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11Warum die Bioethik ein Konzept von Vulnerabilität benötigtIn Nikola Biller-Andorno, Settimio Monteverde, Tanja Krones & Tobias Eichinger (eds.), Medizinethik, Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden. pp. 189-219. 2021.Wendy Rogers ist Professorin für klinische Ethik und Catriona Mackenzie ist Professorin für Philosophie. Beide lehren an der Macquarie University in Sydney, Australien. Susan Dodds ist Professorin für Philosophie an der La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australien. Alle drei befassen sich seit Jahren intensiv mit feministischer Theorie, angewandter und biomedizinischer Ethik sowie mit Moralphilosophie.
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73Ethical Guidance for Hard Decisions: A Critical Review of Early International COVID-19 ICU Triage GuidelinesHealth Care Analysis 30 (2): 163-195. 2022.This article provides a critical comparative analysis of the substantive and procedural values and ethical concepts articulated in guidelines for allocating scarce resources in the COVID-19 pandemic. We identified 21 local and national guidelines written in English, Spanish, German and French; applicable to specific and identifiable jurisdictions; and providing guidance to clinicians for decision making when allocating critical care resources during the COVID-19 pandemic. US guidelines were not …Read more
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25Activism and Bioethics: Taking a Stand on Things That MatterHastings Center Report 51 (4): 32-33. 2021.The question of whether activism should be overtly embraced as part of the bioethicist's role deserves serious consideration. Like others, we agree that bioethics is inescapably partisan; bioethical deliberation is based on trying to determine morally relevant features of situations and morally justifiable outcomes. Where disagreement arises is over the degree to which bioethicists should be activists. Meyers argues for a somewhat circumscribed role, limited to action on ethically concerning ins…Read more
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40Bioethics, Volume 35, Issue 7, Page 623-633, September 2021.
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73Innovative surgery: the ethical challengesJournal of Medical Ethics 38 (1): 9-12. 2012.Innovative surgery raises four kinds of ethical challenges: potential harms to patients; compromised informed consent; unfair allocation of healthcare resources; and conflicts of interest. Lack of adequate data on innovations and lack of regulatory oversight contribute to these ethical challenges. In this paper these issues and the extent to which problems may be resolved by better evidence-gathering and more comprehensive regulation are explored. It is suggested that some ethical issues will be…Read more
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23Responding to unethical research: the importance of transparencyJournal of Medical Ethics 46 (10): 691-692. 2020.We thank Goldstein and Peterson, Caplan, and Bramstedt for engaging with our paper on the ethics of publishing and using Chinese transplant research that involves organs procured from executed prisoners.1–4 In that paper, we examine consequentialist and deontological arguments for and against using data from unethical research. Goldstein and Peterson question the relationship between the social and scientific value of the research and the decision to publish the results. They argue that the fail…Read more
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35Against the use and publication of contemporary unethical research: the case of Chinese transplant researchJournal of Medical Ethics 46 (10): 678-684. 2020.Recent calls for retraction of a large body of Chinese transplant research and of Dr Jiankui He’s gene editing research has led to renewed interest in the question of publication, retraction and use of unethical biomedical research. In Part 1 of this paper, we briefly review the now well-established consequentialist and deontological arguments for and against the use of unethical research. We argue that, while there are potentially compelling justifications for use under some circumstances, thes…Read more
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28Defining Disease in the Context of OverdiagnosisMedicine, Health Care and Philosophy: A European Journal 20 (2): 269-280. 2017.Recently, concerns have been raised about the phenomenon of 'overdiagnosis', the diagnosis of a condition that is not causing harm, and will not come to cause harm. Along with practical, ethical, and scientific questions, overdiagnosis raises questions about our concept of disease. In this paper, we analyse overdiagnosis as an epistemic problem and show how it challenges many existing accounts of disease. In particular, it raises questions about conceptual links drawn between disease and dysfunc…Read more
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9Ethics, Pandemic Planning and CommunicationsMonash Bioethics Review 25 (4): 9-18. 2006.In this article we examine the role and ethics of communications in planning for an influenza pandemic. We argue that ethical communication must not only he effective, so that pandemic plans can be successfully implemented, communications should also take specific account of the needs of the disadvantaged, so that they are not further disenfranchised. This will require particular attention to the role of the mainstream media which may disadvantage the vulnerable through misrepresentation and exc…Read more
