Many high-risk medical devices earn US marketing approval based on limited premarket clinical evaluation that leaves important questions unanswered. Rigorous postmarket surveillance includes registries that actively collect and maintain information defined by individual patient exposures to particular devices. Several prominent registries for cardiovascular devices require enrolment as a condition of reimbursement for the implant procedure, without informed consent. In this article, we focus on whether these registries, separate from their legal requirements, have an ethical obligation to obtain informed consent from (...) enrolees, what is lost in not doing so, and the ways in which seeking and obtaining consent might strengthen postmarket surveillance in the USA. (shrink)

The “right to repair” movement highlights opportunities to reduce health care costs and promote public health resilience through increased competition in the way in which medical devices are serviced and updated over their lifespan. We review legislative and legal facets of third-party repair of medical devices, and conclude with specific recommendations to help this market function more efficiently to the benefit of patients and health care systems.

California has focused on health equity in the state’s COVID-19 reopening plan. The Blueprint for a Safer Economy assigns each of California’s 58 counties into 1 of 4 tiers based on 2 metrics: test positivity rate and adjusted case rate. To advance to the next less-restrictive tier, counties must meet that tier’s test positivity and adjusted case rate thresholds. In addition, counties must have a plan for targeted investments within disadvantaged communities, and counties with more than 106 000 residents must (...) meet an equity metric. California's explicit incorporation of health equity into its reopening plan underscores the interrelated fate of its residents during the COVID-19 pandemic and creates incentives for action. This article evaluates the benefits and challenges of this novel health equity focus, and outlines recommendations for other US states to address disparities in their reopening plans. (shrink)

Academic social scientists overwhelmingly vote Democratic, and the Democratic hegemony has increased significantly since 1970. Moreover, the policy preferences of a large sample of the members of the scholarly associations in anthropology, economics, history, legal and political philosophy, political science, and sociology generally bear out conjectures about the correspondence of partisan identification with left/right ideal types; although across the board, both Democratic and Republican academics favor government action more than the ideal types might suggest. Variations in policy views among Democrats (...) is smaller than among Republicans. Ideological diversity (as judged not only by voting behavior, but by policy views) is by far the greatest within economics. Social scientists who deviate from left‐wing views are as likely to be libertarian as conservative. (shrink)

Recent studies challenge the classical view that the origin of animal life was primarily controlled by atmospheric oxygen levels. For example, some modern sponges, representing early‐branching animals, can live under 200 times less oxygen than currently present in the atmosphere – levels commonly thought to have been maintained prior to their origination. Furthermore, it is increasingly argued that the earliest animals, which likely lived in low oxygen environments, played an active role in constructing the well‐oxygenated conditions typical of the modern (...) oceans. Therefore, while oxygen is still relevant to understanding early animal evolution, the relationships between the two might be less straightforward than previously thought. (shrink)

Pioneering biblical critic, theorist of democracy, and legendary conflater of God and nature, Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) was excommunicated by the Sephardic Jews of Amsterdam in 1656 for his "horrible heresies" and "monstrous deeds." Yet, over the past three centuries, Spinoza's rupture with traditional Jewish beliefs and practices has elevated him to a prominent place in genealogies of Jewish modernity. The First Modern Jew provides a riveting look at how Spinoza went from being one of Judaism's most notorious outcasts (...) to one of its most celebrated, if still highly controversial, cultural icons, and a powerful and protean symbol of the first modern secular Jew. Ranging from Amsterdam to Palestine and back again to Europe, the book chronicles Spinoza's posthumous odyssey from marginalized heretic to hero, the exemplar of a whole host of Jewish identities, including cosmopolitan, nationalist, reformist, and rejectionist. Daniel Schwartz shows that in fashioning Spinoza into "the first modern Jew," generations of Jewish intellectuals -German liberals, East European maskilim, secular Zionists, and Yiddishists- have projected their own dilemmas of identity onto him, reshaping the Amsterdam thinker in their own image. The many afterlives of Spinoza are a kind of looking glass into the struggles of Jewish writers over where to draw the boundaries of Jewishness and whether a secular Jewish identity is indeed possible. Cumulatively, these afterlives offer a kaleidoscopic view of modern Jewish culture and a vivid history of an obsession with Spinoza that continues to this day."--Jacket. (shrink)

The use of genomic selection in agricultural animal breeding is in academic literature generally considered an ethically unproblematic development, but some critical views have been offered. Our paper shows that an important preliminary question for any ethical evaluation of genomic selection is how the scope of discussion should be set, that is, which ethical issues and perspectives ought to be considered. This scope is determined by three partly overlapping choices. The first choice is which ethical concepts to include: an ethical (...) discussion of genomic selection approaches may draw on concepts central to applied ethics, but some critical views have been based on concepts from critical animal studies and continental philosophy. A related choice is to what extent discussion should focus on new ethical issues raised or on existing ethical issues that will be ameliorated, perpetuated or aggravated by an innovation in genomic selection. The third choice is to treat an innovation in genomic selection either as a technique on itself or as a part of specific practices. We argue that ethical discussion should not limit attention to new issues or ignore the implications of particular ways of applying genomic selection in practice, and this has some consequences for which ethical concepts ought to be included. Limiting the scope of discussion may be defensible in some contexts, but broader ethical discussion remains necessary. (shrink)

