would not only he...
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - November 14, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Explanatory integration and integrated explanations in Darwinian medicine and evolutionary medicine
AbstractRecently, two research traditions that bring together evolutionary biology and medicine, that is to say, Darwinian medicine and evolutionary medicine, have been identified. In this paper, I analyse these two research traditions with respect to explanatory and interdisciplinary integration. My analysis shows that Darwinian medicine does not integrate medicine and evolutionary biology in any strong sense but does incorporate evolutionary concepts into medicine. I also show that backward-looking explanations in Darwinian medicine are not integrated proximate-and-ultimate explanations but functional explanations that i...
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - October 29, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Misapplying autonomy: why patient wishes cannot settle treatment decisions
AbstractThe principle of autonomy is widely recognized to be of utmost importance in bioethics; however, we argue that this principle is often misapplied when one fails to distinguish two different contexts in medicine. When a particular patient is offered treatment options, she has the ultimate say in whether to proceed with any of those treatments. However, when deciding whether a particular intervention should be regarded as a form of medical treatment in the first place, it is the medical community who has the ultimate say. Some argue that particular interventions should be allowed by virtue of the fact that they are a...
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - October 28, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Towards a dispositionalist (and unifying) account of addiction
AbstractAddiction theorists have often utilized the metaphor of the blind men and the elephant to illustrate the complex nature of addiction and the varied methodological approaches to studying it. A common purported upshot is skeptical in nature: due to these complexities, it is not possible to offer a unifying account of addiction. I think that this is a mistake. The elephant is real –there is athere there. Here, I defend a dispositionalist account of addiction asthe systematic disposition to fail to control one ’s desires to engage in certain types of behaviors. I explain this position, defend the inclusion of desir...
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - October 27, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
The ubiquity of the fallacy of composition in cognitive enhancement and in education
AbstractResearch into cognitive enhancement is highly controversial, and arguments for and against it have failed to identify the logical fallacy underlying this debate: the fallacy of composition. The fallacy of composition is a lesser-known fallacy of ambiguity, but it has been explored and applied extensively to other fields, including economics. The fallacy of composition, which occurs when the characteristics of the parts of the whole are incorrectly extended to apply to the whole itself, and the conclusion is false, should be addressed in the debate on cognitive enhancement and within education. Within cognitive enha...
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - October 23, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Robert Veatch ’s early career in bioethics, contributions to the field, and career at Georgetown University
AbstractIn this essay, I describe Bob Veatch ’s career from the perspective of a colleague and friend. Bob and I started our professional careers at the same time and quickly came into professional contact. With Bob’s move from the Hastings Center to the Kennedy Institute, we became colleagues and worked for almost a decade on our book on death and dying. He was an outstanding co-editor and author. I believe he knew more about the philosophically connected issues in this area of bioethics than anyone publishing in the area, and it was an area of intellectual interest that he pursued throughout his career. Beyond bioeth...
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - October 17, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Death as “benefit” in the context of non-voluntary euthanasia
AbstractI offer a principled objection to arguments in favour of legalizing non-voluntary euthanasia on the basis of the principle of beneficence. The objection is that the status of death as a benefit to people who cannot formulate a desire to die is more problematic than pain management care. I ground this objection on epistemic and political arguments. Namely, I argue that death is relatively more unknowable, and the benefits it confers more subjectively debatable, than pain management. I am not primarily referring to the claim that it is difficult to make comparisons between live and post-mortem states, but rather to t...
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - October 13, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Correction to: How many ways can you die? Multiple biological deaths as a consequence of the multiple concepts of an organism
(Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics)
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - October 5, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Osteoporosis and risk of fracture: reference class problems are real
AbstractElselijn Kingma argues that Christopher Boorse ’s biostatistical theory does not show how the reference classes it uses—namely, age groups of a sex of a species—are objective and naturalistic. Boorse has replied that this objection is of no concern, because there are no examples of clinicians’ choosing to use reference classes other than the ones he suggests. Boorse argues that clinicians use the reference classes they do because these reflect the natural classes of organisms to which their patients belong. Drawing on a thorough exploration of how the disease osteoporosis is defined in adults, I argue that ...
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - September 17, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Case analysis in ethics instruction: bootlegging theory in a topical structure
AbstractRobert Veatch was a notable and prolific author in a variety of areas in philosophy, health care practice, and policy. However, it is evident by the sheer number of case study in ethics books, eighteen editions of case collections in all, that this approach to teaching ethics in the health sciences was especially important to him. A few of these case study collections he wrote alone, but the majority were written with co-authors from nursing, dentistry, pharmacy, allied health, and medicine, drawing on their respective areas of disciplinary expertise and experience as educators. The aim of this article is to focus ...
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - September 12, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Disability bioethics and the commitment to equality
AbstractRobert Veatch ’sThe Foundations of Justice: Why the Retarded and the Rest of Us Have Claims to Equality (1986) delves into deep questions of justice through the case of a child with disabilities. I describe what is basically right about this vision, as well as what is problematic from the standpoint of contemporary disability bioethics. From there, I dive into the notion of vulnerability that is at play in his work. He describes disability as necessarily a condition of weakness, lesser-than existence, and neediness. When disability is viewed in this way as an inherently vulnerable state of being, the essential so...
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - August 20, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
