We examine current applications of the moral duty to rescue to justify clinical investigators’ duties of ancillary care and standard of care to subjects in resource-poor settings. These applications fail to explain why investigators possess obligations to research participants, in particular, and not to people in need, in general. Further, these applications fail to recognize … Read more

Abstract:The value of health states is often understood to depend on their impact on the goodness of people’s lives. As such, prominent health states metrics are grounded in particular conceptions of wellbeing – e.g. hedonism or preference satisfaction. In this paper, I consider how liberals committed to the public justification requirement – the requirement that … Read more

I am very grateful to the authors of the open peer commentaries, as well as Cass R. Sunstein, for their challenging and insightful comments on our article “The Ethics of Organ Donor Registration Policies: Nudges and Respect for Autonomy. A number of commentators find our analysis largely compelling and explore further ethical considerations that the … Read more

Glenn Cohen’s Patients with Passports: Medical Tourism, Law, and Ethics offers a thorough examination of the growing practice of medical tourism, the legal regulations governing it, and the many ethical issues it raises for policy-makers, health care providers, and prospective medical tourists. Demonstrating mastery of the relevant literatures in the social sciences, law, ethics, and … Read more

Governments must determine the legal procedures by which their residents are registered, or can register, as organ donors. Provided that governments recognize that people have a right to determine what happens to their organs after they die, there are four feasible options to choose from: opt-in, opt-out, mandated active choice, and voluntary active choice. We … Read more

In this paper, I explore the ethics of subject selection in the context of biomedical research. I reject a key principle of what I shall refer to as the standard view According to this principle, investigators should select participants so as to minimise aggregate risk to participants and maximise aggregate benefits to participants and society. … Read more

Many high-income countries have skill-selective immigration policies, favoring prospective immigrants who are highly skilled. I investigate whether it is permissible for high-income countries to adopt such policies. Adopting what Joseph Carens calls a “realistic approach” to the ethics of immigration, I argue first that it is in principle permissible for high-income countries to take skill … Read more

Recent efforts by legislative officials and public health advocates to reform the US food stamp program, or Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), have focused on restricting the types of foods eligible for purchase with SNAP benefits, specifically sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs). We argue that it is, in principle, permissible for the US government to enact a … Read more

A chief objection to opt-out organ donor registration policies is that they do not secure people’s actual consent to donation, and so fail to respect their autonomy rights to decide what happens to their organs after they die. However, scholars have recently offered two powerful responses to this objection. First, Michael B Gill argues that … Read more