In early March 2020, the March‐April Hastings Center Report was very nearly assembled and contained nothing about Covid‐19, which was still just beginning to make itself publicly known in the United States. Two weeks later, the editorial line‐up was undergoing a remix, and essays that lay out sweeping agendas for the response to the worldwide crisis were in preparation. The central theme in the agenda that Lawrence O. Gostin and colleagues develop is that the pandemic requires a sharp break from (...) usual ethical norms yet simultaneously demands a return to core ethical commitments. A similar theme is sounded by Mildred Z. Solomon and colleagues in a commentary calling for federal actions to keep the health care system functioning. Other essays in the issue take up an assortment of topical issues—including international patient dumping—that were simmering along prior to the pandemic, and the two articles take up foundational questions about the nature of moral reasoning. (shrink)

Bioethics in the blogosphere. There is important news, and then there is important news that grabs hold of people and gets them thinking and talking: “Did you see the piece on . . . ?” “What do you think?” “What would you do?” That kind of news often has to do with bioethics. The desire to capture diverse perspectives on bioethical issues of the day led The Hastings Center to launch Bioethics Forum nearly five years ago. Greg Kaebnick, (...) editor of the Hastings Center Report, conceived of it as an online adjunct to the Report. Commentaries that would take at least a month to work their way through the Report’s production cycle could be posted immediately on Bioethics Forum. And the Forum might broaden our .. (shrink)

Consequence is at the heart of logic; an account of consequence, of what follows from what, offers a vital tool in the evaluation of arguments. Since philosophy itself proceeds by way of argument and inference, a clear view of what logical consequence amounts to is of central importance to the whole discipline. In this book JC Beall and Greg Restall present and defend what thay call logical pluralism, the view that there is more than one genuine deductive consequence relation, (...) a position which has profound implications for many linguists as well as for philosophers. We should not search for one true logic, since there are many. (shrink)

The objective of this study is to test the embeddedness of codes of ethics (ECE) in organizations on aggregated data from three countries, namely Australia, Canada and the United States. The properties of four constructs of ECE are described and tested, including surveillance/training, internal communication, external communication and guidance. The data analysis shows that the model has satisfactory fit, validity and reliability. Furthermore, the results are fairly consistent when tested on each of the three samples (i.e. cross‐national validation). This cross‐national (...) study makes a contribution beyond previous descriptive or exploratory studies by using confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling. Nevertheless, a number of limitations are raised, all of which provide opportunities for further research in refining, extending and testing the proposed ECE model in other cultural and corporate settings. (shrink)

This article defends two theses: that a mental state is conscious if and only if it has phenomenal character, i.e., if and only if there is something it is like for the subject to be in that state, and that all state consciousness involves self-consciousness, in the sense that a mental state is conscious if and only if its possessor is, in some suitable way, conscious of being in it. Though neither of these theses is novel, there is a dearth (...) of direct arguments for them in the scholarly literature and the relationship between them has so far gone underrecognized. This article attempts to remedy this lack, advancing the claim that if all conscious states have phenomenal character, then all state consciousness involves self-consciousness. (shrink)