Today’s panel is about the expanding boundary of population health policy, what that expanding boundary has to do with law, and what kinds of challenges and opportunities come out of it. What I want to do for the next few minutes is talk to you about the notion of population health as it exists where law and policy are made, rather than where it exists in a spectacular international theoretical literature. Then I want to introduce our panelists. In the process, (...) I will explain why the Honorable John Nilson, is not with us, which tells you a great deal about not only the real world of the politics of population health, but also about the kind of trouble you can get into if you are a first class lawyer involved in population health. (shrink)

Dealing with major issues in Jewish biomedical law, this book focuses upon the influence of morality, the rise of patient autonomy, and the role played by scientific progress in this area of Jewish Law. The book examines Jewish Law in comparison with canon, common, and modern Israeli law.

This study focuses upon two competing visions of wealth and work among Baptists in America and how these different visions have shaped Baptist business ethics. Russell H. Conwell reflected the Reformed tradition's inclination toward what came to be called the Protestant work ethic and its defense of capitalism. He contended that American capitalism presented an open door for any diligent worker to achieve deserved riches. Walter Rauschenbusch reflected the Anabaptist heritage in the stream of Baptist history. He challenged the dominant (...) ethos of the industrial revolution in America and its preference for the interests of management; he called instead for the protection of the worker from the monopolistic power of the capitalists. These two contrasting postures influenced the response of Baptists to the labor-management struggle. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAdam Smith infused the expression ‘impartial spectator’ with a plexus of related meanings, one of which is a super-being, which bears parallels to monotheistic ideas of God. As for any genuine, identified, human spectator, he can be deemed impartial only presumptively. Such presumptive impartiality as regards the incident does not of itself carry extensive implications about his intelligence, nor about his being aligned with benevolence towards any larger whole. We may posit, however, a being who is impartial and who holds (...) higher levels of intelligence and of benevolence, and then converse over what her sentiments would be about the matter under discussion. It is natural to conceive of a being who is unsurpassable in such qualities, who is morally supreme, and who naturally takes the definite article the without having been definitized by the writer. Signal passages, new to edition 6, suggest that Smith formulates the man within the breast as a representative of the always present and everywhere morally supreme impartial spectator. When Smith speaks of the man within the breast as ‘the supposed impartial spectator’, we interpret ‘supposed’ as sup-pos-ed, not sup-pos’d. (shrink)

© The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Scots Philosophical Association and the University of St Andrews. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] richness and originality of Thomas Aquinas’ theory of self-knowledge has been underappreciated no less by his admirers than his critics. The former consider it secondary to his teaching on cognition in general, and the latter dismiss it as scholastic triviality. Cory wishes to restore Aquinas’ theory of self-knowledge to its rightful (...) place, and to do so she must provide both its historical context and the theoretical implications it has for Aquinas’ anthropology and epistemology.Cory's basic premise is that Aquinas needed to maintain both that the intellect can know itself only by cognizing something else and that it has no explicit awareness of anything outside itself without implicit awareness of itself. To elaborate this ‘fundamental duality’ of conscious thought,... (shrink)

Today’s panel is about the expanding boundary of population health policy, what that expanding boundary has to do with law, and what kinds of challenges and opportunities come out of it. What I want to do for the next few minutes is talk to you about the notion of population health as it exists where law and policy are made, rather than where it exists in a spectacular international theoretical literature. Then I want to introduce our panelists. In the process, (...) I will explain why the Honorable John Nilson, is not with us, which tells you a great deal about not only the real world of the politics of population health, but also about the kind of trouble you can get into if you are a first class lawyer involved in population health. (shrink)

Arguably, no historical thinker has had as varied and fractious a reception within modern Judaism as Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza (1632-77), the seventeenth-century philosopher, pioneering biblical critic, and Jewish heretic from Amsterdam. Revered in many circles as the patron saint of secular Jewishness, he has also been branded as the worst traitor to the Jewish people in modern times. Jewish philosophy has cast Spinoza as marking a turning point between the old and the new, as a radicalizer of the medieval tradition (...) and table setter for the modern. He has served as a perennial landmark and point of reference in the construction of modern Jewish identity. This volume brings together excerpts from central works in the Jewish response to Spinoza. True to the diversity of Spinoza's Jewish reception, it features a mix of genres, from philosophical criticism to historical fiction, from tributes to diary entries, providing the reader with a sense of the overall historical development of Spinoza's posthumous legacy. (shrink)