Racial disparities in health outcomes have recently become a flashpoint in the debate about the value of race as a biological concept. What role, if any, race has in the etiology of disease is a philosophically and scientifically contested topic. In this article, I expand on the insights of the new mechanistic philosophy of science to defend a mechanism discovery approach to investigating epidemiological racial disparities. The mechanism discovery approach has explanatory virtues lacking in the populational approach typically employed in (...) the study of race and biomedicine. The explanatory constraints that form an integral part of the new mechanistic approach enable mechanism discovery to avoid the epistemic and normative shortcomings of the populational approach. The methodology of mechanism discovery can fruitfully be extended to the treatment and reversal of epidemiological racial disparities. (shrink)

According to an influential account of the new mechanistic philosophy of science, entities and activities compose mechanisms. However, the new mechanists have paid too little attention to activities. Critics have charged that accounts of activities in the new mechanism literature are philosophically uninformative and opaque. This paper defends a novel account of causally productive activities, which I call the Hybrid Account, that marries the two dominant philosophical approaches to causation: production and difference-making. The Hybrid Account of Activities (HAA) identifies causally (...) productive activities as robust difference-makers to the next stage of a mechanism. The Hybrid Account provides attractive solutions to causal identification and causal selection problems faced by earlier activities views. (shrink)

Lockdowns were a morally and medically appropriate anti-contagion policy to stop the spread of Covid. However, lockdowns came with considerable costs. Specifically, lockdowns imposed harms and losses upon the young in order to benefit the elderly, who were at the highest risk of severe illness and death from Covid. This represented a shifting of the (epidemiological) burden of Covid for the elderly to a systemic burden of lockdown upon the young. This article argues that even if lockdowns were a morally (...) permissible response to Covid, the harms and losses they imposed on the young ground a claim of compensation. I defend an intergenerational compensation argument that defends a claim for an egalitarian intergenerational transfer to compensate the young for the harms of lockdown. (shrink)

This article approaches the ethical dilemma of healthcare allocation and rationing from the perspective of pragmatist ethics, mainly following John Dewey’s ethics. The moral dilemma of healthcare allocation arises whenever we allocate limited resources, and rationing is a necessary option for distributing available resources. In a broader sense, the moral problems of healthcare allocation also encompass the issue of access to primary healthcare, especially for low-income sections of communities. In this sense, allocation always entails rationing – denying service to someone (...) for the benefit of others. Such aspects of allocation and rationing and the relational aspect of disease and health make the problem morally controversial, which makes it difficult to agree on a principle or principles of allocation and rationing applicable across different contexts. Hence, this paper argues that moral challenges of healthcare rationing ought not to be addressed through the appeal to principles, but rather through deliberation that embraces a more pragmatic and democratic approach to negotiating health resource allocation and rationing. However, this does not mean that moral principles and values are insignificant in healthcare allocation. (shrink)

In 1968, the definition of death in the United States was expanded to include not just death by cardiopulmonary criteria, but also death by neurologic criteria. We explore the way the definition has been modified by the medical and legal communities over the past 50 years and address the medical, legal and ethical controversies associated with the definition at present, with a particular highlight on the Supreme Court of Nevada Case of Aden Hailu.