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...

As Nair-Collins and Joffe note, the concern that our tests for brain death do not successfully show that all brain functions have stopped is not new (Nair-Collins and Joffe 2023). As our abilities...

I agree fully that a “clearer picture of how vulnerability might manifest and how it can be accommodated, ideally without resorting to mere exclusion from research, is needed” (Friesen et al. 2023,...

ABSTRACTTeam physicians have a complicated job that involves potentially conflicting obligations to multiple entities. Though responsible for the medical care of the athletes as individuals, they also have obligations to the team that employs them which can include returning athletes to play who are at heightened risk of re-injury. The fact that the athletes and owners have some overlapping interests only complicates this issue. Further, there are strong financial incentives to do what is necessary to obtain and keep a position (...) as a team physician. This article examines dual loyalty and conflict of interest in sports medicine, and argues that there is not now a widely accepted or adequate solution to either. Moving toward a solution will require fairly serious changes in the role of the team physician.Abbreviations: FIMS International Federation of Sports Medicine; NFL National Football League; MVP Most Valuable Player; RGIII Robert Griffin, III. (shrink)

It is commonly assumed that persons who hold abortions to be generally impermissible must, for the same reasons, be opposed to embryonic stem cell research [ESR]. Yet a settled position against abortion does not necessarily direct one to reject that research. The difference in potentiality between the embryos used in ESR and embryos discussed in the abortion debate can make ESR acceptable even if one holds that abortion is impermissible. With regard to their potentiality, in vitro embryos are here argued (...) to be more morally similar to clonable somatic cells than they are to in vivo embryos. This creates an important moral distinction between embryos in vivo and in vitro. Attempts to refute this moral distinction, raised in the recent debate in this journal between Alfonso Gómez-Lobo and Mary Mahowald, are also addressed. (shrink)

The development of a code of ethics for a profession can be an indicator of the coherence and stability of a discipline as a unique and singular entity. Since “bioethics”, as a discipline, is not one profession but many, practiced by persons with not one but many varying responsibilities and training, it has been argued that no code of ethics is possible for the discipline(s) of bioethics. I argue that a code of ethics is possible for bioethics by looking at (...) the nature of the various disciplines and noting necessary overlap between them, and deriving the ethics from the nature of the discipline(s) themselves. I show how this can be done by arguing that strict rules about funding and conflict of interest are necessary for bioethicists. (shrink)

Makins’s analysis of the philosophical justification of decision-making understates and so misinterprets the importance of patient values to ‘the deference principle.’ (Makins N,1, p1) He assesses autonomy and beneficence as two separate arguments in support of deferring to patient preferences, but they only work well considered together. Further, neither the constitutive nor the evidential view of beneficence fully recognises the importance of patient values to understanding the patient’s worldview, which in turn determines what risks and benefits matter most. Revising these (...) arguments enables a much fuller understanding of the importance of patient values to the practice of medicine, which will in turn improve the refinement of the deference principle. Autonomy requires beneficence, and vice versa, for either of them to be sufficient arguments for deferring to patient choices. Focusing on autonomy alone to justify deference overstates the value of choice in and of itself, as good medicine does not pursue just any choices. It seeks informed consent, which means that the choices we truly value are those made while understanding what is importantly relevant to the choice. A well-informed decision includes data about expected side effects and likelihood of beneficial effects; but it also includes knowing the patient’s values and goals. One must know what is actually valuable …. (shrink)

An anxious resident paged ethics at 2:00 a.m. His patient, Mr. M, a twenty‐nine‐year‐old man with a history of multiple substance abuse, was in the hospital after cardiac arrest and lack of cerebral perfusion. Sadly, the young man probably met the criteria for brain death, but the final apnea test to confirm the diagnosis could not be done for another forty‐eight to seventy‐two hours because the Klonopin in his system might confound the results. The resident's concern, however, addressed a request (...) made by the patient's mother for a sperm harvest. The patient's mother maintained that her son had said he wanted to give her grandchildren. She wished to harvest sperm from him for a future use with an as‐yet‐to‐be‐determined surrogate mother. (shrink)

Jotkowitz, Glick, and Gesundheit (2008) rightly critique Manninen (2006) for an errant analysis of the Groningen protocol. However, they draw conclusions about the protocol itself that are not justified. Because of the nature of the care of infants, the Groningen protocol doesn't break new ethical ground. We already have to treat infants without direct access to their autonomous preferences or values; therefore, we are already making the decisions that Jotkowitz, Glick, and Gesundheit argue we are beginning to take once active (...) euthanasia of infants is allowed. (shrink)