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57Fragility, uncertainty, and healthcareTheoretical Medicine and Bioethics 37 (1): 71-83. 2016.Medicine seeks to overcome one of the most fundamental fragilities of being human, the fragility of good health. No matter how robust our current state of health, we are inevitably susceptible to future illness and disease, while current disease serves to remind us of various frailties inherent in the human condition. This article examines the relationship between fragility and uncertainty with regard to health, and argues that there are reasons to accept rather than deny at least some forms of …Read more
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72The Line-drawing Problem in Disease DefinitionJournal of Medicine and Philosophy 42 (4): 405-423. 2017.Biological dysfunction is regarded, in many accounts, as necessary and perhaps sufficient for disease. But although disease is conceptualized as all-or-nothing, biological functions often differ by degree. A tension is created by attempting to use a continuous variable as the basis for a categorical definition, raising questions about how we are to pinpoint the boundary between health and disease. This is the line-drawing problem. In this paper, we show how the line-drawing problem arises within…Read more
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70Current Dilemmas in Defining the Boundaries of DiseaseJournal of Medicine and Philosophy 42 (4): 350-366. 2017.Boorse’s biostatistical theory states that diseases should be defined in ways that reflect disturbances of biological function and that are objective and value free. We use three examples from contemporary medicine that demonstrate the complex issues that arise when defining the boundaries of disease: polycystic ovary syndrome, chronic kidney disease, and myocardial infarction. We argue that the biostatistical theory fails to provide sufficient guidance on where the boundaries of disease should …Read more
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45Diagnosis, narrative identity, and asymptomatic diseaseTheoretical Medicine and Bioethics 38 (4): 307-321. 2017.An increasing number of patients receive diagnoses of disease without having any symptoms. These include diseases detected through screening programs, as incidental findings from unrelated investigations, or via routine checks of various biological variables like blood pressure or cholesterol. In this article, we draw on narrative identity theory to examine how the process of making sense of being diagnosed with asymptomatic disease can trigger certain overlooked forms of harm for patients. We s…Read more
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58Defining disease in the context of overdiagnosisMedicine, Health Care and Philosophy 20 (2): 269-280. 2017.Recently, concerns have been raised about the phenomenon of ‘overdiagnosis’, the diagnosis of a condition that is not causing harm, and will not come to cause harm. Along with practical, ethical, and scientific questions, overdiagnosis raises questions about our concept of disease. In this paper, we analyse overdiagnosis as an epistemic problem and show how it challenges many existing accounts of disease. In particular, it raises ques- tions about conceptual links drawn between disease and dysfu…Read more
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49Introduction: The Boundaries of DiseaseJournal of Medicine and Philosophy 42 (4): 343-349. 2017.Although health and disease occupy opposite ends of a spectrum, distinguishing between them can be difficult. This is the “line-drawing” problem. The papers in this special issue engage with this challenge of delineating the boundaries of disease. The authors explore different views as to where the boundary between disease and nondisease lies, and related questions, such as how we can identify, or decide, what counts as a disease and what does not; the nature of the boundary between the two cate…Read more
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34Bioethics and activism: A natural fit?Bioethics 33 (8): 881-889. 2019.Bioethics is a practically oriented discipline that developed to address pressing ethical issues arising from developments in the life sciences. Given this inherent practical bent, some form of advocacy or activism seems inherent to the nature of bioethics. However, there are potential tensions between being a bioethics activist, and academic ideals. In academic bioethics, scholarship involves reflection, rigour and the embrace of complexity and uncertainty. These values of scholarship seem to b…Read more
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50Analysing the ethics of breast cancer overdiagnosis: a pathogenic vulnerabilityMedicine, Health Care and Philosophy 22 (1): 129-140. 2019.Breast cancer screening aims to help women by early identification and treatment of cancers that might otherwise be life-threatening. However, breast cancer screening also leads to the detection of some cancers that, if left undetected and untreated, would not have damaged the health of the women concerned. At the time of diagnosis, harmless cancers cannot be identified as non-threatening, therefore women are offered invasive breast cancer treatment. This phenomenon of identifying non-harmful ca…Read more
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30Casting the net too wide on overdiagnosis: benefits, burdens and non-harmful diseaseJournal of Medical Ethics 42 (11): 717-719. 2016.
