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40Knowing When to Stop: The Limits of MedicineHastings Center Report 21 (3): 5-8. 1991.Baconian science, a tool for plundering nature, has impelled physicians to insist on medical treatment even when it is futile. The Hippocratic tradition of medicine teaches us instead to acknowledge nature's limits.
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15Growing Older and Getting WiserInternational Journal of Applied Philosophy 33 (1): 35-41. 2019.Health care reform to provide long-term care supportive services for growing numbers of older Americans presents ethical, cultural, and political challenges. This paper draws lessons from Japan, the world’s oldest nation, to develop an ethical argument in support of enacting public long-term care in the U.S. Despite cultural and political challenges, the paper shows that the ethical case for reform is strong, with broad ethical support from a range of ethical perspectives.
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98Health Care Reform: What History Doesn’t TeachTheoretical Medicine and Bioethics 26 (4): 277-305. 2005.The paper begins by tracing the historical development of American medicine as practice, profession, and industry from the eighteenth century to the present. This historical outline emphasizes shifting conceptions of physicians and physician ethics. It lays the basis for showing, in the second section, how contemporary controversies about the physician’s role in managed care take root in medicine’s past. In the final two sections, I revisit both the historical analysis and its application to con…Read more
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50Is There a ‘Right to Try’ Experimental Therapies? Ethical Criteria for Selecting Patients With Spinal Muscular Atrophy to Receive Nusinersen in an Expanded Access ProgramAmerican Journal of Bioethics 17 (10): 70-71. 2017.
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42Genetic Testing and the Social Responsibility of Private Health Insurance CompaniesJournal of Law, Medicine and Ethics 21 (1): 109-116. 1993.Over the next 15 years, the government-funded human genome project will map and sequence each of the human cell’s estimated 100,000 genes. The project’s first fruits will be a vast quantity of information about genetic disease. This information will contribute to the design of quicker, cheaper and more accurate tests for identifying deleterious genes in individuals. Because genetic conditions are often regarded as “immutable, heritable taints that intrinsically implicate the bearer’s identity,” …Read more
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15Fairly Allocating Space in an Immunotherapy Production Facility: Reply to CriticsAmerican Journal of Bioethics 18 (5). 2018.
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43Is That the Same Person? Case Studies in NeurosurgeryAmerican Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 8 (3): 160-170. 2017.Do neurosurgical procedures ever result in the patient prior to the procedure not being identical with the individual who wakes up postsurgery in the hospital bed? We address this question by offering an analysis of the persistence of persons that emphasizes narrative, rather than numerical, identity. We argue that a narrative analysis carries the advantage of highlighting what matters to patients in their ordinary lives, explaining the varying degrees of persistence of personal identity, and en…Read more
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9Genetic Testing and the Social Responsibility of Private Health Insurance CompaniesJournal of Law, Medicine and Ethics 21 (1): 109-116. 1993.Over the next 15 years, the government-funded human genome project will map and sequence each of the human cell’s estimated 100,000 genes. The project’s first fruits will be a vast quantity of information about genetic disease. This information will contribute to the design of quicker, cheaper and more accurate tests for identifying deleterious genes in individuals. Because genetic conditions are often regarded as “immutable, heritable taints that intrinsically implicate the bearer’s identity,” …Read more
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26Is Refusal of Futile Treatment Unjustified Paternalism?Journal of Clinical Ethics 6 (2): 133-137. 1995.
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27From protection to entitlement: selecting research subjects for early phase clinical trials involving breakthrough therapiesJournal of Medical Ethics 43 (6): 391-400. 2017.
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18Intergenerational ethics in Africa: Duties to older adults in skipped generation householdsDeveloping World Bioethics 22 (3): 152-161. 2021.Developing World Bioethics, Volume 22, Issue 3, Page 152-161, September 2022.
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32Integrating medical ethics with normative theory: Patient advocacy and social responsibilityTheoretical Medicine and Bioethics 11 (2). 1990.It is often assumed that the chief responsibility medical professionals bear is patient care and advocacy. The meeting of other duties, such as ensuring a more just distribution of medical resources and promoting the public good, is not considered a legitimate basis for curtailing or slackening beneficial patient services. It is argued that this assumption is often made without sufficient attention to foundational principles of professional ethics; that once core principles are laid bare this as…Read more
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Ethics committees and distributive justiceIn D. Micah Hester & Toby Schonfeld (eds.), Guidance for healthcare ethics committees, Cambridge University Press. 2012.
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35Conceiving A Child to Save A Child: Reproductive and Filial EthicsJournal of Clinical Ethics 1 (2): 99-103. 1990.
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31Futility and Fairness: A Defense of the Texas Advance Directive LawAmerican Journal of Bioethics 15 (8): 43-46. 2015.Debates about medical futility first emerged in the scholarly literature during the 1990s after empirical studies showed the widespread use of medical interventions offering no reasonable chance of...
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49Can we wrong a robot?AI and Society 38 (1): 259-268. 2023.With the development of increasingly sophisticated sociable robots, robot-human relationships are being transformed. Not only can sociable robots furnish emotional support and companionship for humans, humans can also form relationships with robots that they value highly. It is natural to ask, do robots that stand in close relationships with us have any moral standing over and above their purely instrumental value as means to human ends. We might ask our question this way, ‘Are there ways we can…Read more
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24Ending Midlife Bias: New Values for Old AgeOup Usa. 2020.As average lifespans stretch to new lengths, how are human values impacted? Should our values change over the course of our ever-increasing lifespans? Nancy S. Jecker introduces a new concept, the life stage relativity of values, which holds that at different life stages, different ethical concerns should take center stage. For Jecker, the privileging of midlife values raises fundamental problems of fairness, and reveals large gaps in ethical principles and theories. Jecker introduces a new phil…Read more
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20Disenfranchising the elderly from life-extending medical carePublic Affairs Quarterly 2 (3): 51-68. 1988.
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33Ethical Guidance for Selecting Clinical Trials to Receive Limited Space in an Immunotherapy Production FacilityAmerican Journal of Bioethics 18 (4): 58-67. 2018.Our aims are to set forth a multiprinciple system for selecting among clinical trials competing for limited space in an immunotherapy production facility that supplies products under investigation by scientific investigators; defend this system by appealing to justice principles; and illustrate our proposal by showing how it might be implemented. Our overarching aim is to assist manufacturers of immunotherapeutic products and other potentially breakthrough experimental therapies with the ethical…Read more
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26Calling It Quits: Stopping Futile Treatment and Caring For PatientsJournal of Clinical Ethics 5 (2): 138-142. 1994.
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65Doing What We Shouldn't: Medical Futility and Moral DistressAmerican Journal of Bioethics 17 (2): 41-43. 2017.
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52Exploiting subjects in placebo-controlled trialsAmerican Journal of Bioethics 2 (2). 2002.This Article does not have an abstract
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79Caring for Patients in Cross‐Cultural SettingsHastings Center Report 25 (1): 6-14. 1995.A caregiver from the dominant U.S. culture and a patient from a very different culture can resolve cross‐cultural disputes about treatment, not by compromising important values, but by focusing on the patient's goals.
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27Animal subjects research Part I: Do animals have rights?In G. A. van Norman, S. Jackson, S. H. Rosenbaum & S. K. Palmer (eds.), Clinical Ethics in Anesthesiology, Cambridge University Press. pp. 168. 2010.
APA Western Division
Shatin, New Territories, Hong Kong
Areas of Specialization
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Applied Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |
African/Africana Philosophy |
Asian Philosophy |
Philosophy of Computing and Information |