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14Protecting Participants in Thought Experiments: The Role of the Research Ethics CommitteeJournal of Bioethical Inquiry 15 (1): 5-6. 2018.
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146. Defining Death in Donation after Circulatory Determination of DeathIn Solveig Lena Hansen & Silke Schicktanz (eds.), Ethical Challenges of Organ Transplantation, Transcript Verlag. pp. 117-132. 2021.
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14The Cost of Coronavirus Obligations: Respecting the Letter and Spirit of Lockdown RegulationsCambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 30 (2): 255-261. 2021.We all now know that the novel coronavirus is anything but a common cold. The pandemic has created many new obligations for all of us, several of which come with serious costs to our quality of life. But in some cases, the guidance and the law are open to a degree of interpretation, leaving us to decide what is the ethical course of action. Because of the high cost of some of the obligations, a conflict of interest can arise between what we want to do and what it is right to do. And so, some peo…Read more
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14Accommodating an Uninvited Guest: Perspectives of Researchers in Switzerland on ‘Honorary’ AuthorshipScience and Engineering Ethics 26 (2): 947-967. 2020.The aim of this paper is to analyze the attitudes and reactions of researchers towards an authorship claim made by a researcher in a position of authority who has not made any scientific contribution to a manuscript or helped to write it. This paper draws on semi-structured interviews conducted with 33 researchers at three seniority levels working in biomedicine and the life sciences in Switzerland. This manuscript focuses on the analysis of participants’ responses when presented with a vignette…Read more
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13Premortem interventions in dying children to optimise organ donation: an ethical analysisJournal of Medical Ethics 42 (7): 424-428. 2016.
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13Dogs, Epistemic Indefensibility and Ethical Denial: Don’t Let Sleeping Dog Owners LieJournal of Bioethical Inquiry 20 (1): 7-12. 2023.In this paper I use normative analysis to explore the curious and seemingly singular phenomenon whereby some dog owners deny the physical and moral facts about a situation where it is claimed their dog harmed or irritated others. I define these as epistemic and ethical denial, respectively, and offer a tentative exploration of their implications in terms of relational autonomy and responsible behaviour in public spaces.
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12Triaging ethical issues in the coronavirus pandemic: how to prioritize bioethics research during public health emergenciesBioethics 35 (4): 380-384. 2021.Much of the ethical discourse concerning the coronavirus pandemic has focused on the allocation of scarce resources, be it potentially beneficial new treatments, ventilators, intensive care beds, or oxygen. Somewhat ironically, the more important ethical issues may lie elsewhere, just as the more important medical issues do not concern intensive care or treatment for COVID‐19 patients, but rather the diversion towards these modes of care at the expense of non‐Covid patients and treatment. In thi…Read more
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12Withholding conflicts of interest: the many flaws of the new ICMJE disclosure formJournal of Medical Ethics 48 (1): 19-21. 2022.In this article, I describe and analyse the proposed new International Committee of Medical Journal Editors form for disclosing conflicts of interest and conclude that it has many flaws. The form does not mention ‘conflicts of interest’ even once in either its body or its title, it introduces a conceptually confused categorisation of different potential conflicts and it ignores future conflicts and intellectual biases. Finally, many of the authors of the new form have themselves failed to declar…Read more
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12Division and discord in the Clinical Trials RegulationJournal of Medical Ethics 42 (11): 729-732. 2016.
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11COVID-19 conscience tracing: mapping the moral distances of coronavirusJournal of Medical Ethics 48 (8): 530-533. 2022.One of the many problems posed by the collective effort to tackle COVID-19 is non-compliance with restrictions. Some people would like to obey restrictions but cannot due to their job or other life circumstances; others are not good at following rules that restrict their liberty, even if the potential consequences of doing so are repeatedly made very clear to them. Among this group are a minority who simply do not care about the consequences of their actions. But many others fail to accurately p…Read more
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10Playing Brains: The Ethical Challenges Posed by Silicon Sentience and Hybrid Intelligence in DishBrainScience and Engineering Ethics 29 (6): 1-17. 2023.The convergence of human and artificial intelligence is currently receiving considerable scholarly attention. Much debate about the resulting _Hybrid Minds_ focuses on the integration of artificial intelligence into the human brain through intelligent brain-computer interfaces as they enter clinical use. In this contribution we discuss a complementary development: the integration of a functional in vitro network of human neurons into an _in silico_ computing environment. To do so, we draw on a r…Read more
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3A Response to Penders: The Disvalue of Vagueness in AuthorshipJournal of Bioethical Inquiry 14 (1): 17-17. 2017.
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3The Consequences of Vagueness in Consent to Organ DonationBioethics 31 (6): 424-431. 2016.In this article I argue that vagueness concerning consent to post‐mortem organ donation causes considerable harm in several ways. First, the information provided to most people registering as organ donors is very vague in terms of what is actually involved in donation. Second, the vagueness regarding consent to donation increases the distress of families of patients who are potential organ donors, both during and following the discussion about donation. Third, vagueness also increases the chance…Read more
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3Update on the ethical, legal and technical challenges of translating xenotransplantationJournal of Medical Ethics. forthcoming.This manuscript reports on a landmark symposium on the ethical, legal and technical challenges of xenotransplantation in the UK. King’s College London, with endorsement from the British Transplantation Society (BTS), and the European Society of Organ Transplantation (ESOT), brought together a group of experts in xenotransplantation science, ethics and law to discuss the ethical, regulatory and technical challenges surrounding translating xenotransplantation into the clinical setting. The symposi…Read more
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The untimely death of the UK Donation Ethics CommitteeJournal of Medical Ethics 43 (1): 63-64. 2017.