According to Marshall et al. (2024), some of the patients who refuse to stay in observation after being resuscitated following an opioid overdose are likely not making an autonomous choice. While I do not intend to dispute this claim, it merits discussion what is the concept of autonomy at play in making this assessment. I contend that the concept at work is more substantive than Marshall et al. acknowledge—and more substantive, too, than the form of autonomy usually thought to underpin (...) the moral justification of the requirement of informed consent . (shrink)

As innovations in the field of vascular composite allotransplantation (VCA) progress, whole-eye transplantation (WET) is poised to transition from non-human mammalian models to living human recipients. Present treatment options for vision loss are generally considered suboptimal, and attendant concerns ranging from aesthetics and prosthesis maintenance to social stigma may be mitigated by WET. Potential benefits to WET recipients may also include partial vision restoration, psychosocial benefits related to identity and social integration, improvements in physical comfort and function, and reduced surgical (...) risk associated with a biologic eye compared to a prosthesis. Perioperative and postoperative risks of WET are expected to be comparable to those of facial transplantation (FT), and may be similarly mitigated by immunosuppressive protocols, adequate psychosocial support, and a thorough selection process for both the recipient and donor. To minimize the risks associated with immunosuppressive medications, the first attempts in human recipients will likely be performed in conjunction with a FT. If first-in-human attempts at combined FT-WET prove successful and the biologic eye survives, this opens the door for further advancement in the field of vision restoration by means of a viable surgical option. This analysis integrates recent innovations in WET research with the existing discourse on the ethics of surgical innovation and offers preliminary guidance to VCA programs considering undertaking WET in human recipients. (shrink)

Physicians generally recommend that patients resuscitated with naloxone after opioid overdose stay in the emergency department for a period of observation in order to prevent harm from delayed sequelae of opioid toxicity. Patients frequently refuse this period of observation despiteenefit to risk. Healthcare providers are thus confronted with the challenge of how best to protect the patient’s interests while also respecting autonomy, including assessing whether the patient is making an autonomous choice to refuse care. Previous studies have shown that physicians (...) have widely divergent approaches to navigating these conflicts. This paper reviews what is known about the effects of opioid use disorder on decision-making, and argues that some subset of these refusals are non-autonomous choices, even when patients appear to have decision making capacity. This conclusion has several implications for how physicians assess and respond to patients refusing medical recommendations after naloxone resuscitation. (shrink)

Spitale et al. (2024) address a public health ethics question of great importance: How should governments communicate with the public during public health emergencies? The article highlights severa...

In their target article, “Proposed Principles for International Bioethics Conferencing: Anti-Discriminatory, Global, and Inclusive,” Jecker et al. (2024) highlight the growing international scope o...

Jecker and colleagues open (2024) a critical and needed dialogue about the ethics of international conferencing. In particular, they focus on proposing a set of principles in selecting the location...

For risk and crisis communication in health emergencies and for the management of infodemics, now is the time to intervene. A time that precedes the arrival of the next health emergency and a time...

Understanding how research participants, and by extension, the wider community, perceive and evaluate the risks of research interventions is of paramount importance. The current study (Dawson et al...

The case (Dawson et al. 2024) raises tensions between the ethical demands of respect for patient autonomy, patients’ clinical needs, and research to improve clinical care. Given burn patients’ urge...

This case is about a study of burn patients that included a request to the IRB for a waiver of consent for perianal specimen collection–a request which ultimately was not approved by a reviewing IR...

We appreciate that the theme “ethics of ethics conferences” that we introduced in 2023 (Van der Graaf et al. 2023) was echoed by the previous and current presidents of the International Association...

The case (Dawson et al. 2024) describes an Institutional Review Board (IRB) chair who seeks consultation about waiving the requirement that investigators obtain prospective, informed consent for co...