Human aesthetic practices show a sensitivity to the ways that the appearance of an artefact manifests skills and other qualities of the maker. We investigate a possible origin for this kind of sensibility, locating it in the need for co-ordination of skill-transmission in the Acheulean stone tool culture. We argue that our narrative supports the idea that Acheulean agents were aesthetic agents. In line with this we offer what may seem an absurd comparison: between the Acheulean and the Quattrocento. In (...) making it we display some hidden complexity in human aesthetic responses to an artefact. We conclude with a brief review of rival explanations—biological and/or cultural—of how this skills-based sensibility became a regular feature of human aesthetic practices. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume Studies Volume XX, Number 1, April 1994, pp. 143-149 David Hume and Public Debt: Crying Wolf? JOHN CHRISTIAN LAURSEN and GREG COOLIDGE David Hume's views on public credit have not only received prominent attention in the literature on his political thought, but have even been the subject of attention in The Wall Street Journal.1 Most of the attention has centered on Hume's essay "Of Public Credit" of (...) 1752, and treats it only as an expression of ideas, without relating it to the historical facts. This note lays out Hume's views on this matter throughout his lifetime, and juxtaposes them with figures for the actual public debt, carrying the story down to the twentieth century. Public debt as we know it only goes back about 300 years. The British government in the 1690s was the first modern government to establish enough genuine credit that private citizens would loan it money without having to be compelled.2 At the turn of the century, in the year 1700, the British public debt amounted to 14.2 million pounds sterling.3 As early as 1741, Hume was already worrying about the public debt in the essay "Of Liberty and Despotism" (later changed to "Of Civil Liberty"). In the last paragraph of that essay, he wrote of the "degeneracy" brought about by public debt, suggested that debt-service "taxes may, in time, become altogether intolerable, and all the property of the state be brought into the hands of" the government. If it is not curbed, we may come to "curse our very liberty," he wrote.4 That year, the national debt totaled 48.8 million pounds (45.2 million in 1701 pounds5). John Christian Laursen and Greg Coolidge are at the Department of Political Science, University of California, Riverside, Riverside, CA 92521 USA. Laursen e-mail: [email protected]. 144 John Christian Laursen and Greg Coolidge Hume's essay of 1752, "Of Public Credit, " was devoted entirely to criticism of the public debt (Essays, 349-365). His thoughts on public credit at this time can be summed up in this ominous warning: It must, indeed, be one of these two events; either the nation must destroy public credit, or public credit will destroy the nation. (Essays, 360-361) Hume acknowledged that the use of public credit could benefit the economy in some ways: more men with large stocks and incomes, may naturally be supposed to continue in trade, where there are public debts; and this, it must be owned, is of some advantage to commerce, by diminishing its profits, promoting circulation, and encouraging industry. (Essays, 354) But the many disadvantages would outweigh such advantages (Essays, 354355 ): 1) "It is certain, that national debts cause a mighty confluence of people and riches to the capital," making the head too large for the body. 2) Public stocks "banish gold and silver from the most considerable commerce of the state." 3) The taxes levied to pay the interest oppress the poorer people. 4) "As foreigners possess a great share of our national funds, they render the public, in a manner, tributary to them, and may in time occasion the transport of our people and our industry." 5) Public credit encourages an idle and useless rentier class. All of this pales, however, in comparison to the political consequences. From the point of view of the body politic, public credit was a threat to the security of the state. It would die a natural or a violent death. In wartime, or some national emergency, the funds necessary for the functioning of the economy would be diverted to other purposes. The economy, now dependent on credit, would crumble. The whole fabric, already tottering, falls to the ground, and buries thousands in its ruins. And this, I think, may be called the natural death of public credit. (Essays, 363) Hume Studies David Hume and Public Debt: Crying Wolf? 145 Another scenario would occur if the government became too indebted to intervene in maintaining the balance of power in Europe. Our children, weary of the struggle, and fettered with encumbrances, may sit down secure, and see their neighbors oppressed and conquered ; till, at last, they themselves... (shrink)

The question of whether donors should be able to set conditions on who can receive their tissue has been discussed by bioethicists, but so far there has been little consideration of whether the answer to this question should be different depending on the type of tissue under discussion. In this article, we compare the donation of organs with the donation of reproductive material such as sperm, eggs, and embryos, exploring possible arguments for allowing donors to set conditions in one case (...) but not the other. After considering arguments from procreative liberty, special parental obligations, and donors meeting their genetic offspring, we find that there is no ethically defensible reason to have different policies between these two cases. As a consequence, we conclude that jurisdictions operating with this inconsistency should consider moving their policies into better alignment. We also make some recommendations for the standardisation of the terminology around conditional donation. (shrink)

