Vegetarians have argued at great length that meat-eating is wrong. Even so, the vast majority of people continue to eat meat, and even most vegetarians eventually give up on their diets. Does this prove these people must be morally corrupt? In Why It’s OK to Eat Meat, Dan C. Shahar argues the answer is no: it’s entirely possible to be an ethical person while continuing to eat meat—and not just the "fancy" offerings from the farmers' market but also the regular (...) meat we find at most supermarkets and restaurants. Shahar’s examination forcefully echoes vegetarians’ concerns about the meat industry’s impacts on animals, workers, the environment, and public health. However, he shows that the most influential ethical arguments for avoiding meat on the basis of these considerations are ultimately unpersuasive. Instead of insisting we all become vegetarians, Shahar argues each of us has broad latitude to choose which of the world’s problems to tackle, in what ways, and to what extents, and hence people can decline to take up this particular form of activism without doing anything wrong. (shrink)

Liberal political theory seeks to enable diverse groups to coexist respectfully despite their differences. According to liberals, this requires embracing certain political institutions and refraining from imposing controversial views on others. The liberal formula has enjoyed considerable success. However, green political theorists insist liberal societies will precipitate an ecological crisis unless they are transformed in line with (controversial) green views. These perspectives highlight a longstanding gap in liberal theory. Liberalism rose to prominence only after Reformation-era Christians accepted that societal success (...) did not require the ascendancy of any particular doctrine. Liberals never had to show how their recommendations could be reconciled with the once-common view that toleration would be catastrophic. Yet today’s greens once again anticipate catastrophe unless they can remake civilization around their doctrines. Liberals must find a way to respond to these concerns if they are to sustain their paradigm amidst environmental conflicts. (shrink)

Personal carbon footprints have become a subject of major concern among those who worry about global climate change. Conventional wisdom holds that individuals have a duty to reduce their impacts on the climate system by restricting their carbon footprints. However, I defend a new argument for thinking that this conventional wisdom is mistaken. Individuals, I argue, have a duty to take actions to combat the world’s problems. But since climate change is only one of a nearly endless list of such (...) problems, individuals’ obligations to take action as activists do not specifically require reductions in personal carbon footprints. Moreover, this is true even in spite of the fact that we are personally implicated in causing climate change. This paper also argues that many of those who decide to combat climate change by reducing their carbon footprints are likely doing more than they can justify in this regard. Although most people are not doing enough to combat world problems, a proper devotion to activism would seek a balance with other life demands that many climate activists currently eschew. (shrink)

Global climate change is one of the most widely discussed problems of our time. However, many libertarian thinkers have not participated in the ethical dimensions of this discussion due to a narrow focus on the scientific basis for concern about climate change. In this paper, I reject this approach and explore the kind of response libertarians should be offering instead. I frame the climate change problem as one which concerns potential rights-infringements and explore different ways in which climate change might (...) be thought to infringe upon rights. I conclude that there are some ways in which climate change might be expected to result in rights-infringements, but that some of the current concern about climate change cannot be reconciled with a rights-oriented paradigm. I close by outlining future directions for research, emphasizing that much remains to be done in order to formulate a complete libertarian perspective on climate change. (shrink)

Libertarians often emphasize courts’ potential to alleviate pollution problems without the need for legislation and regulation. However, this chapter argues courts cannot completely replace these other tools. Because of the historical conditions in which pollution law develops, we should expect courts in industrial societies to initially develop legal standards that deliver limited protection against many common pollution threats. As societies grow wealthier and citizens begin favoring stricter defenses against pollution, courts honoring longstanding precedents will struggle to keep pace with changing (...) priorities. Because legislators and regulators are authorized to create and alter laws deliberately in a way judges are not, they can perform an essential function by updating legal standards amidst changing circumstances. Libertarianism stands the best chance of addressing the challenges pollution creates by allowing each branch of the liberal division of powers to perform its role, not by substituting the judiciary for all other branches. (shrink)

After a unilateral focus on medical professional obligations to patients in most of the 20th century, there is a growing, if modest, interest in patient responsibility. This article critiques some public assertions, explores the ethics literature, and attempts to find some consensus and moral grounds for positions taken on the question, "Does a patient have moral obligations in the process of interactions with medical and other professional caregivers?" There is widespread agreement on a few responsibilities, such as "truth telling" and (...) "avoiding harm to others," but no apparent consensus either on the list of duties or on the appropriate justification for such duties. The context and clinical realities of patient interactions are noted to suggest that feasibility is important in making judgments of patient obligations. (shrink)