There are few moral principles less controversial than “don’t touch people’s private parts without consent.” Though the principle doesn’t make explicit that there are exceptions, there clearly are some. Parents must wipe their infants. If an unconscious patient is admitted to the emergency room with a profusely bleeding laceration on their genitals, a doctor must give them stitches. The researchers who proposed the study in question, which would look for a connection between burn patients’ microbiomes and their clinical outcomes, presumably (...) believed they had identified an additional exception to the aforementioned principle. I argue that they did not. Rather, because of their tremendous inherent risks, we ought only to perform intimate procedures on those who can’t consent when the procedure is for their own good. -/- Intimate violations have been overlooked in both philosophy and medicine. Because of this, we have lacked an adequate conceptual framework for identifying certain kinds of harms research can inflict. When we understand these special risks, we see that the IRB was right to deny a waiver of consent. (shrink)

In their paper titled “Proposed Principles for International Bioethics Conferencing: Anti-Discriminatory, Global, and Inclusive,” Jecker et al. eloquently present essential principles for Internati...

Jecker, et al., argue against rejecting a location for an international bioethics conference based on a “litmus test” for several reasons, ranging from the practical to the theoretical. However, th...

The ethical restatement of the “risk and crisis communication in public health emergency” (PHERCC) matrix by Spitale et al. (2024) is a step up from mainstream approaches like the Crisis and Emerge...

In a town near mine, a small business owner used their changeable-letter sign to wage a public protest against a variety of restrictions implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic. Unlike a great man...

Despite the promise of international collaboration and sharing by bringing together bioethicists from throughout the world at the 2024 IAB conference in Qatar, I will not be attending. The authors...

Spitale, Germani, and Biller-Andorno’s (2024) PHERCC matrix sets out a useful and systematic framework for risk and crisis communication in public health emergencies. A problem in ensuring effective messaging is the extent to which the messaging environment is *quiet* or *noisy*: in other words, whether or not a message has to *compete with other messages* at the same time. I use the example of the UK’s experience during COVID-19, which was marked by tensions between the devolved regional governments—and consequently divergent (...) policy responses—which sowed confusion among the populace. More generally, if policymakers try to account for the needs of competing publics simultaneously (in order to meet the inclusivity and understandability principles), this may increase the noise problem and so actually undermine effective public health messaging. The issue of noisy messaging environments reveals a tradeoff between inclusivity and understandability versus effectiveness in risk and crisis communication. (shrink)

In “Materialized Oppression in Medical Tools and Technologies”, we show how oppression can be inscribed in medical devices. We consider oximeters and spirometers, drawing heavily on the work of anthropologist Amy Moran-Thomas and historian Lundy Braun. Both devices encode racial biases: oximeters because they do not correct for race, and spirometers because they do. We zoom out from these particular devices to examine a wide range of tools and technologies, and we build a theoretical framework that covers not only race (...) but other axes of oppression: gender, ability, class, etc. -/- We are inspired by the peer commentaries and the guest editorial, and we are grateful to the contributors for engaging with our work and sharing their expertise. Their responses to our target article advance our understanding in three directions. First, a set of responses contextualize our framework within the histories of medicine, bioethics, and science and technology studies. Second, a set of responses provide additional examples of oppressive medical tools and technologies: not only material artifacts like oximeters and spirometers, but also spatial environments like inpatient psychiatric units, and cognitive niches comprised of digital technologies like electronic medical records and medical data classifications. Third, a set of responses propose countermeasures: operationalizing anti-oppressive practices for device design and testing; mapping the complex causal relationships involved in real-world problems; and repairing the harms done by materialized oppression through racism-conscious praxis. We reply to these three sets of responses—respectively, the “past, present, and future” of oppressive medical objects and spaces—in what follows. (shrink)

Jecker et al. (2024) offer seven principles with which to guide conference organizers and assess how ethically a conference is organized. While focused on bioethics, these principles are relevant t...

What is the purpose of a large academic meeting attended by hundreds or thousands of participants? What are the reasons, given current virtual conferencing technology, to hold such meetings in pers...