In this paper, we analyse the recent rapid growth of ‘binge’ drinking in the UK. This means the rapid consumption of large amounts of alcohol, especially by young people, leading to serious anti-social and criminal behaviour in urban centres. British soccer fans have often exhibited this kind of behaviour abroad, but it has become widespread amongst young people within Britain itself. Vomiting, collapsing in the street, shouting and chanting loudly, intimidating passers-by and fighting are now regular night-time features of many (...) British towns and cities. A particularly disturbing aspect is the huge rise in drunken and anti-social behaviour amongst young females. Increasingly, policy makers in the West are concerned about how not just to regulate but to alter social behaviour. Smoking and obesity are obvious examples, and in the UK ‘binge’ drinking has become a focus of acute policy concern. We show how a simple agent based model approach, combined with a limited amount of easily acquired information, can provide useful insights for policy makers in the context of behavioural regulation. We show that the hypothesis that the rise in binge drinking is a fashion-related phenomenon, with imitative behaviour spreading across social networks, is sufficient to account for the empirically observed patterns of binge drinking behaviour. The results show that a small world network, rather than a scale-free or random one, offers the best description of the data. (shrink)

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to transform many aspects of scholarly publishing. Authors, peer reviewers, and editors might use AI in a variety of ways, and those uses might augment their existing work or might instead be intended to replace it. We are editors of bioethics and humanities journals who have been contemplating the implications of this ongoing transformation. We believe that generative AI may pose a threat to the goals that animate our work but could also be (...) valuable for achieving those goals. In the interests of fostering a wider conversation about how generative AI may be used, we have developed a preliminary set of recommendations for its use in scholarly publishing. We hope that the recommendations and rationales set out here will help the scholarly community navigate toward a deeper understanding of the strengths, limits, and challenges of AI for responsible scholarly work. (shrink)

A range of views on the morality of synthetic biology and its place in public policy and political discourse.

The new generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools, and especially the large language models (LLMs) of which ChatGPT is the most prominent example, have the potential to transform many aspects o...

The emerging phenomenon of genetic paternity testing shows how good science and useful social reform can run off the rails. Genetic paternity testing enables us to sort out, in a transparent and decisive way, the age-old but traditionally never-quite-answerable question of whether a child is genetically related to the husband of the child's mother. Given the impossibility of settling this question for certain, British and American law has long held that a biological relationship must almost always be assumed to exist. (...) According to what is known as the “marital presumption” or “presumption of legitimacy,” a child born to a woman within a marital relationship is assumed to be the biological child of the woman's husband unless he was absent, impotent, or sterile. In other words, if paternity was not a physical impossibility for the husband, there was a nearly irrebuttable presumption that he was the father of the child. The husband was locked into the role of fatherhood. a. (shrink)

The lead article in this January‐February 2021 issue—the first of the Hastings Center Report's fiftieth year of publication—does not set out to change medicine. It tries instead to understand it. In “A Heart without Life: Artificial Organs and the Lived Body,” Mary Jean Walker draws on work in phenomenology and on empirical research with people who have received artificial heart devices to argue that such devices may have two very different effects on how a patient experiences the body and the (...) self. Several other pieces in this issue address the ongoing slew of patient care and health policy problems surrounding the Covid‐19 pandemic, and a special report titled Democracy in Crisis: Civic Learning and the Reconstruction of Common Purpose considers the requirements for public involvement in policy‐making about bioethical issues. (shrink)

Can we make wise policy decisions about still‐emerging technologies—decisions that are grounded in facts yet anticipate unknowns and promote the public's preferences and values? There is a widespread feeling that we should try. There also seems to be widespread agreement that the central element in wise decisions is the assessment of benefits and costs, understood as a process that consists, at least in part, in measuring, tallying, and comparing how different outcomes would affect the public interest. But how benefits and (...) costs are best weighed when making decisions about whether to move forward with an emerging technology is not clear. Many commentators feel that the weighing is often inadequate or inappropriate. Those who argue for a “precautionary” approach to the weighing do so precisely because they feel the need for a restraint on the dominant decision‐making tools and processes for assessing outcomes.This Hastings Center special report examines those tools and processes, taking the method known as cost‐benefit analysis as a starting point. In U.S. governance, CBA, sometimes informed by risk assessment, is the most widely used and extensively studied method, and authoritative reports on genetic and reproductive technologies often use language suggestive of cost‐benefit analysis. There is also a long‐running debate about the role of values in CBA and other formal impact assessment mechanisms—and about how those mechanisms compare to the precautionary principle. The guiding idea in the report is to engage in a close examination of the strengths and limits of CBA for ensuring that emerging technologies are used in ways that square with the public's values, drawing on applications of synthetic biology to illustrate and sharpen the analysis and then considering corrections to CBA and some alternative methodologies that handle values differently. (shrink)

