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Endgame proposals strive for a tobacco‐free (or at least cigarette‐free) society. Some endgame proposals are radical and include, for example, a complete ban on cigarettes. Setting aside empirical worries, one worry is ethical: would such proposals not go too far in interfering with individual freedom? I argue that concerns around freedom do not speak against endgame proposals, including strong proposals...
Prolife theorists typically hold to the claim that all human beings possess equal moral status from conception and consequently possess a right to life. This, they believe, entails that abortion is impermissible in all circumstances. Critics characterize this as an extreme anti‐abortion position, as it prima facie allows no exceptions, even in cases of rape. Here, I examine whether the prolife claim...
Little scholarly attention has been given to the ethics of public commenting as part of the online federal rule‐making process. This essay argues the process of public commenting on federal regulations in the digital era threatens both the integrity of those regulations and the integrity of the individuals they are meant to protect. The ongoing risk is anonymous public commenting is open to manipulation...
In the beginning of the COVID pandemic, researchers and bioethicists called for human challenge trials to hasten the development of a vaccine for COVID. However, the fact that we lacked a specific, highly effective treatment for COVID led many to argue that a COVID challenge trial would be unethical and we ought to pursue traditional phase III testing instead. These ethical objections to challenge...
In recent years, a proportion of older Germans has been sent to relatively high‐end care homes within lower‐income countries where the care tends to be cheaper and more extensive than that in German care homes. Destination countries are found predominantly within Eastern Europe (e.g. Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic), but to a lesser extent also within South‐East Asia (e.g. Thailand). At the same time,...
The debate over whether the medical profession should accommodate its members' conscientious objections (COs) has raged on in the bioethics literature and on legislative floors for decades. Unfortunately, participants on all sides of the debate fail to distinguish among different types of CO, a failure that obstructs the view of which cases warrant accommodation and why. In this paper, we identify...
Schuklenk, Smalling, and Savulescu put forth four conditions that delineate when conscientious objection is impermissible. Roughly, they argue for the following claim: if some practice is legal, standard, expected of a profession, and in the patient's interest, then medical professionals cannot refuse to perform the practice. In this essay, I argue that these conditions are not jointly sufficient...
Antibiotic resistance (AR) is a major threat to public health and healthcare worldwide. In this article, we analyse and discuss the claim that taking actions to minimize AR is everyone's responsibility, focusing on individual moral responsibility. This should not be merely interpreted as a function of knowledge of AR and the proper use of antibiotics. Instead, we suggest a circumstantial account of...
Procreation with donor gametes is widespread and commonly accepted, but it involves ethical questions about the child's best interest. Understanding the historical structures of the moral discussion of gamete donation may contribute to reflecting on the child's best interest. This is why I have analysed the debate on gamete donation in the Netherlands, and this analysis has uncovered some striking...
The increasing dementia prevalence worldwide is driving the testing of novel therapeutic approaches, such as invasive brain technologies, despite limited clinical evidence and the risk of accelerating cognitive decline. Our manuscript (a) reviews the NIH Clinicaltrials.gov database for deep brain stimulation, stem cell implantation, and gene therapy trials on people with dementia; (b) discusses issues...
Mobile applications (apps) have gained significant popularity as a new intervention strategy responding to violence against women and girls. Despite their growing relevance, an assessment from the perspective of public health ethics is still lacking. Here, we base our discussion on the understanding of violence against women and girls as a multidimensional, global public health issue on structural,...
The aim of this article is to argue that one of the central arguments against company‐sponsored non‐medical egg freezing, namely that this practice is contrary to the reproductive autonomy of women, can be difficult to sustain under certain conditions. More specifically, we argue that company‐sponsored egg freezing is not necessarily in conflict with the most common requirements for autonomous choice...
Vaccination tourism (whereby citizens of one nation travel to a different, usually more developed nation to receive a vaccine unavailable or with little availability at home) during the COVID pandemic raises a host of moral issues and is usually met with criticism. From the perspective of the society of origin, the criticism is that those who use their socio‐economic privileges to go abroad and receive...
The sudden rise in the ability of machine learning methodology, such as deep neural networks, to identify and predict with great accuracy instances of malignant cell growth from radiological images has led prominent developers of this technology, such as Geoffrey Hinton, to hold the view that “[…] we should stop training radiologists.” Similar views exist in other contexts regarding the replacement...
In this article I consider two pertinent questions that practitioners must consider when they deploy an algorithmic system as support in clinical shared decision‐making. The first question concerns how to interpret and assess the significance of different performance measures for clinical decision‐making. The second question concerns the professional obligations that practitioners have to communicate...
The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare comes with opportunities but also numerous challenges. A specific challenge that remains underexplored is the lack of clear and distinct definitions of the concepts used in and/or produced by these algorithms, and how their real world meaning is translated into machine language and vice versa, how their output is understood by the end user. This...
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