It is a common misconception that individuals act rationally and according to their interests—numerous examinations of human psychology have proven that this is not the case (Tversky and Kahneman 1...

Where should we meet? This may seem like a trivial decision, mostly focused on convenience. However, location can represent integral values, attitudes, and priorities. Especially when the meeting i...

After giving the name “burnout” to the experience of being overworked and undervalued and the physician and patient suffering that comes from it, many clinicians have sought to elucidate further wh...

Spitale, Germani, and Biller-Andorno (2024) have proposed a comprehensive framework for navigating the ethical dilemmas associated with risk and crisis communication (RCC) during public health emer...

The IAB’s selection of the Qatar-based Research Center for Islamic Legislation & Ethics (CILE) for hosting the 2024 World Congress of Bioethics does not leave the international bioethics community...

Some of my colleagues will sadly not be attending the IAB World Congress in Qatar. Amongst other things, they wish to take a stand against Qatar’s human rights record and the treatment of women and...

In “Proposed Principles for International Bioethics Conferencing: Anti-Discriminatory, Global, and Inclusive” the authors offer a framework for assessing the ethics of international bioethics confe...

In a commentary published in Bioethics I defended Qatar as the location of the 2024 World Congress of Bioethics (Schuklenk 2023). I have since, reluctantly, changed my views on this.This brief resp...

The upcoming World Congress of Bioethics (WCB) will take place in Qatar in 2024. In response to criticism regarding this location, The international Association of Bioethics (IAB) board members exp...

Spitale, Germani, and Biller-Andorno (2024) presented an ethical framework for managing risk and crisis communication (RCC) during public health emergencies (PHE) in their recent paper. They advoca...

The risk and crisis communication process in public health emergencies (PHERCC, public health emergency risk and crisis communication) matrix, as proposed by Spitale, Germani, and Biller-Andorno (2...

Bioethics, as a field, grapples with ethical implications of biological and medical advancements. The global nature of these challenges necessitates international collaboration and discourse. At th...

Jecker et al. (2024) propose seven ethical principles to guide international bioethics conferencing, applying them to the selection of Qatar as the location for the 2024 World Congress of Bioethics...

Biomedicine in recent decades has been defined by an increasing tendency to turn social problems into biomedical questions. Precision or personalized health initiatives have gained attention due to...

In their target article, Galasso (2024) highlights the limitations of upstream inclusion in precision medicine research to produce downstream benefits to participants and proposes precision public...

Ray and Cooper (2024) present a clear and compelling argument for giving greater prioritization to environmental injustice in the work we do as bioethicists. Their discussion of justice and vulnera...

Keisha Ray and Jane Falls Cooper’s article “Bioethics of Environmental Injustice: Ethical, Legal, and Clinical Implications of Unhealthy Environments” seeks to give environmental concerns greater p...

Dr. Galasso’s (2024) insightful article expands the ongoing debate on the utility and equity of precision medicine in public and population health. The initiatives mentioned, Genomics England and t...

Galasso (2024) provides a strong critique of precision medicine research initiatives regarding their potential for the exclusion of populations based on upstream and downstream factors with “Genomi...

Precision medicine (PM) and genomics are increasingly scrutinized through the lens of health inequities. This is a welcome development for a field that, while concerned with health-related differen...

As climate change risks intensify, I welcome Ray and Cooper’s call for bioethicists to engage with environmental injustice, though I am pessimistic it is another false dawn for bioethics engagement...

In “The Bioethics of Environmental Injustice,” Ray and Cooper (2024) lay out compelling arguments to increase attention to environmental health within bioethics. Advocacy is crucial, they argue, co...

In the article, “Precision Medicine for Whom? Public Health Outputs from “Genomics England” and “All of Us” to Make Up for Upstream and Downstream Exclusion,” Galasso focuses on how marginalized pe...

Galasso calls for “the actualization of the public health potential of precision medicine….as the best realistic contribution to health equity” (Galasso 2024, 83). Unfortunately, this is wishful th...