The January‐February issue of the Report introduced a number of new features designed to provide opportunities for further give‐and‐take in our pages. In this issue, we put to use our revamped letters to the editor, Exchange, with a set of commentaries on another of the January‐February articles, Daniel Callahan's “Obesity: Chasing an Elusive Epidemic.” Commentaries in Other Voices and special reports are planned and solicited, in consultation with scholars in the field and with the guest editors of the special reports, (...) but our hope is that Exchange will provide an opportunity for unsolicited voices in the Report. Of course, Callahan's controversial article is all too good for drumming up unsolicited commentary: Callahan argued that the rise in obesity requires an aggressive public health campaign that employs some stigmatization of obesity. (shrink)

Something has been going wrong on many college campuses in the last few years. Speakers are shouted down. Students and professors say they are walking on eggshells and are afraid to speak honestly. Rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide are rising--on campus as well as nationally. How did this happen? First Amendment expert Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt show how the new problems on campus have their origins in three terrible ideas that have become increasingly woven into (...) American childhood and education: What doesn't kill you makes you weaker; always trust your feelings; and life is a battle between good people and evil people. These three Great Untruths contradict basic psychological principles about well-being and ancient wisdom from many cultures. Embracing these untruths--and the resulting culture of safetyism--interferes with young people's social, emotional, and intellectual development. It makes it harder for them to become autonomous adults who are able to navigate the bumpy road of life. Lukianoff and Haidt investigate the many social trends that have intersected to promote the spread of these untruths. They explore changes in childhood such as the rise of fearful parenting, the decline of unsupervised, child-directed play, and the new world of social media that has engulfed teenagers in the last decade. They examine changes on campus, including the corporatization of universities and the emergence of new ideas about identity and justice. They situate the conflicts on campus within the context of America's rapidly rising political polarization and dysfunction. This is a book for anyone who is confused by what is happening on college campuses today, or has children, or is concerned about the growing inability of Americans to live, work, and cooperate across party lines. (shrink)

A majority opinion seems to have emerged in scholarly analysis of the assortment of technologies that have been given the label “synthetic biology.” According to this view, society should allow the technology to proceed and even provide it some financial support, while monitor­ing its progress and attempting to ensure that the development leads to good outcomes. The near‐consensus is captured by the U.S. Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues in its report New Directions: The Ethics of Synthetic Biology (...) and Emerging Technologies, which arguably marked the end of a preliminary round of analysis about the ethical and policy questions raised by synthetic bi­ology. Like a number of other, earlier documents issued by various groups around the world, the re­port called attention to questions about how the technology will be used; whether it might be mis­used; what sorts of accidents might happen along the way; the economic, environmental, and social impacts of the eventual applications; whether the very idea of “synthetic biology” should be trou­bling; and how the debate over all of these ques­tions will be conducted. Also like most similar documents, however, while it called for careful monitoring and oversight of technology, it did not recommend any significant new constraints on its development and use. The commission's stance was that it would be “imprudent either to declare a moratorium on synthetic biology until all risks can be determined and mitigated, or to simply ‘let science rip,’ regardless of the likely risks.”In this report, we will take stock of the current consensus, comment on some of the major points of disagreement, and identify the next steps for the debate. In part I, we offer a brief overview of the research and applications commonly grouped together under the heading of synthetic biology, partly in order to set the stage for the rest of the discussion and partly because we want to highlight some conceptual problems that attend the very la­bel given this field. In parts II, III, and IV, we take up, respectively, three broad classes of concerns that arise in the context of synthetic biology: con­cerns about the intrinsic or inherent value of do­ing synthetic biology, concerns about the concrete harms and benefits of doing synthetic biology, and concerns about justice. Addressing these concerns requires a method for bringing the public's values to bear on policy‐making concerning emerging biotechnologies; in part V, we discuss the chal­lenges in developing such a method. (shrink)