Paul Taylor has argued that all living organisms have equal inherent worth. David Schmidtz objects, insisting that there is little to be gained by talk of “equality” in interspecific contexts. On Schmidtz’s view, ethicists should be satisfied simply to say that all organisms deserve respect, while leaving unspecified how such claims to respect measure up to one another. Yet in this paper, I contend that Schmidtz’s position cannot be sustained in the face of predictable and ongoing conflict between species. When (...) sacrifices of some organisms’ interests and lives are inevitable, it is facile to demand simply that all living things deserve respect. Ethicists must be able to say how such conflicts are to be resolved, which means that they must have something to say about how organisms and their interests compare to one another in their moral significance. Paul Taylor may be wrong to think that such questions should be answered by appeal to the moral equality of all living things, but his mistake lies in thinking that all beings’ natures as “teleological centers of life” captures all that is relevant from a moral point of view. (shrink)

Although libertarianism is often regarded as “weak” on environmental issues, the truth is more complicated. Because of its commitment to defending private property rights, libertarianism actually lends itself to aggressive protections against pollution—to the point where an interpretive challenge arises in establishing how to reconcile it with any pollution at all. To meet this challenge, libertarians must explicate how societies should delimit and allocate rights over the environment and identify who will be responsible for making these determinations. The most ideologically (...) salient libertarian paths to addressing these questions demand heavy lifting from courts in adjudicating conflicting claims. However, there are reasons to doubt that courts would be up to this task. Libertarians might thus be well-advised to embrace a role for government administration in regulating environmental impacts. Although this would depart from the role libertarians have traditionally ascribed to governments, it would align in spirit with familiar libertarian arguments for government provision of policing, courts, and national defense. Libertarianism so understood would resemble more mainstream views on the environment, though with a stricter emphasis on the protection of individual rights. Libertarians thus have fewer deep disagreements with environmentalists than is generally appreciated. To the extent these disagreements exist, they revolve specifically around the use of state coercion to protect the environment for reasons other than defending rights. Although environmentalists generally approve of such coercion, libertarianism opposes it as a matter of principle. Whether this is so much the worse for libertarianism or environmentalism is ultimately for the reader to decide. (shrink)

Kevin Elliott observes that environmental protection efforts often benefit humans, not just because the natural environment is useful, but also because activities that result in environmental protections can also promote a range of other human values. Elliott argues that environmentalists could gain practical advantages by emphasizing these indirect benefits. He also insists that even for environmentalists who believe that nature ought to be protected for its own sake, deploying such arguments would not necessarily pose problems of integrity since more explicitly (...) non-anthropocentric arguments could be employed to complement the ones he favors. In this paper I push back on Elliott’s proposal, arguing that the practical benefits he promises are unlikely to materialize if environmentalists do not reign in their moralistic non-anthropocentrism in public discourse. In practice, environmentalists who understand the demands of integrity in the way Elliott describes will see in his proposal a thorny dilemma, forcing them to choose between their practical efficacy and their integrity as environmentalists. (shrink)

It is argued that cultural attitudes of a speciesist nature are background to the current practice of animal use in teaching medical students and residents. The scope of this activity is estimated, and educational theory is enlisted to suggest that many assumptions about the effectiveness of the practice are not valid. An assessment of one course used for ob-gyn training is presented. Since it is clear that animal suffering should be avoided when possible, the case is made that alternatives to (...) animals may be used to replace animal use in much of current medical education. Medical educators should routinely question and offer adequate justification for any use of animals in medical education. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 6, June 2020, Page 17-19.

Significantly revised in this third edition, Environmental Ethics: What Really Matters, What Really Works examines morality from an environmental perspective. Featuring accessible selections—from classic articles to examples of cutting-edge original research—it addresses both theory and practice. -/- Asking what really matters, the first section of the book explores the abstract ideas of human value and value in nature. The second section turns to the question of what really works—what it would take to solve our real-world environmental problems. Moving beyond the (...) "hype," it presents authoritative essays on applying environmental ethics to the issues that matter right now. The selections present philosophical, biological, and socially scientific approaches to the major issues. Environmental Ethics also features first-hand descriptions from people who have actually been involved in wildlife and conservation initiatives. (shrink)

Conscious macrostates are usually assumed to be emergent from the underlying physical microstates comprising the brain and nervous system of biological organisms. However, a major problem with this assumption is that consciousness is essentially nonmeasurable unlike all other proven emergent properties of physical systems. In an earlier paper, using a no-go theorem, it was shown that conscious states cannot be comprised of processes that are physical in nature (Reason, 2019). Combining this result with another unrelated work on causal emergence in (...) physical systems (Hoel, Albantakis and Tononi, 2013), we show in this paper that conscious macrostates are not emergent from physical systems and they also do not supervene on physical microstates. An important implication of our work is that there must be some form of violation of energy conservation in biological systems that are conscious. (shrink)

Many areas of business ethics research are “sensitive.” We provide an empirical assessment of the randomized response techniquewhich provides absolute anonymity to subjects and “legal immunity” to the researcher. Beyond that, RRT techniques provide complete disclosure to subjects, unconditional privacy is maintained, and there is no deception.