In “The Bioethics of Environmental Injustice: Ethical, Legal, and Clinical Implications of Unhealthy Environments,” Keisha Ray and Jane Fallis Cooper argue that one aspect of environmental health h...

Ray and Cooper (2024) argue for the need to incorporate the fight for environmental justice into the bioethics agenda. While they convincingly argue that the principle of justice involves environme...

In their article “The Bioethics of Environmental Injustice: Ethical, Legal, and Clinical Implications of Unhealthy Environments,” Ray and Cooper (2024) invite us to prioritize environmental health...

Ray and Cooper (2024) argue that bioethicists should take environmental justice seriously as a matter of health justice; as part of this project, they defend a legal right to a healthy environment....

In this reply to our commentators, we respond to ethical concerns raised about the potential use (or misuse) of personalized LLMs for academic idea and prose generation, including questions about c...

The environmental movement has brought attention to the reality that we are not only connected to the natural world, but the ways in which we transform nature have a significant impact on our well-...

We’re grateful for the thoughtful and incisive commentaries on our article, “Ethical Responsibilities for Companies that Process Personal Data” (McCoy et al. 2023). In the article, we propose the E...

We wish to extend the concepts in Ray and Cooper’s (2024) article entitled “The Bioethics of Environmental Injustice: Ethical, Legal, and Clinical Implications of Unhealthy Environments” to palliat...

In “The Bioethics of Environmental Injustice: Ethical, Legal, and Clinical Implications of Unhealthy Environments,” Keisha Ray and Jane Cooper (2024) assert that bioethicists have an obligation to...

We applaud Ray and Cooper (2024) for emphasizing environmental health as a bioethics issue. As a team of interdisciplinary pediatric researchers and providers who are part of an institutional clima...

The environmental justice movement began in 1982, when residents of Shocco Township, a low-income, African-American community located in Warren County, North Carolina, protested the state’s plan to...

There are compelling scientific, political, historical, legal, and ethical reasons why the All of Us research program participants should reflect the population of the United States. Many commentat...

Galasso (2024) shares findings from narrative analyses of relevant constituting material of and interviews with leaders in two national precision medicine research (PMR) programs: 100KGP of Genomic...

In her paper, Galasso contends that transitioning precision medicine from its current emphasis on healthcare benefits, to a focus on precision public health, may help address the equity concerns th...

Rising temperatures, increased frequency and intensity of storms, and other extreme climate events clearly indicate that we are living in an era of dramatic climate change. The impacts of pollution...

The inclusion of members of structurally marginalized communities in data-intensive innovation initiatives, such as precision medicine projects, is an urgent contemporary issue. On the one hand, th...

In “The Bioethics of Environmental Injustice: Ethical, Legal, and Clinical Implications of Unhealthy Environments,” Ray and Cooper (2024) initiate needed discourse on environmental justice and the...

In their recent article, scholars Keisha Ray and Jane Fallis Cooper claim that “bioethicists should not be deterred from advocating for a healthy environment […] instead, […] underscore the importa...

Environmental issues are rarely present in mainstream bioethics; the situation is somewhat better with feminist bioethics. The problem, then, is allowing a feminist perspective into mainstream bioe...

Galasso (2024) helpfully puts her finger on what is perhaps the most troubling feature of precision medicine research today: Champions of the science are targeting communities of color and other ma...

In “The Bioethics of Environmental Injustice: Ethical, Legal, and Clinical Implications of Unhealthy Environments,” Ray and Cooper (2024) advocate for environmental law efforts, with a focus on the...

Ray and Cooper (2024) make a very compelling argument for vastly increasing bioethicists’ engagement with environmental justice. I strongly support this proposal and agree with their arguments. Yet...

Galasso (2024) reiterates the problem of medical research being grounded on data from people with European ancestry and subsequently describes efforts made by the All of Us Research Program in the...