Both articles in the November‐December 2021 issue of the Hastings Center Report reflect bioethics’ growing interest in questions of justice, or more generally, questions of how collective interests constrain individual interests. Hugh Desmond argues that human enhancement should be reconsidered in light of developments in the field of human evolution. Contemporary understandings in this area lead, he argues, to a new way of thinking about the ethics of enhancement—an approach that replaces personal autonomy with group benefit as the primary criterion (...) for deciding what enhancements are acceptable. In the second article, Johannes Kniess considers the many attempts within bioethics to draw on John Rawls's work to discuss health care access and social determinants of health, and he comes across as moderately optimistic that Rawls's theory of justice has ongoing relevance. (shrink)

A competent person can avoid the onset of dementia by refusing life‐sustaining medical care and by voluntarily stopping eating and drinking, bringing life to an end well before any health crisis. A competent person can also try to limit the duration of dementia by drafting an advance directive that sets bounds on the life‐sustaining care, including artificial nutrition and hydration, that medical caregivers can provide when the person no longer has the capacity to make her own medical decisions. But between (...) these two strategies there can lie a significant gap. A person could live with moderate to severe dementia for a considerable time, no longer able to voluntarily stop eating and drinking yet also not yet requiring the life‐sustaining care forbidden by advance directive.This gap has been much discussed in recent years in the Hastings Center Report. Several years ago (in the May‐June 2014 issue), Paul Menzel and M. Colette Chandler‐Cramer argued for what they described as a moderate correction to the dominant view that food and water should always be offered to a patient with dementia if the patient expresses a desire to eat and drink. The problem is taken up again by the legal scholar Norman L. Cantor in this issue (July‐August 2018), and Cantor, too, tries to find a moderate alternative. (shrink)

The lead article in this issue of the Hastings Center Report explores the ideas underpinning the Precision Medicine Initiative, the effort announced by President Obama in 2015 to promote the development of treatments adjusted to genetic and other variations. Authors Maya Sabatello and Paul Appelbaum hold that the effort works by appealing to a sense of collective identity and shared commitment—an understanding that they call the “PMI nation.” But what are the moral implications of this idea? Sabatello and Appelbaum's question (...) about the impact of an imagined community is an unusual way of exploring a set of values questions. In the second article, Johann Brännmark defends what is, at least in bioethics, an unusual philosophical framework for moral values. Brännmark starts by calling attention to large, never-quite-solved problems with the field's going way of understanding personhood and autonomy, and then argues that the body of tradition, law, and international governance known as the human-rights framework offers a solution to those problems. And a supplement to this issue offers a set of essays on a topic outside the usual range for bioethics: the prospect of “de-extinction”—that is, of using genetic and reproductive technologies to construct simulacra of extinct animals that might eventually be introduced into the wild. (shrink)

Hastings Center Report, Volume 51, Issue 5, Page 2-2, September‐October 2021.

: A comparison of casuistry with the strain of particularism developed by John McDowell and David Wiggins suggests that casuistry is susceptible to two very different mistakes. First, as sometimes developed, casuistry tends toward an implausible rigidity and systematization of moral knowledge. Particularism offers a corrective to this error. Second, however, casuistry tends sometimes to present moral knowledge as insufficiently systematized: It often appears to hold that moral deliberation is merely a kind of perception. Such a perceptual model of deliberation (...) cannot offer a convincing account of the possibility of moral progress. This second problem is one to which particularism is itself prone. To redress it, other aspects of casuistry must be exploited: Casuistry contains an account of presumptive generalizations that explains how moral deliberation might be structured by rules while also depending at critical junctures on perception. (shrink)

This book introduces an important group of logics that have come to be known under the umbrella term 'susbstructural'. Substructural logics have independently led to significant developments in philosophy, computing and linguistics. _An Introduction to Substrucural Logics_ is the first book to systematically survey the new results and the significant impact that this class of logics has had on a wide range of fields.The following topics are covered: * Proof Theory * Propositional Structures * Frames * Decidability * Coda Both (...) students and professors of philosophy, computing, linguistics, and mathematics will find this to be an important addition to their reading. (shrink)

