A. M. Viens

Parents’ freedom to choose infant male circumcision is the correct policyIndividuals and groups lobbying to have infant male circumcision prohibited or restricted often argue that the practice of routinely circumcising infants is unjustified. For instance, in this issue of the journal, John Hutson argues that it is virtually impossible to justify a policy in which the medical establishment should be able to embark on a “mass circumcision” campaign of 100% of the infant male population [see page 238].1Indeed, I would be hard pressed to find anyone who could rationally disagree with this contention. However, this is because no one is currently arguing for the enactment of a policy that stipulates that all healthy male infants should be routinely circumcised . Arguments seeking to support a prohibition of “routine infant circumcision”, such as the one by Hutson, are arguing against a straw man—and a pitiful one at that.2 Such arguments only serve to misconstrue the debate and avoid engaging in the real and pressing issues concerning the legitimacy of the provision of this procedure.The questions that should be considered, and the ones which I shall be interested in discussing here, are what reasons are justifiable for allowing parents to choose to have their son circumcised? After well informed and careful deliberation should parents have the freedom to choose to have their son circumcised? These are the most relevant questions to be considered because there is a growing collection of citizens, medical practitioners, and lawyers who are currently lobbying for the practice of infant male circumcision to be outlawed—for example, there is a bioethicist who argues that the criminal law should be used ….

The essays selected for this volume focus on issues that arise when attempting to design, review and undertake research involving human participants who are experiencing a private or public emergency. The main themes discussed by the essays are: the distinctive and significant ethical questions as to how research participants can be treated during emergency settings; the ethical challenges raised by emergencies for researchers undertaking research and its effects on the nature of research pursued; and procedural obstacles raised by emergencies which can affect the quality of good research ethics review. The volume is unique in that it is the first collection to exclusively deal with all of the central ethical aspects of conducting human subject research in the context of emergency.

The author comments on several articles on addiction. Recent developments in neuroscience suggest that addicted individuals have substantial impairments in the cognitive control of voluntary behavior. The author differs on the observations that addicts either act on desires that are not conducive to rational action. The author also states that addiction seems to be a prime manifestation of akrasia, in which one fails to be motivated to act in accordance with what one judges ought to be done. Accession Number: 24077920; Authors: Viens, A. M. 1; Email Address: [email protected]; Affiliations: 1: University of Oxford, Hertford College, Oxford, United Kingdom; Subject: EDITORIALS; Subject: ADDICTIONS; Subject: COGNITION; Subject: DECISION making; Subject: AKRASIA; Subject: NEUROSCIENCES; Number of Pages: 3p

There is an underdeveloped potential for using neuroscience as a particular input in the process of law-making. This paper examines one such instance in the area of public health law. Neuroscience could play an important role in elucidating and strengthening the relevance of the conditions underlying and re-enforcing our ability to cooperate in balancing the benefits and burdens necessary to achieve particular goods; for instance, the protection of public health in an outbreak of pandemic influenza. In particular, I shall focus on how a better understanding of the neurobiological basis of reciprocity could be used to help increase support and compliance with public heath laws—especially those involving restrictive measures (such as quarantine and isolation).

In this paper, we provide a state-of-the-art overview of the ethical challenges that arise in the context of antimicrobial resistance, which includes an introduction to the contributions to the symposium in this issue. We begin by discussing why AMR is a distinct ethical issue, and should not be viewed purely as a technical or medical problem. In the second section, we expand on some of these arguments and argue that AMR presents us with a broad range of ethical problems that must be addressed as part of a successful policy response to emerging drug resistance. In the third section, we discuss how some of these ethical challenges should be addressed, and we argue that this requires contributions from citizens, ethicists, policy makers, practitioners and industry. We conclude with an overview of steps that should be taken in moving forward and addressing the ethical problems of AMR

The aim of establishing a consistent and unified approach in law concerning the ethics of commercializing human embryos and their derivative parts, products, or related technologies remains incomplete within the European Union. In an attempt to elucidate these problems and implications, I examine three separate moral considerations (i.e., exploitation, commodification, and objectification) that could be used to ground the putative wrongness associated with commercializing stem cells—in particular patenting these materials. It is argued that the moral justification for legal prohibitions on such biological materials for commercial purposes is faced by a number of problematic issues.

While Powers and Faden do not consider possible anti-paternalism objections to their view, there are two variants of this objection that a social justice perspective is susceptible to. It is worth exploring which responses to such objections may be less promising than others. It is argued that for most public health measures targeting the disadvantaged, theorists and practitioners taking a social justice perspective should bite the paternalist bullet. Insofar as the government has the ability to reduce mortality and morbidity within the population in a way that is fair and in everyone’s interests, then the use of paternalistic means or resultant paternalistic effects should be thought to be the lesser evil