Reducing health disparities and improving health outcomes are fundamental principles in global health. Environmental justice remains underrecognized and undervalued as a key driver of health dispar...

Minkoff et al.’s contention that Dobbs threatens pregnant women’s right to refuse medical treatments that would risk the embryo’s life offers a bracing set of challenges to ethicists who affirm the...

Shen et al.'s (2024) novel 3 × 3 ethical framework aims to facilitate “study-by-study decisions about returning individual research results (IRRs) from digital phenotyping in psychiatry.” The frame...

Shen et al. (2024) present a new and updated framework on the ethical, social, and legal implications of returning individual research results (IRRs) in digital phenotyping psychiatric research. Th...

We share Minkoff et al.’s (2024) concern regarding the potential disavowal of pregnant patients’ right to refuse medical interventions, without or against their explicit consent, aimed at preservin...

Once anesthetized, patients are inherently “compliant” with surgical interventions because they can no longer intervene on their own behalf. In their target article, Minkoff et al. (2024) reasonabl...

In their article, ‘The Two Front War on Reproductive Rights,’ Minkoff, Vullikanti, and Marshall (2024) highlight the challenges faced by pregnant persons following the overturn of Roe v. Wade (Dobb...

The Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization plunged the United States into a devastating public health crisis. While we have some evidence of the deep harms that ab...

The authors of the Target article, Shen and colleagues (2024) argue that there is a need for an ethical framework to help analyze when it is appropriate to return individualized research results (I...

Howard Minkoff, Raaga Unmesha Vullikanti and Mary Faith Marshall argue that the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization not only undermines the right to abortion b...

In March of 2021, a woman named Ashley Caswell was arrested in Etowah County, Alabama after testing positive for methamphetamine (Levin 2023). Ms. Caswell was two months pregnant and was arrested f...

Shen et al. (2024) provide a valuable framework for returning IRRs from digital phenotyping (hereafter IRRs) and note its potential for negative effects (through fueling public- and/or self-stigma)...

Minkoff, Vullikanti, and Marshall (2024) warn that the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v Wade and Planned Parenthood v Casey, did more than eliminate a nationwide right to...

Minkoff et al. (2024) discuss the potential deprivation of medical liberties against pregnant persons following Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health. Another consideration is how Dobbs may impact physic...

Volume 24, Issue 2, February 2024, Page W1-W1.

While the intellectual challenge of digital phenotyping (DP) has evolved from data collection to more complex data analysis (Onnela 2021), core ethical considerations remain centered on patient pri...

The authors of “The Two Front War on Reproductive Rights” make a profoundly important observation—“Because zygotes, embryos and fetuses early in gestation are neither viable nor independent without...

Three thousand belligerents, mostly belonging to the military arm of Hamas, stormed Southern Israel on October 7th, 2023. Along with 3,000 rockets fired at Israel from Gaza, these belligerents inva...

Feminist bioethicists have long shed light on the indignities and injustice of reproductive intrusions, be they coerced gestation or forced interventions during pregnancy and birth. Writing about t...

Minkoff, Vullikanti, and Marshall (2024) worry that assumptions about fetal personhood used to justify states’ restrictions on a pregnant person’s right to request certain interventions (i.e. abort...

The integration of digital phenotyping in psychiatry promises unprecedented insights into mental health, particularly in college settings where mental well-being is a growing concern. The COVID-19...

While the 2022 Supreme Court of the United States decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization may bring the contingent rights of pregnant people to refuse interventions into sharper foc...