The emergence of de‐extinction is a study in technological optimism. What has already been accomplished in recovering ancient genomes, recreating them, and reproducing animals with engineered genomes is amazing but also has a long ways to go to achieve “de‐extinction” as most people would understand that term. Still, with some caveats in place, creating a functional replacement for an extinct species may sometimes be doable, and given the right goals, might sometimes make sense. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (...) guidelines for de‐extinction do a reasonable job of keeping the caveats in place and clarifying the goals. In fact, given the right caveats about what de‐extinction can accomplish, we should pay a lot of attention to the technology and should think carefully about the goals. Not only has the technology been advancing, but our environmental standards have been getting looser and more flexible, providing less guidance for implementing the technology. The guiding ideals for conservation are often explained as a choice between John Muir, founder of The Sierra Club, and Gifford Pinchot, who helped create the U.S. Forest Service. Muir argued for preserving some places in the world in their natural state because of their great value and beauty. Pinchot, by contrast, was bluntly utilitarian. He argued for trying to keep some natural places more or less undamaged so that we could use them later. There has long been dissatisfaction with this choice, and in the last couple of decades, a number of prominent voices have proposed a “gardening ethic” as a new standard that combines elements of Muir and Pinchot. A gardening ethic is supposed to both celebrate the land and declare that it must now be managed. But what would good gardening mean when it comes to de‐extinction? (shrink)

In an attempt to address the theoretical gap between linguistics and philosophy, a group of semanticists, calling itself the Generic Group, has worked to develop a common view of genericity. Their research has resulted in this book, which consists of a substantive introduction and eleven original articles on important aspects of the interpretation of generic expressions. The introduction provides a clear overview of the issues and synthesizes the major analytical approaches to them. Taken together, the papers that follow reflect the (...) current state of the art in the semantics of generics, and afford insight into various generic phenomena. (shrink)

An advanced-level logic textbook that presents proof construction on equal footing with model building. Potentially relevant to students of mathematics and computer science as well.

This paper concerns a key point of decision in Donald Davidson's early work in philosophy of language — a fateful decision that set him and the discourse in the area on the path of truth-theoretic semantics. The decision of moment is the one Davidson makes when, in the face of a certain barrier, he gives up on the idea of constructing an explicit meaning theory that would parallel Tarski's recursive way with truth theory. For Davidson there was little choice: he (...) tells us he does not see how to deal with the difficulty except in the radical way he proposes. But there is a way to give such a meaning theory — a meaning theory proper which, using classical logic only, meets a meaning-theoretic analogue of Convention T, satisfies Davidson’s three key desiderata for a theory of meaning, reflects linguistic competence, and avoids quantifying over meanings. The meaning theory sketched here uses Tarskian strategies, as Davidson proposed, but differs from Davidson's approach in not going by way of a truth theory for the target language. (shrink)

The release of genetically engineered organisms into the shared environment raises scientific, ethical, and societal issues. Using some form of democratic deliberation to provide the public with a voice on the policies that govern these technologies is important, but there has not been enough attention to how we should connect public deliberation to the existing regulatory process. Drawing on lessons from previous public deliberative efforts by U.S. federal agencies, we identify several practical issues that will need to be addressed if (...) relevant federal agencies are to undertake public deliberative activities to inform decision‐making about gene editing in the wild. We argue that, while agencies may have institutional capacity to undertake public deliberative activities, there may not be sufficient political support for them to do so. Advocates of public deliberation need to make a stronger case to Congress about why federal agencies should be encouraged and supported to conduct public deliberations. (shrink)

