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13Making Use of Existing International Legal Mechanisms to Manage the Global Antimicrobial Commons: Identifying Legal Hooks and Institutional MandatesHealth Care Analysis 31 (1): 9-24. 2023.Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is an urgent threat to global public health and development. Mitigating this threat requires substantial short-term action on key AMR priorities. While international legal agreements are the strongest mechanism for ensuring collaboration among countries, negotiating new international agreements can be a slow process. In the second article in this special issue, we consider whether harnessing existing international legal agreements offers an opportunity to increase …Read more
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12Genetic ImmunisationIn David Edmonds (ed.), Future Morality, Oxford University Press. 2021.[book blurb:] The world is changing so fast that it's hard to know how to think about what we ought to do. We barely have time to reflect on how scientific advances will affect our lives before they're upon us. New kinds of dilemma are springing up. Can robots be held responsible for their actions? Will artificial intelligence be able to predict criminal activity? Is the future gender-fluid? Should we strive to become post-human? Should we use drugs to improve our intimate relationships — or to …Read more
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11Conscientious refusal or conscientious provision: We can't have bothBioethics. forthcoming.Some authors argue that it is permissible for clinicians to conscientiously provide abortion services because clinicians are already allowed to conscientiously refuse to provide certain services. Call this the symmetry thesis. We argue that on either of the two main understandings of the aim of the medical profession—what we will call “pathocentric” and “interest‐centric” views—conscientious refusal and conscientious provision are mutually exclusive. On pathocentric views, refusing to provide a …Read more
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10Freedom, diseases, and public health restrictionsBioethics 37 (9): 886-896. 2023.The debate around lockdowns as a response to the recent pandemic is typically framed in terms of a tension between freedom and health. However, on some views, protection of health or reduction of virus‐related risks can also contribute to freedom. Therefore, there might be no tension between freedom and health in public health restrictions. I argue that such views fail to appreciate the different understandings of freedom that are involved in the trade‐off between freedom and health. Grasping th…Read more
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9Conscientious Objection in Healthcare: Neither a Negative Nor a Positive RightJournal of Clinical Ethics 31 (2): 146-153. 2020.Conscientious objection in healthcare is often granted by many legislations regulating morally controversial medical procedures, such as abortion or medical assistance in dying. However, there is virtually no protection of positive claims of conscience, that is, of requests by healthcare professionals to provide certain services that they conscientiously believe ought to be provided, but that are ruled out by institutional policies. Positive claims of conscience have received comparatively littl…Read more
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9Reelin’ In The Years: Age and Selective Restriction of Liberty in the COVID-19 PandemicJournal of Bioethical Inquiry 20 (4): 685-693. 2023.During the COVID-19 pandemic, focused protection strategies including selective lockdowns of the elderly were proposed as alternatives to general lockdowns. These selective restrictions would consist of isolating only those most at risk of COVID-19 hospitalization and subsequent use of healthcare resources. The proposal seems to have troubling implications, including the permissibility of selective lockdown on the basis of characteristics such as ethnicity, sex, disability, or BMI. Like age, the…Read more
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5Objection to Conscience: An Argument Against Conscience Exemptions in HealthcareBioethics 31 (5): 400-408. 2016.I argue that appeals to conscience do not constitute reasons for granting healthcare professionals exemptions from providing services they consider immoral (e.g. abortion). My argument is based on a comparison between a type of objection that many people think should be granted, i.e. to abortion, and one that most people think should not be granted, i.e. to antibiotics. I argue that there is no principled reason in favour of conscientious objection qua conscientious that allows to treat these tw…Read more
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1Challenging human enhancementIn Steve Clarke, Julian Savulescu, C. A. J. Coady, Alberto Giubilini & Sagar Sanyal (eds.), The Ethics of Human Enhancement: Understanding the Debate, Oxford University Press. 2016.
Areas of Interest
Applied Ethics |
Normative Ethics |