The loss of the federally protected constitutional right to an abortion is a threat to the already tenuous autonomy of pregnant people, and may augur future challenges to their right to refuse unwanted obstetric interventions. Even before Roe’s demise, pregnancy led to constraints on autonomy evidenced by clinician-led legal incursions against patients who refused obstetric interventions. In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court found that the right to liberty espoused in the Constitution does not extend to a (...) pregnant person’s right to an abortion. With Roe’s demise, the right to request specific types of care has been vitiated. The same argument underpinning that holding may now become ballast for attacks on the traditionally more robust right, the right to refuse. Here we discuss how the elevation of fetal and embryonic rights may lead to a cascade of medical intrusions and deprivations of liberty against pregnant persons, and offer an argument opposing these improprieties. (shrink)

Shen et al. (2024) have articulated the many opportunities as well as notable challenges associated with the emerging practice of returning individual research results (IRR) specific to digital phe...

The Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization Supreme Court decision not only upended constitutional protections for abortion in the United States but also bolstered legislative and cultural int...

Perhaps I am wrong to take this article personally, but when the authors refer to Cassandras “voicing concern about a post-Roe degradation of pregnant persons’ right to chart their own medical cour...

We applaud Shen et al. (2024) for offering a framework to address how to return research results from digital phenotyping within the discipline of psychiatry. However, given the value-laden nature...

As Minkoff, Vullikanti, and Marshall (2024) note, pregnancy has long been the basis for dismissal of individual rights. It is important to note that Roe did not grant full bodily autonomy to the ge...

In the wake of the Supreme Court Decision, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Minkoff, Vullikanti, and Marshall (2024) argue that the unraveling of the constitutional right to abortion t...

Psychiatry is rapidly adopting digital phenotyping and artificial intelligence/machine learning tools to study mental illness based on tracking participants’ locations, online activity, phone and text message usage, heart rate, sleep, physical activity, and more. Existing ethical frameworks for return of individual research results (IRRs) are inadequate to guide researchers for when, if, and how to return this unprecedented number of potentially sensitive results about each participant’s real-world behavior. To address this gap, we convened an interdisciplinary expert working group, supported by (...) a National Institute of Mental Health grant. Building on established guidelines and the emerging norm of returning results in participant-centered research, we present a novel framework specific to the ethical, legal, and social implications of returning IRRs in digital phenotyping research. Our framework offers researchers, clinicians, and Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) urgently needed guidance, and the principles developed here in the context of psychiatry will be readily adaptable to other therapeutic areas. (shrink)

In their thoughtful paper, Shen et al. (2024) discuss optimal solutions to address the challenge of returning individual research results from digital phenotyping in psychiatry. Their conclusion to...

Minkoff, Vullikanit, and Marshall (2024) have advanced critical dialogue about the agency of pregnant persons, highlighting serious issues about the erosion of reproductive rights and the fall of R...

Anti-abortion proponents argue that a fetus holds the status of a person akin to healthy adult human beings. The fetus possesses inherent dignity and a fundamental right to life, which must be resp...

After the Supreme Court overturned Roe in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, legal commentators and bioethicists asked whether other constitutional rights were on the chopping block (Coh...

Is it time to ditch the concept of “person” from practical fields, like bioethics? Blumenthal-Barby (2024) answers in the affirmative. They urge leaving personhood out of practical debates at the f...

Ariane Lewis provided an insightful review of several controversial cases of death by neurologic criteria (“brain death”) in the UK, focusing on Archie Battersbee, a boy whose tragic illness provok...

The concept of personhood has been central to bioethics debates about abortion, the treatment of patients in a vegetative or minimally conscious states, as well as patients with advanced dementia. More recently, the concept has been employed to think about new questions related to human-brain organoids, artificial intelligence, uploaded minds, human-animal chimeras, and human embryos, to name a few. A common move has been to ask what these entities have in common with persons (in the normative sense), and then draw (...) conclusions about what we do (or do not) owe them. This paper argues that at best the concept of “personhood” is unhelpful to much of bioethics today and at worst it is harmful and pernicious. I suggest that we (bioethicists) stop using the concept of personhood and instead ask normative questions more directly (e.g., how ought we to treat this being and why?) and use other philosophical concepts (e.g., interests, sentience, recognition respect) to help us answer them. It is time for bioethics to end talk about personhood. (shrink)

In her paper titled “The End of Personhood,” Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby (2024) takes a swipe at the functionalist account of personhood. The problem with the functionalist view of personhood is that...

