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28A New Ethical Framework for Assessing the Unique Challenges of Fetal Therapy Trials: Response to CommentariesAmerican Journal of Bioethics 22 (3): 45-61. 2022.New fetal therapies offer important prospects for improving health. However, having to consider both the fetus and the pregnant woman makes the risk–benefit analysis of fetal therapy trials challenging. Regulatory guidance is limited, and proposed ethical frameworks are overly restrictive or permissive. We propose a new ethical framework for fetal therapy research. First, we argue that considering only biomedical benefits fails to capture all relevant interests. Thus, we endorse expanding the co…Read more
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81How to (Consistently) Reject the Options ArgumentUtilitas 33 (2): 237-245. 2021.It is commonly thought that disability is a harm or “bad difference” because having a disability restricts valuable options in life. In his recent essay “Disability, Options and Well-Being,” Thomas Crawley offers a novel defense of this style of reasoning and argues that we and like-minded critics of this brand of argument are guilty of an inconsistency. Our aim in this article is to explain why our view avoids inconsistency, to challenge Crawley's positive defense of the Options Argument, and t…Read more
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333Setting priorities fairly in response to Covid-19: identifying overlapping consensus and reasonable disagreementJournal of Law and the Biosciences 1 (1). 2020.Proposals for allocating scarce lifesaving resources in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic have aligned in some ways and conflicted in others. This paper attempts a kind of priority setting in addressing these conflicts. In the first part, we identify points on which we do not believe that reasonable people should differ—even if they do. These are (i) the inadequacy of traditional clinical ethics to address priority-setting in a pandemic; (ii) the relevance of saving lives; (iii) the flaws of fir…Read more
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26Caring for People with Disabilities: An Ethics of RespectHastings Center Report 50 (1): 44-45. 2020.Eva Feder Kittay's Learning from My Daughter: The Value and Care of Disabled Minds is poised to make a major contribution to the disability literature and is likely to spark controversy among disability scholars. The book's central contribution is the articulation of an ethics of care for meeting the “genuine needs” and “legitimate wants” of people with disabilities or chronic illnesses. We applaud Kittay, who is the mother of a woman with cerebral palsy who has multiple physical and intellectua…Read more
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39Review of Carl F. Cranor: Regulating Toxic Substances: A Philosophy of Science and the Law (review)Ethics 105 (3): 674-676. 1995.
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336Cutting to the Core: Exploring the Ethics of Contested SurgeriesRowman & Littlefield Publishers. 2006.When the benefits of surgery do not outweigh the harms or where they do not clearly do so, surgical interventions become morally contested. Cutting to the Core examines a number of such surgeries, including infant male circumcision and cutting the genitals of female children, the separation of conjoined twins, surgical sex assignment of intersex children and the surgical re-assignment of transsexuals, limb and face transplantation, cosmetic surgery, and placebo surgery
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100A Symmetrical View of Disability and EnhancementIn Adam Cureton & David Wasserman (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Disability, Oxford University Press. pp. 561-79. 2020.Disability and enhancement are often treated as opposing concepts. To become disabled in some respect is to move away from those who are enhanced in that same respect; to become enhanced is to move away from the corresponding state of disability. This chapter examines how best to understand the concepts of disability and enhancement in this symmetrical way. After considering various candidates, two types of accounts are identified as the most promising: welfarist accounts and typical-functioning…Read more
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19A Case for Greater Risk Tolerance in Internet Use by Adults with Intellectual Disabilities: A Comment on Chalghoumi et alEthics and Behavior 29 (3): 223-226. 2019.This comment argues for increased tolerance of privacy risks in the Internet activity of adults with intellectual disabilities. Excessive caution about such risks denies those individuals not only the great benefits of Internet use but also the difficult but valuable experiences of loss, disappointment, and hurt associated with those risks. A level of risk-aversion appropriate for small children will be disrespectful for adults with intellectual disabilities. To the extent that additional safegu…Read more
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9Deception, Harm, and Expectations of PainAmerican Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 9 (3): 188-189. 2018.