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43Joint issues – conflicts of interest, the ASR hip and suggestions for managing surgical conflicts of interestBMC Medical Ethics 15 (1): 63. 2014.Financial and nonfinancial conflicts of interest in medicine and surgery are troubling because they have the capacity to skew decision making in ways that might be detrimental to patient care and well-being. The recent case of the Articular Surface Replacement (ASR) hip provides a vivid illustration of the harmful effects of conflicts of interest in surgery
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26Virtue ethics and public health: A practice-based analysisMonash Bioethics Review 23 (1): 10-21. 2004.Public health plays an important, albeit often unnoticed, role in protecting and promoting the health of populations. The activities of public health are complex, performed by multiple professionals, and range from the innocuous to the intrusive. Ethical analyses in public health reflect some of this complexity and fragmentation, with no one approach able to capture the full range of ethical considerations raised by public health activities. There are however, good reasons why we should pursue s…Read more
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1Gender inequalities in health research : An australian perspectiveIn Michael D. A. Freeman (ed.), Law and Bioethics / Edited by Michael Freeman, Oxford University Press. 2008.
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27Practical ethics for general practiceOxford University Press. 2004.The aim of this book is to provide an accessible account of ethics in general practice, addressing concerns identified by practitioners. It contains many examples and allows the reader to gain practical insights into how to identify and analyze the ethical issues they encounter in everyday general practice.
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25Whistle-blowing in the medical curriculum: A response to FaunceMonash Bioethics Review 24 (1): 50-58. 2005.We agree with Faunce’s proposal that academic legitimacy is important in ensuring that whistle-blowing is included in medical curricula. We disagree, however, with the assertion that this is best achieved by means of an over-arching theoretical foundation for health care whistle-blowing of the kind suggested by Faunce. We propose that systematic theoretical justification is neither the sole nor the main determinant of academic legitimacy when it comes to matters for inclusion in medical school c…Read more
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61Social justice and pandemic influenza planning: The role of communication strategiesPublic Health Ethics 1 (3): 223-234. 2008.Department of Medical Education, Flinders University of South Australia, GPO Box 2100, Adelaide SA 5001. Tel. : +61-8-7225-1111; Fax: +61-8-8204-5675; Email: lee0359{at}flinders.edu.au ' + u + '@ ' + d + ' '/ /- ->.This paper analyses the role of communication strategies in pandemic influenza planning. Our central concern is with the extent to which nations are using communication to address issues of social justice. Issues associated with disadvantage and vulnerability to infection in the event…Read more
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46Evidence based medicine and justice: a framework for looking at the impact of EBM upon vulnerable or disadvantaged groupsJournal of Medical Ethics 30 (2): 141-145. 2004.This article examines the implicit promises of fairness in evidence based medicine , namely to avoid discrimination through objective processes, and to distribute effective treatments fairly. The relationship between EBM and vulnerable groups is examined. Several aspects of EBM are explored: the way evidence is created , and the way evidence is applied in clinical care and health policy. This analysis suggests that EBM turns our attention away from social and cultural factors that influence heal…Read more
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28IntroductionInternational Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 5 (2): 1-10. 2012.Our motivation for proposing a special issue of IJFAB on vulnerability is twofold. First, there is growing interest in the concept of vulnerability within both bioethics and feminist theory. Reflecting this interest, this special issue provides a forum for exploring the relevance for bioethics of feminist perspectives on vulnerability. Second, despite growing recognition within bioethics of the moral significance of vulnerability, the concept remains under-theorized in bioethical (and wider phil…Read more
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19Conflicts of interest in divisions of general practiceJournal of Medical Ethics 32 (12): 715-717. 2006.Community-based healthcare organisations manage competing, and often conflicting, priorities. These conflicts can arise from the multiple roles these organisations take up, and from the diverse range of stakeholders to whom they must be responsive. Often such conflicts may be titled conflicts of interest; however, what precisely constitutes such conflicts and what should be done about them is not always clear. Clarity about the duties owed by organisations and the roles they assume can help iden…Read more
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Areas of Specialization
Applied Ethics |
Areas of Interest
Applied Ethics |