•  482
    Physicians and other medical practitioners make untold numbers of judgments about patient care on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. These judgments fall along a number of spectrums, from the mundane to the tragic, from the obvious to the challenging. Under the rubric of evidence-based medicine, these judgments will be informed by the robust conclusions of medical research. In the ideal circumstance, medical research makes the best decision obvious to the trained professional. Even when practic…Read more
  •  68
    Epistemic Trust, Epistemic Responsibility, and Medical Practice
    Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 33 (4): 302-320. 2008.
    Epistemic trust is an unacknowledged feature of medical knowledge. Claims of medical knowledge made by physicians, patients, and others require epistemic trust. And yet, it would be foolish to define all epistemic trust as epistemically responsible. Accordingly, I use a routine example in medical practice to illustrate how epistemically responsible trust in medicine is trust in epistemically responsible individuals. I go on to illustrate how certain areas of current medical practice of medicine …Read more
  •  32
    Formal and effective autonomy in healthcare
    Journal of Medical Ethics 32 (10): 575-579. 2006.
    This essay lays the groundwork for a novel conception of autonomy that may be called “effective autonomy”—a conception designed to be genuinely action guiding in bioethics. As empirical psychology research on the heuristics and biases approach shows, decision making commonly fails to correspond to people’s desires because of the biases arising from bounded cognition. People who are classified as autonomous on contemporary philosophical accounts may fail to be effectively autonomous because their…Read more
  •  65
    Saying Privacy, Meaning Confidentiality
    American Journal of Bioethics 11 (11): 44-45. 2011.
    The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 11, Issue 11, Page 44-45, November 2011
  •  19
    Systemic versus Severable Conflicts of Interest
    Business and Professional Ethics Journal 40 (2): 223-242. 2021.
    This paper is split into two parts. The first half analyzes conflicts of interests’ effects on judgment, the harms these effects threaten, and our current policies and practices for handling conflicts of interest. This analysis relies on scholarship in several fields, most prominently psychology, all of which have reasons to worry about conflicts of interest. This analysis will show that our current classifications of conflicts of interest and our current strategies for handling conflicts of int…Read more
  •  18
    Should I Stay or Should I Go? A Bioethical Analysis of Healthcare Professionals' and Healthcare Institutions' Moral Obligations During Active Shooter Incidents in Hospitals — A Narrative Review of the Literature
    with Al Giwa, Andrew Milsten, Dorice Vieira, Chinwe Ogedegbe, and Kristen Kelly
    Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics 48 (2): 340-351. 2020.
    Active shooter incidents have unfortunately become a common occurrence the world over. There is no country, city, or venue that is safe from these tragedies, and healthcare institutions are no exception. Healthcare facilities have been the targets of active shooters over the last several decades, with increasing incidents occurring over the last decade. People who work in healthcare have a professional and moral obligation to help patients. As concerns about the possibility of such incidents inc…Read more
  •  13
    Defining Conflicts of Interest in Terms of Judgment
    Business and Professional Ethics Journal 38 (1): 111-131. 2019.
    Conflicts of interest represent one of the defining problems of our time, and yet a clear definition of what constitutes a conflict of interest remains elusive. To move us closer to resolving this problem, this article first reviews and critiques attempts to define conflicts of interest, and, second, uses these critiques to ground a more conceptually consistent and practically useful definition. This definition builds on, but also breaks away from Michael Davis’s definition of conflicts of inter…Read more
  •  14
    Calibrating Confident Judgments About Medically Unexplained Symptoms
    American Journal of Bioethics 18 (5): 36-37. 2018.
  • In this article the authors reflect on regulations which have been developed to protect research subjects and data in research which uses human subjects. They suggest that regulations related to informed consent and privacy protection are burdensome in research which uses human subjects. They argue that a new category of research risk must be established which informs research subjects of the level of risk that they will be exposed to by participating in the research.
  •  3
    Broadbent takes on the ambitious project of carving out some space for a philosophy of epidemiology within the philosophy of science. An exploratory endeavor, the book travels down many paths that the author notes are of limited value. Framing the questions, the answers remain unsettled. This introduction to the primary concepts of a philosophy of epidemiology makes little headway in providing a clearly articulated structure. Though the book begins a discussion of a philosophy of epidemiology, a…Read more
  • The article reviews the book "Ethical Practice in Grief Counseling," by Louis A. Gamino and R. Hal Ritter.
  •  9
    The human microbiome is the bacteria, viruses, and fungi that cover our skin, line our intestines, and flourish in our body cavities. Work on the human microbiome is new, but it is quickly becoming a leading area of biomedical research. What scientists are learning about humans and our microbiomes could change medical practice by introducing new treatment modalities. This new knowledge redefines us as superorganisms comprised of the human body and the collection of microbes that inhabit it and r…Read more
  • In her first effort as editor, Myser brings together the diverse contributors needed for an ambitious book. This volume defies easy categorization: it includes history, sociological and anthropological analysis, and philosophical reflection. In this way, it reflects the contours of bioethics as a field--interdisciplinary almost to a fault. The text is written with minimal jargon, and those without training in sociology or anthropology will find it approachable. The first section provides jarring…Read more
  •  2
    Alfano, a relatively new contributor to the increasingly busy intersection of ethics and epistemology, works to unpack the empirical work in psychology and articulate the full weight of its challenges to virtue ethics and virtue epistemology. The thread that runs throughout is the novel conception of "factitious virtue." Drawing on the chimerically real placebo effect and self-fulfilling prophecies, factitious virtue integrates these epistemically counterintuitive effects into norms for behavior…Read more