The stock market crash of 1987 had a profound effect on corporate Australia and the Australian community in general. The fall-out revealed that some of our most respected business figures had not been as ethical, or even as lawful, as we would have hoped. This impropriety produced in Australia an awakening to business ethics. Whilst many companies endeavoured to introduce ethical practices into their corporations, they perceived ethics as a way of minimising damage to the corporation and in some cases (...) as a means of competitive advantage. What was lost was the reason that one should embark on business ethics; and that is to make the society and corporate Australia a more ethical place in which to exist.This paper proposes a model based on 2 factors: commitment and partnerships, as a means of enabling corporate Australia to refocus attention on the main purpose of being inherently ethical in all that we do. This ethical model requires a commitment to partnerships with all stakeholders both internal and external in an attempt to enhance the level of ethical business practices that are contemplated and pursued within corporate Australia. Whilst the research agenda and the information collected is Australian-based, it is hoped that the ideas contained within this paper will have a wider appeal to corporations in similar cultural settings. (shrink)

Hastings Center Report, Volume 52, Issue 5, Page 2-2, September–October 2022.

I was recently asked to report on editorial trends in the Hastings Center Report, past and future. What I reported is that HCR has been going in two seemingly contrasting directions. One has to do with moral decision‐making in clinical ethics—the core theme in bioethics for fifty years, but still developing. A second editorial trend is treatment of larger social and political issues that bear on health, such as public health interventions and access to health care. I could also have (...) noted a continuing stream of pieces on emerging technologies, from whole‐genome screening for newborns to artificial intelligence in clinical diagnoses to the so‐called de‐extinction of extinct animals and plants through various genetic and reproductive tricks. This January‐February 2019 issue of HCR reflects all these trends. (shrink)

Two articles in the March‐April 2021 issue of the Hastings Center Report consider alterations to traditional informed consent. In “The Consent Continuum: A New Model of Consent, Assent, and Nondissent for Primary Care,” Marc Tunzi and colleagues argue that, in primary care settings, patient consent should be understood as taking a range of forms depending on the procedure, the patient, and the patient‐care context. Traditional informed consent is at the ceremonious end; for many things done in these settings, the authors (...) assert, assent or even nondissent is fine. In the lead article, health policy scholars Stephanie Morain and Emily Largent consider another continuum for informed consent, this one occurring with pragmatic research, at the intersection of clinical care with research. (shrink)

The lead article in this, the September‐October 2020, issue of the Hastings Center Report considers the use of metaphors in communications with clinicians and patients.

The Covid‐19 pandemic has highlighted connections between health and social structural phenomena that have long been recognized in bioethics but have never really been front and center—not just access to health care, but fundamental conditions of living that affect public health, from income inequality to political and environmental conditions. In March, as the pandemic spread globally, the field's traditional focus on health care and health policy, medical research, and biotechnology no longer seemed enough. The adequacy of bioethics seemed even less (...) certain after the killing of George Floyd, whose homicide showed in an especially agonizing way how social institutions are in effect (and often intentionally) designed to make the lives of black people go poorly and end early. Whether bioethics needs to be expanded, redirected, and even reconceived is at the heart of the May‐June 2020 issue of the Hastings Center Report, which is devoted to questions provoked by and lessons emerging during this pandemic. (shrink)

Good ethics start with good facts, as Tom Murray, past president of Hastings, often said when he was here, and that alone might be enough to declare that fields like genetic science and synthetic biology warrant their own subfields of ethics—“genethics” and “synthethics.” Perhaps getting clear on how genetic science might be used to improve human health requires such deep immersion in the genetic science that those studying the science's ethical implications are in effect in a subfield of ethics. A (...) further issue is whether the ethical questions about the scientific facts in a nascent field are new. (shrink)

Advancing neuroscience is one of many topics that pose a challenge often called “the alignment problem”—the challenge, that is, of assuring that science policy is responsive to and in some sense squares with the public's values. This issue of the Hastings Center Report launches a series of scholarly essays and articles on the ethical and social issues raised by this vast body of medical research and bench science. The series, which will run under the banner “Neuroscience and Society,” is supported (...) by the Dana Foundation and seeks to promote deliberative public engagement, broadly understood, about neuroscience. As a social goal, deliberative public engagement is both ubiquitous and elusive—called for everywhere yet difficult to undertake at a national level on a complex scientific topic. To be meaningful, deliberative public engagement must occur in many locations in a society and be carried forward by many actors. Scholarly writing might contribute in several ways. (shrink)