Many areas of business ethics research are “sensitive.” We provide an empirical assessment of the randomized response technique which providesabsoluteanonymity to subjects and “legal immunity” to the researcher. Beyond that, RRT techniques provide complete disclosure to subjects, unconditional privacy is maintained, and there is no deception.

The Declaration of Helsinki and the Council of the International Organization of Medical Sciences provide guidance on standards of care and prevention in clinical trials. In the current and increasingly challenging research environment, the ethical status of a trial design depends not only on protection of participants, but also on social value, feasibility, and scientific validity. Using the example of a study assessing efficacy of a vaccine to prevent human papilloma virus in HIV-1 infected adolescent girls in low resource countries (...) without access to the vaccine, we compare several trial designs which rank lower on some criteria and higher on others, giving rise to difficult trade-offs. This case demonstrates the need for developing more nuanced guidance documents to help researchers balance these often conflicting criteria. (shrink)

ExcerptMany people assume that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 was an exclusively or primarily Western project, imposed on the rest of the world by the European and American powers that emerged victorious from World War II. Harvard Law professor Mary Ann Glendon’s 2001 book, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, suggests otherwise. It was not the great powers but small powers that pushed hardest for a declaration of rights. And it (...) was often great powers—and one must acknowledge, great powers dominated by people of European ancestry—that did not like the idea of being pushed around by politically and economically weaker inhabitants of the Global South, who were just beginning to emerge from centuries of Western colonialism and other forms of oppression.1. (shrink)

The present commentary on it greatly contributes to the understanding of thisvery important work. In fact, it is a good expositary commentary, lucidly explaning the knotty points. It evinces deep study and understanding of Navya-Nyaya and its methodology.yhus, the sukhabodhika Tippanika represents a positive and distinctive contribution to the vast commercial literature on the Tattvacimtamani.

Patients with psychiatric illness feel the brunt of the intersection of many of our society's and our health care system's disparities, and the vulnerability of this population during the Covid‐19 pandemic cannot be overstated. Patients with psychiatric illness often suffer from the stigma of mental illness and receive poor medical care. Many patients with severe and persistent mental illness face additional barriers, including poverty, marginal housing, and food insecurity. Patients who require psychiatric hospitalization now face the risk of transmission of (...) Covid‐19 due to the inherent difficulties of social distancing within a psychiatric hospital. Patients whose freedom and self‐determination have been temporarily overruled as they receive involuntary psychiatric treatment deserve a setting that maintains their health and safety. While tele‐mental health has been rapidly expanded to provide new ways to access psychiatric treatment, some patients may have limitations in technological literacy or access to devices. The social isolation, economic fallout, and potential traumatization related to the current pandemic will disproportionately affect this vulnerable population, and society's duties to them must be considered. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Controlled human infection (CHI) models have been developed for numerous pathogens in order to better understand disease processes and accelerate drug and vaccine testing. In the past, some researchers conducted highly controversial CHIs with vulnerable populations, including children. Ethical frameworks for CHIs now recommend vulnerable populations be excluded because they cannot consent to high risk research. In this paper we argue that CHI studies span a wide spectrum of benefit and risk, and that some CHI studies may involve minimal (...) risk. The categorical exclusion of children from CHIs therefore departs from the standard approach to evaluating research risks, as international regulations and ethical guidance for pediatric research generally permit non‐beneficial research with low risks. The paradigm in research ethics has also shifted from focusing on protecting vulnerable participants to recognizing that inclusion can be important as a matter of justice, providing new reasons to question this default exclusion of children from CHIs. Recognizing that pediatric CHIs can raise complex ethical issues and are easy to sensationalize in ways that may threaten the public’s trust in research and sponsor institutions, we conclude by describing additional complexities that must be addressed before pediatric CHIs beyond licensed vaccine studies might be ethically acceptable. (shrink)

Most human beliefs are acquired through communication, and so are most misbeliefs. Just like the misbeliefs discussed by McKay & Dennett (M&D), culturally transmitted misbeliefs tend to result from limitations rather than malfunctions of the mechanisms that produce them, and few if any can be argued to be adaptations. However, the mechanisms involved, the contents, and the hypothetical adaptive value tend to be specific to the cultural case.

