• Can't Regulate, Won't Regulate? As the global trade in human eggs continues to expand with logarithmic momentum, it is frequently argued that we could not regulate it even if we wanted to. Not all commentators do want to, of course. Many view regulation as counterproductive: reports have suggested that FDA governance has had the perverse effect of increasing levels of reproductive tourism to Latin America. Most of the other chapters in this volume are broadly in favour of letting market forces t…Read more
  •  166
    Interview by Klasien Horstman on gender and genetics. 'Unlike many gender theorists, I do not view the body as socially constructed; nor do I share postmodern and deconstructionist disquiet at the notion of a unified subject. Frankly, I think these constructions get in the way of political action and are bad for women’s rights.'
  •  280
    Testing times for the consumer genetics revolution
    The New Scientist 221 (2251): 26-27. 2014.
    With the highest profile seller of $99 genetic tests under fire, will public trust in personalised medicine suffer?
  •  262
    Disappearing women, vanishing ladies and property in embryos
    International Journal of Law and the Biosciences 4 1-6. 2017.
    Guidelines on embryo storage prioritise 'respect for the embryo' above the wishes of the women whose labour and tissue have gone into creating the embryo in the first place, effectively making women and the female body disappear. In this article I draw a parallel between this phenomenon relating to embryo storage and other instances of a similar phenomenon that I have called 'the lady vanishes', particularly in stem cell and 'mitochondrial transfer' research. I suggest that a modified property r…Read more
  •  216
    How can intellectuals who oppose the illegitimate war in Iraq come to similar terms with the U.S. neoconservatives, and their unrepentant British collaborators, who have stranded us in it? In the Tempest, Shakespeare’s most political play, comedy though it is meant to be, intellectuals are warned not to consider themselves guiltless. But how can those who marched against the war, or who tried to speak truth to power in other ways, be guilty of its misuses? Surely this is too harsh a view of the …Read more
  •  216
    The rise of personalised medicine can be seen as an extension of individualism and as a threat to the common good.
  •  157
    Not so fast
    with Marcy Darnovsky
    New Scientist 222 28-29. 2014.
    Three-parent IVF is proceeding towards partial legalisation in the UK, but is this process too hasty?
  •  13
    Bioscience policies
    eLS (Formerly Known as the Encyclopedia of Life Sciences). 2015.
    The rapid pace of change in the biosciences makes setting biotechnology policies and regulating the sciences difficult for governments, but no less necessary for that. Although government policies around the globe are sometimes classed as ‘pro-science’ or ‘anti-science’, that is a misleading oversimplification. Nurturing the ‘bioeconomy’ is a key goal for most national governments, leading in the UK to a comparatively loose regulatory policy, for example in relation to mitochondrial transfer and…Read more
  •  14
    Feminist perspectives on human genetics and reproductive technologies
    eLS (Formerly Known as the Encyclopedia of Life Sciences). 2016.
    Feminism offers three separate but equally important insights about human genetics and the new reproductive technologies. First, feminism is concerned with ways in which these new technologies have the potential to exploit women, particularly in the treatment of their reproductive tissue, while seeming to offer both sexes greater reproductive freedom. This risk has been largely ignored by much bioethics, which has concentrated on choice and autonomy at the expense of justice, giving it little to…Read more
  • The commodification of women's reproductive tissue and services
    In Leslie Francis (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Reproductive Ethics, Oxford University Press. pp. 118-140. 2017.
    Although the term commodification is sometimes criticised as imprecise or overused, in fact it has a complex philosophical ancestry and can never be used too much, because the phenomena that it describes are still gaining ground. The issues that commodification raises in relation to reproductive technologies include whether it is wrong to commodify human tissues generally and gametes particularly, and whether the person as subject and the person as object can be distinguished in modern biomedici…Read more
  •  1
    The common good
    In Roger Brownsword, Eloise Scotford & Karen Yeung (eds.), The Oxford of the Law and Regulation of Biotechnology, Oxford University Press. pp. 135-152. 2017.
    In conventional thinking, the promise of scientific progress gives automatic and unquestioned legitimacy to any new development in biotechnology. It is the nearest thing we have in a morally relativistic society to the concept of the common good. This chapter begins by examining a recent case study, so-called ‘mitochondrial transfer’ or three-person IVF, in which policymakers appeared to accept that this new technology should be effectively deregulated because that would serve UK national scient…Read more
  •  225
    Ethical qualms about genetic prognosis
    Canadian Medical Association Journal 188 (6): 1-2. 2016.
    The debate about direct-to-consumer genetic testing has centred on whether consumers are the best judges of their own clinical care. Inthis article, I also examine whether the science of personalized medicine is really as advanced as its proponents claim, and how the availability of genetic markers affects decisions on who gets and does not get medical treatment.
  •  380
    This book contributes to the feminist reconstruction of political theory. Although many feminist authors have pointed out the ways in which women have been property, they have been less successful in suggesting how women might become the subjects rather than the objects of property-holding. This book synthesises political theory from liberal, Marxist, Kantian and Hegelian traditions, applying these ideas to history and social policy.
