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22Owning up to our Agendas: On the Role and Limits of Science in Debates about Embryos and Brain DeathJournal of Law, Medicine and Ethics 34 (1): 58-76. 2006.The ethical issues integral to embryo research and brain death are intertwined with comprehensive views of life that are not explicitly discussed in most policy debate. I consider three representative views – a naturalist, romantic, and theist – and show how these might inform the way practical ethical issues are addressed. I then consider in detail one influential argument in embryo research that attempts to bypass deep values. I show that this twinning argument is deeply flawed. It presupposes…Read more
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22A Sympathetic but Critical Assessment of Nanotechnology InitiativesJournal of Law, Medicine and Ethics 34 (4): 655-657. 2006.
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20The case for managed care: Reappraising medical and socio-political idealsJournal of Medicine and Philosophy 24 (5). 1999.The arguments against managed care can be divided into two general clusters. One cluster concerns the way managed care undermines the ethical ideals of medical professionalism. Since those ideals largely focus on the physician-patient relation, the first cluster comes under the rubric of micro-ethics; namely, the ethics of individual-individual relations. The second cluster of criticisms focuses on macro-ethical issues, primarily on issues of justice and policy. By reviewing these arguments, it …Read more
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19A hierarchical architecture for nano-scale science and technology: taking stock of the claims about science made by advocates of NBIC convergenceIn Baird D. (ed.), Discovering the Nanoscale, Ios. pp. 21--33. 2004.
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19The Social Conditions for Nanomedicine: Disruption, Systems, and Lock-InJournal of Law, Medicine and Ethics 34 (4): 733-740. 2006.Many believe that nanotechnology will be disruptive to our society. Presumably, this means that some people and even whole industries will be undermined by technological developments that nanoscience makes possible. This, in turn, implies that we should anticipate potential workforce disruptions, mitigate in advance social problems likely to arise, and work to fairly distribute the future benefits of nanotechnology. This general, somewhat vague sense of disruption, is very difficult to specify –…Read more
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18The value of comparative analysis in framing the problems of organizational ethicsHEC Forum 13 (2): 125-131. 2001.
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18The concept of faith: A philosophical investigation (review)International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 41 (2): 126-128. 1997.
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16What Is Unique About Nanomedicine? The Significance of the MesoscaleJournal of Law, Medicine and Ethics 40 (4): 780-794. 2012.Unlike drugs and medical devices, for which long standing and continuously improving quality assurance/quality control infrastructures exist, many nano-based products lack well-defined standards that are useful to manufacturers and regulators. Inherent variabilities in nanoparticle sizes and shapes, their large surface-to-volume ratios, and their mesoscale interactions with subcellular structures, suggest new complexities and challenges that must be met before widespread application of nanomedic…Read more
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15What is Unique about Nanomedicine? The Significance of the MesoscaleJournal of Law, Medicine and Ethics 40 (4): 780-794. 2012.In prominent funding and policy statements, a particle with at least one dimension in the 1-300 nm size range must have novel physicochemical properties to count as a “nanoparticle.” Size is thus only one factor. Novelty of a particle's properties is also essential to its “nano” classification. When particles in this size range are introduced into living systems, they often interact with their host in novel ways that require some modification of existing methods and models used by pharmaceutical…Read more
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15The ethics of nano/neuro convergenceIn Judy Illes & Barbara J. Sahakian (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Neuroethics, Oxford University Press. pp. 467--92. 2011.This article outlines a few representative areas of research in nano- and neuroscience and then considers the complex continuum of entangled research practices that results. The point of this review is to give a realistic sense of the distributed, opportunistic character of this research, and to show how such emergent practices challenge conventional assumptions about how ethics and science should be advanced. It evaluates the risk profile of research related to that type as if it designated som…Read more
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15Stem cells and the man on the moon: Should we go there from here?American Journal of Bioethics 2 (1). 2002.This Article does not have an abstract
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14Reflections on the Dignity of Guan Zhong: A Comparison of Confucian and Western Liberal Notions of SuicideConfucian Bioethics. forthcoming.
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12Hegel and the Spirit (review)The Owl of Minerva 26 (1): 71-77. 1994.In most of the philosophy of the last 150 years, theological concerns have been increasingly marginalized. This does not mean that the issues that were addressed theologically in the past are no longer addressed. Rather, the perennial concerns have been reconstructed so that they are no longer tied to a religious context. Ecclesiology has become political theory, moral theology has become ethics, and doctrines of revelation have become epistemology. Such a list could be made fairly exhaustive, a…Read more
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10Owning up to Our Agendas: On the Role and Limits of Science in Debates about Embryos and Brain DeathJournal of Law, Medicine and Ethics 34 (1): 58-76. 2006.”Merely fact-minded sciences make merely factminded people.”“ …the positivistic concept of science in our time is, historically speaking, a residual concept. It has dropped all the questions which had been considered under the now narrower, now broader concepts of metaphysics….all these ‘metaphysical’ questions, taken broadly – commonly called specifically philosophical questions – surpass the world understood as the universe of mere facts. They surpass it precisely as being questions with the i…Read more
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8The domain of parental discretion in treatment of neonates: Beyond the impasse between a sanctity-of-life and quality-of-life ethicIn Julia Lai Po-Wah Tao (ed.), Cross-Cultural Perspectives on the (Im) Possibility of Global Bioethics, Kluwer Academic. pp. 277--298. 2002.
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5Why Bioethics Needs the Philosophy of Medicine: Some Implications of Reflection on Concepts of Health and DiseaseTheoretical Medicine: An International Journal for the Philosophy and Methodology of Medical Research and Practice 18 (1-2): 145-163. 1997.Germund Hesslow has argued that concepts of health and disease serve no important scientific, clinical, or ethical function. However, this conclusion depends upon the particular concept of disease he espouses; namely, on Boorse's functional notion. The fact/value split embodied in the functional notion of disease leads to a sharp split between the "science" of medicine and bioethics, making the philosophy of medicine irrelevant for both. By placing this disease concept in the broader context of …Read more
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1Theoretical foundations for organizational ethics: developing norms for a new kind of healthcareIn Denis Gordon Arnold (ed.), Ethics and the Business of Biomedicine, Cambridge University Press. pp. 220. 2009.
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Ritual, society and communityIn David Solomon, Ruiping Fan & Bingxiang Luo (eds.), Ritual and the moral life: reclaiming the tradition, Springer. 2012.
Columbia, South Carolina, United States of America