To prepare for potential human infection challenge studies involving SARS-CoV-2, we convened a multidisciplinary working group to address ethical questions regarding whether and how much SAR...

Lying in an area bounded by the Wabash, Ohio, and Mississippi rivers, the Southern Illinois country is rich in history, folklore, scenery, and natural resources. At about the latitude of southern Virginia, and extending from the flat prairie farmland of central Illinois to the rugged "Illinois Ozarks,” the area is the natural terminal boundary for hundreds of plant species reaching out to all points of the compass. It is also the oldest and most sparsely populated part of Illinois, a region (...) of small towns and independent people, typical of the vast heartland of the U.S.A. Surveying the area in words and pictures the authors sensitively and appreciatively portray the region’s special qualities. An uncommon portrayal of American life in a distinctive region, the book provides a memorable journey both in time and place. (shrink)

Some would argue that the more promising areas of business ethics research are "sensitive." In such areas, it would be expected that subjects, if inclined to respond at all, would be guarded in their responses, or respond inaccurately. We provide an introduction to an empirical approach -- the unmatched block count (UCT) -- for collecting these potentially sensitive data which provides absolute anonymity and confidentiality to subjects and "legal immunity" to the researcher. Interestingly, under UCT protocol researchers could not divulge (...) subjects' responses even if they were inclined to do so. Beyond that, UCTs provide complete disclosure to subjects and there is no deception. (shrink)

BackgroundIn the Canadian Alliance for Healthy Hearts and Minds (CAHHM) cohort, participants underwent magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the brain, heart, and abdomen, that generated incidental findings (IFs). The approach to managing these unexpected results remain a complex issue. Our objectives were to describe the CAHHM policy for the management of IFs, to understand the impact of disclosing IFs to healthy research participants, and to reflect on the ethical obligations of researchers in future MRI studies.MethodsBetween 2013 and 2019, 8252 participants (...) (mean age 58 ± 9 years, 54% women) were recruited with a follow-up questionnaire administered to 909 participants (40% response rate) at 1-year. The CAHHM policy followed a restricted approach, whereby routine feedback on IFs was not provided. Only IFs of severe structural abnormalities were reported.ResultsSevere structural abnormalities occurred in 8.3% (95% confidence interval 7.7–8.9%) of participants, with the highest proportions found in the brain (4.2%) and abdomen (3.1%). The majority of participants (97%) informed of an IF reported no change in quality of life, with 3% of participants reporting that the knowledge of an IF negatively impacted their quality of life. Furthermore, 50% reported increased stress in learning about an IF, and in 95%, the discovery of an IF did not adversely impact his/her life insurance policy. Most participants (90%) would enrol in the study again and perceived the MRI scan to be beneficial, regardless of whether they were informed of IFs. While the implications of a restricted approach to IF management was perceived to be mostly positive, a degree of diagnostic misconception was present amongst participants, indicating the importance of a more thorough consent process to support participant autonomy.ConclusionThe management of IFs from research MRI scans remain a challenging issue, as participants may experience stress and a reduced quality of life when IFs are disclosed. The restricted approach to IF management in CAHHM demonstrated a fair fulfillment of the overarching ethical principles of respect for autonomy, concern for wellbeing, and justice. The approach outlined in the CAHHM policy may serve as a framework for future research studies.Clinical trial registrationhttps://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/nct02220582. (shrink)

The peer commentaries on our Target Article, “Promoting Ethical Payment in Human Infection Challenge Studies,” offer a number of insights that will help advance the co...

Psychiatric genetic research investigates the genetic basis of psychiatric disorders with the aim of more effectively understanding, treating, or, ultimately, preventing such disorders. Given the challenges of recruiting research participants into such studies, the potential for long‐term benefits of such research, and seemingly minimal risk, a strong claim could be made that all non‐acute psychiatric inpatients, including forensic and involuntary patients, should be included in such research, provided they have capacity to consent. There are tensions, however, regarding the ethics of (...) recruiting psychiatric inpatients into such studies. In this paper our intention is to elucidate the source of these tensions from the perspective of research ethics committee interests and decision‐making. We begin by defining inpatient status and outline some of the assumptions surrounding the structures of inpatient care. We then introduce contemporary conceptions of vulnerability, including Florencia Luna’s account of vulnerability which we use as a framework for our analysis. While psychiatric inpatients could be subject to consent‐related vulnerabilities, we suggest that a particular kind of exploitation‐related vulnerability comes to the fore in the context of our case study. Moreover, a subset of these ethical concerns takes on particular weight in the context of genetic research in low‐ and middle‐income countries. At the same time, the automatic exclusion of inpatients from research elicits justice‐related vulnerabilities. (shrink)