In the last two decades, stem cell-based brain organoids have been developed to study disease mechanisms in various neurological, psychiatric, and developmental disorders. Simultaneously, there hav...

Responding to the nurse’s moral distress in this case depends on a deeper understanding of the source. It is possible that there is concern that resuscitation is morally wrong—perhaps because it wo...

In “The End of Personhood” Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby raises an important question about the concept of personhood—whether it is useful in bioethics—while encouraging the employment of more specific...

In her interesting paper on cross-jurisdictional legal approaches to brain death, Ariane Lewis considers whether informed consent is required for DNC testing in the UK, and proposes that it is not...

In her excellent essay, Blumenthal-Barby (2024) argues that it is “time for bioethics to end talk of personhood.” She is concerned, more specifically, with “the philosophical concept of personhood,...

As the author of a book entitled The Nature of Human Persons: Metaphysics and Bioethics (Eberl 2020), one might reasonably expect me to lament Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby’s (2024) call to end the use...

Healthcare providers have a professional obligation to protect vulnerable patients from harm. An extension of that obligation is the legal mandate in the United States to report any concerns about...

Blumenthal-Barby (2024) argues that the concept of personhood should not be used in bioethics, and part of her justification is that personhood is not consistent with the public’s values. In this c...

We were delighted to be asked by the editors of the American Journal of Bioethics to provide this editorial in response to Dr. Ariane Lewis’s paper “An Overview of Ethical Issues Raised by Medicole...

The term “personhood” has a long history and is deeply rooted in the bioethical debate. Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby argues that bioethicists should abandon the concept of personhood, because “‘person...

When we consider some controversies among scholars about whether brainstem death is death, we should clearly identify what the controversy is about. Is it about whether the brainstem dead can be ca...

The concept of personhood has outlived its usefulness for bioethics, says Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby (2024). The concept of personhood has been important to the bioethics literature from fairly earl...

Blumenthal-Barby (2024) argues for the discarding of the longstanding standard personhood criteria of bioethicists in assessing the ethical status of new and innovative human-like systems in favor...

Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby argues the concept of personhood is “unhelpful” and “at worst it is harmful and pernicious” (2024, 3). While I share her concerns about how modern bioethics uses personhoo...

Since the introduction of a new criterion for determining death (i.e., the brain death criterion) in 1968, the research community has been embroiled in debates about whether this criterion should b...

Ariane Lewis reviewed medicolegal challenges to Death by Neurologic Criteria (DNC) in the United Kingdom in order to identify and discuss the ethical issues raised (Lewis 2024). Here I briefly clar...

With its provocative title, Blumenthal-Barby’s (2024) Target Article is an important addition to the critical work on using ‘personhood’ in bioethics. I suggest it bears on any philosophical discus...

In the United States, patients have a clear right to determine what is done to them by doctors. Starting in the early 20th century, multiple court cases paved the way for our current understanding...

What is personhood? What do we want it to be? Blumenthal-Barby (2024) offers an answer to the first question: personhood is an unhelpful, harmful, and pernicious concept in the bioethical setting....

In her target article, “The End of Personhood,” Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby argues that bioethics as a field should abandon the concept of “person.” She states that for many (inside and outside of bi...

The realm of bioethics has long been underpinned by the foundational concept of "personhood," which delineates entities meriting moral and legal consideration on the basis of attributes such as con...

Although medicolegal challenges to the use of neurologic criteria to declare death in the USA have been well-described, the management of court cases in the United Kingdom about objections to the use of neurologic criteria to declare death has not been explored in the bioethics or medical literature. This article (1) reviews conceptual, medical and legal differences between death by neurologic criteria (DNC) in the United Kingdom and the rest of the world to contextualize medicolegal challenges to DNC; (2) summarizes (...) highly publicized legal cases related to DNC in the United Kingdom, including the nuanced 2022 case of Archie Battersbee, who was transiently considered dead by neurologic criteria, but ultimately determined to be in a vegetative state/unresponsive-wakeful state; and (3) provides an overview of ethical issues raised by medicolegal challenges to DNC in the United Kingdom and a comparison to the management of these challenges in the USA. (shrink)

In her highly thought-provoking article, “The End of Personhood,” Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby (2024) presents a number of reasons why bioethics should “… end talk about personhood.” Some of these rea...

