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33Choosing Life, Choosing Death: The Tyranny of Autonomy in Medical Ethics and LawTimes Higher Education. 2009.Since the 1960s we have moved rapidly from a “doctor-knows-best” society which in which medical paternalism -- such as withholding information from patients “for their benefit” -- was common, towards a society which celebrates patients’ rights to make informed decisions about their care. In Choosing Life, Choosing Death, Charles Foster mounts a polemic against the current enthusiasm for respect for autonomy in medical ethics and law
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33“This chapter looks at four arguments which Microsoft has used to justify the claim that illegal copying of software is wrong: software piracy is theft; software piracy violates the rights of copyright holders; software piracy is free riding; and software piracy reduces incentives to future innovation. It argues that the first argument is simply wrong, and the other three do not establish that it is in fact wrong to pirate Microsoft’s programs.
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32Public Value, Maximization and Health Policy: An Examination of Hausman’s Restricted ConsequentialismPublic Health Ethics 10 (2). 2017.In the book Valuing Health, Daniel Hausman sets out a normative framework for assessing social policy, which he calls restricted consequentialism. For the restricted consequentialist, government policy-making not only is, but ought to be, largely siloed in individual government departments. Each department has its own goal linked to a fundamental public value, which it should pursue in a maximizing way. I argue that, first, Hausman’s argument appears to be internally inconsistent: his case for t…Read more
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31Cunningham and Kavic [1] rightly note that standard accounts of surgical complications—ours included—have focused on postoperative events [2, 3]. As they point out, this postoperative focus leaves open the question of how we should categorize adverse intraoperative events. They argue that we should distinguish between two types of adverse intraoperative events: those that introduce additional risk of postoperative complications and those that do not. On their account, adverse intraoperative even…Read more
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27Responses to Open Peer Commentaries on “Research Exceptionalism”American Journal of Bioethics 10 (8). 2010.Research involving human subjects is much more stringently regulated than many other nonresearch activities that appear to be at least as risky. A number of prominent figures now argue that research is overregulated. We argue that the reasons typically offered to justify the present system of research regulation fail to show that research should be subject to more stringent regulation than other equally risky activities. However, there are three often overlooked reasons for thinking that researc…Read more
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19Introduction to Symposium on Daniel Hausman’s Valuing Health: Well-Being, Freedom and SufferingPublic Health Ethics 10 (2): 105-108. 2017.This article introduces a symposium on Daniel Hausman’s Valuing Health: Well-Being, Suffering and Freedom. The symposium contains papers by Elselijn Kingma, Adam Oliver, Anna Alexandrova, Erik Nord, Alex Voorhoeve and James Wilson, with replies by Daniel Hausman. In Valuing Health, Hausman argues that, despite apparently measuring health, projects such as the Global Burden of Disease Study in fact measure judgments about the value of health. Once this has been clarified, the key question is how …Read more
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18Applying a Public Health Ethics Framework to Consider Scaled-Up Verbal Autopsy and Verbal Autopsy with Immediate Disclosure of Cause of Death in Rural NepalPublic Health Ethics 11 (3): 293-310. 2018.Verbal autopsy presents the opportunity to understand the disease burden in many low-income countries where vital registration systems are underdeveloped and most deaths occur in the community. Advances in technology have led to the development of software that can provide probable cause of death information in real time, and research considering the ethical implications of these advances is necessary to inform policy. Our research explores these ethical issues in rural Nepal using a public heal…Read more
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17Ethics and the Acquisition of Organs by T. M. Wilkinson, 2011 New York, Oxford University Pressx + 209 pp, £35.00 (hb) (review)Journal of Applied Philosophy 29 (3): 268-270. 2012.
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14What makes a health system good? From cost-effectiveness analysis to ethical improvement in health systemsMedicine, Health Care and Philosophy 26 (3): 351-365. 2023.Fair allocation of scarce healthcare resources has been much studied within philosophy and bioethics, but analysis has focused on a narrow range of cases. The Covid-19 pandemic provided significant new challenges, making powerfully visible the extent to which health systems can be fragile, and how scarcities within crucial elements of interlinked care pathways can lead to cascading failures. Health system resilience, while previously a key topic in global health, can now be seen to be a vital co…Read more
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7Healthcare professionals as gatekeepers in research involving refugee survivors of sexual torture: An examination of the ethical issuesDeveloping World Bioethics 19 (4): 215-223. 2019.This paper examines the ethical issues that arise when healthcare providers act as gatekeepers to research involving vulnerable populations. Traumatised refugees serve as an example of this subset of research participants. Highlighting the particular vulnerabilities of this group, we argue that specific ethical considerations are required that go beyond the conventional research approaches. While gatekeeping responds to some of those vulnerabilities, it risks wronging through unwarranted paterna…Read more
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Practice of medicineIn Alan Charles Kors (ed.), Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment, Oxford University Press. 2003.
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Philanthrocapitalism and Global HealthIn Solomon Benatar & Gillian Brock (eds.), Global Health: Ethical Challenges, Cambridge University Press. 2020.
Areas of Interest
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Aesthetics |
Applied Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Philosophy of Law |
Social and Political Philosophy |
Philosophy of Social Science |