Indianapolis, Indiana, United States of America
  •  8
    Rethinking Decision Quality: Measures, Meaning, and Bioethics
    with Greg A. Sachs
    Hastings Center Report 52 (6): 13-22. 2022.
    Studies of patient decision‐making use many different measures to evaluate the quality of decisions and the decision‐making process, partly to determine whether the ethical goals of informed consent, patient autonomy, and shared decision‐making have been achieved. We describe these measures, grouped under three main approaches, and review their limitations, leading to three conclusions. First, no measure or combination of measures can provide a complete assessment of decision quality. Second, th…Read more
  •  3
    Selling Clinical Biospecimens: Guidance for Researchers and Private Industry
    with Jane A. Hartsock
    Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics 51 (2): 429-436. 2023.
    The recently revised Common Rule requires that donors of biospecimens for research be informed if their specimens might be used for commercial profit. The Common Rule, however, does not apply to sharing or selling de-identified biospecimens that are “leftover” from clinical uses. As a result, many medical researchers remain uncertain of their legal and ethical obligations when a commercial entity expresses interest in these specimens.
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    Hastings Center Report 42 (1): 7-8. 2012.
  • The Continuing Usefulness Account of Proper Function
    In Andre Ariew, Robert Cummins & Mark Perlman (eds.), Functions: New Essays in the Philosophy of Psychology and Biology, Clarendon Press. 2002.
    'Modern History' views claim that in order for a trait X to have the proper function F, X must have been recently favored by natural selection for doing F (Griffiths 1992, 1993; Godfrey-Smith 1994). For many traits with prototypical proper functions, however, such recent selection may not have occurred, since traits may have been maintained owing to lack of variation or selection for other effects. I explore this flaw in Modern History accounts and offer an alternative etiological theory, which …Read more