Governments often aim to improve children’s wellbeing by targeting the decision-making of their parents. In this paper, I explore this phenomenon, providing an ethical evaluation of the ways in which governments target parental decision-making in the context of anti-poverty policies. I first introduce and motivate the concept of parent-targeted paternalism to categorize such policies. I … Read more

The federal system for allocating donated livers in the United States is often criticized for allowing geographic disparities in access to livers. Critics argue that such disparities are unfair on the grounds that where one lives is morally arbitrary and so should not influence one’s access to donated livers. They argue instead that livers should … Read more

Much of the discussion concerning the permissibility of government paternalism has focused on laws and policies that either (1) ban or mandate the use or purchase of particular products;1 or (2) structure choice contexts to “nudge” people to make one choice rather than another.2 Examples of the former include existing laws that mandate the use … Read more

New gene-editing tools challenge conventional policy proscriptions of research aimed at either human germline gene editing or human enhancement by potentially lowering technical barriers to both kinds of intervention. Some recent gene-editing reports have begun to take up the prospect of germline editing, but most experts are in broad agreement that research should prioritize medical … Read more

Leah Pierson and Joseph Millum’s article “Health Research Priority Setting: The Duties of Individual Funders” (2018) tackles an important question that has not received the attention it deserves from bioethics scholars: How should funders of research set priorities among competing research programs? Pierson and Millum make considerable progress on this problem, introducing a number of … Read more

Australia, Canada, and New Zealand currently apply health requirements to prospective immigrants, denying residency to those with health conditions that are likely to impose an “excessive demand” on their publicly funded health and social service programs. In this paper, I investigate the charge that such policies are wrongfully discriminatory against persons with disabilities. I first … Read more

“Government Policy Experiments and the Ethics of Randomization” November 8–9, 2018 A Conference of Applied Ethics and Critical Social Sciences Carleton University Ottawa, Canada The Public Issues and Public Reason (PIPR) conference is a multidisciplinary conference at which graduate students from a variety of programmes and disciplines present work that addresses current social and global challenges … Read more

In this article, we suggest that the evidence regarding the social determinants of health calls for a deep re‐thinking of our understanding of distributive justice. Focusing on John Rawls’s theory of distributive justice in particular, we argue that a full reckoning with the social determinants of health requires a re‐working of Rawls’s principles of justice. … Read more

Governments are increasingly making use of field experiments to evaluate policy interventions in the spheres of education, public health and welfare. However, the research ethics literature is largely focused on the clinical context, leaving investigators, institutional review boards and government agencies with few resources to draw on to address the ethical questions they face regarding … Read more

In a carefully argued article, Haley K. Sullivan and Benjamin E. Berkman address the important question of whether investigators have a duty to report incidental findings to research participants in low‐resource settings. They suggest that the duty to rescue offers the most plausible justification for the duty to return incidental findings, and they explore the … Read more