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24Fetal Medicine and the Pregnant WomanHastings Center Report 48 (2). 2018.In coming decades, fetal medicine may become a routine part of reproductive care. The measures pregnant women now take to protect fetal health are largely generic, like restricting their diets and using supplements. Relatively few interventions are based on specific conditions revealed by ultrasound or genetic testing. A recent finding, though, may herald a dramatic rise in “personalized” fetal medicine: certain drugs already approved by the Food and Drug Administration can apparently boost neur…Read more
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14Driving a Wedge Between Self-Control and Self-OwnershipAmerican Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 6 (4): 42-44. 2015.
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93Discrimination and DisabilityIn Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of the Ethics of Discrimination, Routledge. 2017.
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30Persson, Ingmar. Inclusive Ethics: Extending Beneficence and Egalitarian Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. 288. $70.00 (review)Ethics 128 (3): 651-657. 2018.
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1453How to allocate scarce health resources without discriminating against people with disabilitiesEconomics and Philosophy 33 (2): 161-186. 2017.One widely used method for allocating health care resources involves the use of cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) to rank treatments in terms of quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs) gained. CEA has been criticized for discriminating against people with disabilities by valuing their lives less than those of non-disabled people. Avoiding discrimination seems to lead to the ’QALY trap’: we cannot value saving lives equally and still value raising quality of life. This paper reviews existing response…Read more
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30One Child: Do We Have a Right to More?, Sarah Conly. Oxford University Press, 2016, 248 pages (review)Economics and Philosophy 33 (2): 313-319. 2017.
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34Considering Consent to Research for Patients in Chronic Pain and With Mental IllnessesAmerican Journal of Bioethics 17 (12): 51-52. 2017.
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55Better Parenting through Biomedical Modification: A Case for Pluralism, Deference, and CharityKennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 27 (2): 217-247. 2017.The moral limits on how, and how much, parents may attempt to shape their children depend on what the moral project of parenthood is all about. A great deal has been written in the past forty years on the moral functions of parents and families and the acquisition and character of parental duties and rights. There has also been a great deal of philosophical writing on the use of technologies to create, select, and modify children, with such seminal works as Warnock et al., and Robertson. The two…Read more
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15Death or Disability: The Carmentis Machine and Decision-Making for Critically Ill Children by Dominic WilkinsonKennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 27 (1): 4-11. 2017.Dominic Wilkinson, a neonatal physician and medical ethicist, has written a searching, moving, and philosophically sophisticated book about the ethics of life and death decision making in the neonatal intensive care unit. Although I will devote much of this review to criticism, I want to say at the outset that Death or Disability represents interdisciplinary work at its very best. Wilkinson’s exposition is both rich in detail and uncompromising in its ethical analysis. He spares the reader none …Read more
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27Prenatal Harm and Preemptive Abortion in a Two‐Tiered Morality (review)Philosophical Books 46 (1): 22-33. 2005.
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123Let them Eat Chances: Probability and Distributive JusticeEconomics and Philosophy 12 (1): 29-49. 1996.Jon Elster reports that in 1940, and again in 1970, the U.S. draft lottery was challenged for falling short of the legally mandated ‘random selection’. On both occasions, the physical mixing of the lots appeared to be incomplete, since the birth dates were clustered in a way that would have been extremely unlikely if the lots were fully mixed. There appears to have been no suspicion on either occasion that the deficiency in the mixing was intended, known, or believed to favor or disfavor any ide…Read more
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34Disability, Difference, and Discrimination: Perspectives on Justice in Bioethics and Public PolicyHypatia 17 (1): 209-213. 2002.
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11Adrienne Asch: Memories of a Close Friend and CollaboratorHastings Center Report 44 (2): 15-17. 2014.Adrienne Asch inspired, challenged, and provoked a generation of bioethicists and philosophers who were discovering the subject of disability. For Adrienne, disability was a complex phenomenon that raised universal issues of embodiment, justice, well‐being, and identity. She insisted that bioethicists and philosophers who invoked disability in discussions about these issues first learn something about it, for which her own work provided critical insights. She argued eloquently that those who rel…Read more
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8Understanding the Relationship Between Disability and Well-BeingIn David Wasserman & Adrienne Asch (eds.), Disability and the Good Human Life, . pp. 139-67. 2015.
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11Book Reviews-Disability, Difference, Discrimination: Perspectives on Justice in Bioethics and Public PolicyBioethics 14 (3): 276-278. 2000.
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99Physicians as researchers: Difficulties with the "similarity position"American Journal of Bioethics 6 (4). 2006.This Article does not have an abstract