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Ending SNAP-subsidized Purchases of Sugar-Sweetened Beverages

December 20, 2016

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

Opt-Out and Consent

December 20, 2016

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

Incentive Inequalities and Freedom of Occupational Choice

December 20, 2016

In Rescuing Justice and Equality, G.A. Cohen argues that the incentive inequalities permitted by John Rawls’s difference principle are unjust since people cannot justify them to their fellow citizens. I argue that citizens of a Rawlsian society can justify their acceptance of a wide range of incentive inequalities to their fellow citizens. They can do … Read more

Federalism and Responsibility for Health Care

December 20, 2016

Political philosophers often formulate the problem of distributive justice as the problem of how the government ought to distribute different types of goods—for example, income or health care—to its citizens. They therefore presuppose that the government is a unitary agent that governs its citizens directly. However, although a number of governments are unitary in this … Read more

Standard of Care, Institutional Obligations, and Distributive Justice

December 20, 2016

The problem of standard of care in clinical research concerns the level of treatment that investigators must provide to subjects in clinical trials. Commentators often formulate answers to this problem by appealing to two distinct types of obligations: professional obligations and natural duties. In this article, I investigate whether investigators also possess institutional obligations that … Read more

Standard of Care, Professional Obligations, and Distributive Justice

December 20, 2016

The problem of standard-of-care in clinical research concerns the level of care that investigators ought to provide to research subjects in the control arm of their clinical trials. Commentators differ sharply on whether subjects in trials conducted in lower income countries should be provided with the same level of care as subjects in trials conducted … Read more

Incentive Inequalities and Talents

December 20, 2016

In a recent article, Seana Valentine Shiffrin offers a distinctive egalitarian critique of the types of incentive inequalities that are permitted by John Rawls’s difference principle. She argues that citizens of a well-ordered society, who publicly accept Rawls’s two principles of justice and their justifications, may not demand incentives to employ their talents in productive … Read more

Fair subject selection in clinical research

July 19, 2016

Fair subject selection in clinical research: formal equality of opportunity Douglas MacKay Published 2016 July in The Journal of Medical Ethics. 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 … Read more