  •  443
    Personalised Medicine, Individual Choice and the Common Good (edited book)
    with Britta van Beers and Sigrid Sterckx
    Cambridge University Press. 2018.
    This is a volume of twelve essays concerning the fundamental tension in personalised medicine between individual choice and the common good.
  •  152
    Feeling more like myself
    The Philosophers' Magazine 62 (62): 79-84. 2013.
    Speculative enhancement technologies are premised on the notion that I have a duty to be the best Me I can possibly be. This article takes a sceptical look at that claim.
  •  315
    Cutting to the Core: Exploring the Ethics of Contested Surgeries
    with Michael Benatar, Leslie Cannold, Dena Davis, Merle Spriggs, Julian Savulescu, Heather Draper, Neil Evans, Richard Hull, Stephen Wilkinson, David Wasserman, Guy Widdershoven, Françoise Baylis, Stephen Coleman, Rosemarie Tong, Hilde Lindemann, David Neil, and Alex John London
    Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 2006.
    When the benefits of surgery do not outweigh the harms or where they do not clearly do so, surgical interventions become morally contested. Cutting to the Core examines a number of such surgeries, including infant male circumcision and cutting the genitals of female children, the separation of conjoined twins, surgical sex assignment of intersex children and the surgical re-assignment of transsexuals, limb and face transplantation, cosmetic surgery, and placebo surgery
  •  319
    Review of Mary Mahowald, Genes, Women, Equality
  •  479
    Abstract Gender and Ethics Committees: Where’s the Different Voice? Prominent international and national ethics commissions such as the UNESCO Bioethics Commission rarely achieve anything remotely resembling gender equality, although local research and clinical ethics committees are somewhat more egalitarian. Under-representation of women is particularly troubling when the subject matter of modern bioethics so disproportionately concerns women’s bodies, and when such committees claim to derive ‘…Read more
  •  428
    Editorial: Mental Capacity: In Search of Alternative Perspectives
    with Berghmans Ron and Meulen Ruud Ter
    Health Care Analysis 12 (4): 251-263. 2004.
    Editorial introduction to series of papers resulting from a European Commission Project on mental capacity
  •  36
    Selecting Barrenness - A Response from Donna Dickenson
    Human Reproduction and Genetic Ethics 16 (1): 25-28. 2010.
    A response to Kavita Shah's article Selecting Barrenness
  •  320
    In two minds: a casebook of psychiatric ethics
    with Bill Fulford and K. W. M. Fulford
    Oxford University Press. 2000.
    In Two Minds is a practical casebook of problem solving in psychiatric ethics. Written in a lively and accessible style, it builds on a series of detailed case histories to illustrate the central place of ethical reasoning as a key competency for clinical work and research in psychiatry. Topics include risk, dangerousness and confidentiality; judgements of responsibility; involuntary treatment and mental health legislation; consent to genetic screening; dual role issues in child and adolescent p…Read more
  •  26
    Medical criteria rooted in evidence-based medicine are often seen as a value-neutral ‘trump card’ which puts paid to any further debate about setting priorities for treatment. On this argument, doctors should stop providing treatment at the point when it becomes medically futile, and that is also the threshold at which the health purchaser should stop purchasing. This paper offers three kinds of ethical criteria as a counterweight to analysis based solely on medical criteria. The first set o…Read more
  •  31
    There has been a troublesome anomaly in the UK between cash payment to men for sperm donation and the effective assumption that women will pay to donate eggs. Some commentators, including Donald Evans in this journal, have argued that the anomaly should be resolved by treating women on the same terms as men. But this argument ignores important difficulties about property in the body, particularly in relation to gametes. There are good reasons for thinking that the contract model and payment for …Read more
  •  45
    Ethical issues in limb transplants
    Bioethics 15 (2). 2001.
    On one view, limb transplants cross technological frontiers but not ethical ones; the only issues to be resolved concern professional competence, under the assumption of patient autonomy. Given that the benefits of limb transplant do not outweigh the risks, however, the autonomy and rationality of the patient are not necessarily self‐evident. In addition to questions of resource allocation and informed consent, limb, and particularly hand, allograft also raises important issues of personal ident…Read more
  •  355
    This book examines the moral luck paradox, relating it to Kantian, consequentialist and virtue-based approaches to ethics. It also applies the paradox to areas in medical ethics, including allocation of scarce medical resources, informed consent to treatment, withholding life-sustaining treatment, psychiatry, reproductive ethics, genetic testing and medical research. If risk and luck are taken seriously, it might seem to follow that we cannot develop any definite moral standards, that we are doo…Read more
  •  32
    Evidence-Based Medicine and Quality of Care
    with Paolo Vineis
    Health Care Analysis 10 (3): 243-259. 2002.
    In this paper we set out to examine thearguments for and against the claim thatEvidence-Based Medicine (EBM) will improve thequality of care. In particular, we examine thefollowing issues