Ethics is frequently concerned with how to resolve clashes between competing claims from claimants of different kinds. The idea of moral status is crucial to understanding how (1) competing claims...

“I am a person” has more emotive appeal than “I am an entity with moral status.” While scientists and philosophers prefer precise terminology, the public and media favor general terminologies with...

Referred to as “a foundational concept” of bioethics, personhood has long figured prominently in discussions of entities’ moral status and attendant rights and duties (Farah and Heberlein 2007, 39)...

In her new article in the American Journal of Bioethics, Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby (2024) provides at least three reasons that support her argument that the concept of personhood must be abandoned...

In response to the case study of Mr. Rivers, we will speak to three critical elements for an ethics consultant to address when a consult is requested due to moral distress. First, discern if the re...

Arian Lewis provides a comprehensive overview of how the United Kingdom’s medicolegal context manages challenges to determining death by neurologic criteria (DNC) and suggests that a well-crafted s...

In “An Overview of Ethical Challenges Raised by Medicolegal Challenges to Death by Neurologic Criteria in the United Kingdom and a Comparison to Management of these Challenges in the USA,” Ariane L...

As mandated reporters, health care providers have a duty to report concerns about vulnerable adults if they believe abuse, neglect, or financial exploitation has occurred. Filing a report for conce...

Ariane Lewis offers a comprehensive and expert review of ethical issues raised by brain death in the United Kingdom and how they compare to management of those issues in the United States (Lewis 20...

Mr. Rivers’ case offers an example of how a caregiver may perceive the concept of moral distress. The nurse is experiencing what is described as moral distress at the prospect of participating in C...

The Case of Archie Battersbee in the United Kingdom (UK) is a tragic one: a 12-year-old otherwise healthy boy who suffered a cardiac arrest at home on April 7, 2022, and was subsequently diagnosed...

Unfortunately, cases like Mr. Turner’s are common, and likely to become more so in the near future, as the number of people aged 65 and older is expected to increase to about 74 million by 2030, an...

Most countries have adopted a total brain standard for determining death, with some opting instead for a brainstem standard. The total brain standard holds that an individual with “irreversible ces...

Blumenthal-Barby (2024) argues that bioethicists should stop using the concept of "personhood" in both well-established bioethics debates (e.g., regarding cognitive disability) and emerging ones (e...

Human brain organoids (HBOs), three-dimensional neural tissues derived from human pluripotent stem cells, are at the forefront of biomedical research, provoking intricate ethical quandaries (Sawai...

Blumenthal-Barby (2024) presents strong arguments that bioethicists should stop using the concept “personhood.” She points out that “person,” meaning an entity with full moral rights, is defined in...

Mr. Turner could be the victim of abuse from his daughter. On the other hand, he could be the victim of an assumption that Adult Protective Services (APS) involvement justifies a paternalistic appr...

Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby (2024) argues that “[i]t is time for bioethics to end talk about personhood” (11). The author calls on the field to ask different kinds of normative questions about the mo...

Death by neurological criteria (DNC) continues to stir global controversy. Philosophers and theologians contest its moral significance, clinicians and bioscientists debate its probative accuracy, a...

In 2017, Jameton reflected on the conceptual evolution of “moral distress” in the near-forty years since he coined the term in his book: Nursing Practice, The Ethical Issues. Jameton based the book...

In this commentary, we take up Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby’s (2024) important argument to depart from claims about personhood in bioethics. First, we want to extend Blumenthal-Barby’s critique of the...