Baruch Brody

(1943 - 2018)

This paper distinguishes four major types of futility (physiological, imminent demise, lethal condition, and qualitative) that have been advocated in the literature either in a patient dependent or a patient independent fashion. It proposes five criteria (precision, prospective, social acceptability, significant number, and non-agreement) that any definition of futility must satisfy if it is to serve as the basis for unilaterally limiting futile care. It then argues that none of the definitions that have been advocated meet the criteria, primarily because their proponents have not paid sufficient attention to the problematic nature of the data supporting the use of their definitions.

There is a growing interest in comparison of international health care data with the hope that such studies will enable individual systems to learn from other systems. Such comparisons, however, presuppose that there exist common criteria for evaluating health care systems. The main thesis of this paper is that these comparative studies are misleading because they employ inappropriate operationalizations of these criteria because the operarionalizations are based upon mistaken global conceptualizations of the criteria in question. The essay provides a methodological critique of what has been done and sets a new agenda for future research.

Until a few years ago, the works of Thomas Reid were known only by specialists in the history of philosophy, and, insofar as people did think at all about Reid and his school of common sense philosophy, it was generally thought that Kant had been right in dismissing them as naive thinkers who did not really understand what philosophical skepticism was all about. This attitude about Reid changed very rapidly in recent years. More and more people now realize that Reid was one of the most important British philosophers, and that his works are full of deep insights that have only recently been rediscovered.

One of the founding principles of research ethics is that subjects should be treated equally. In the words of the Belmont Report, “equals ought to be treated equally.” This principle does not imply that all subjects should be treated exactly the same. Rather, subjects who are similar in relevant respects should receive similar treatment. Clinical status is clearly relevant to determining how subjects should be treated. Greater resources should be devoted to subjects who have worse diseases. In contrast, fame is irrelevant. Subjects should not receive greater resources simply because they are famous. A more challenging question, one that pervades clinical research yet has received almost no attention in the literature, is whether subjects' level of scientific importance is relevant to determining how much support they should receive.

: The European patent system allows for the introduction of moral issues into decisions about the granting of patents. This feature has greatly impacted European debates about the patenting of biotechnology. This essay explores the European experience, in both the European Union and the European Patent Organization. It argues that there has been great confusion surrounding these issues primarily because the Europeans have not developed a general theory about when exclusion from patentability is the best social mechanism for dealing with morally offensive technologies.

Recent years have witnessed a proliferation of philosophical discussion about such concrete moral issues as just war, distribution of food aid, euthanasia, reverse discrimination, etc. Much of this discussion implicitly assumes that there are true and false positions on these issues, valid or invalid arguments for these positions, etc. Recent years have not witnessed, however, a proliferation of philosophical defenses of these assumptions. With the decline of metaethical discussions, these assumptions have remained just assumptions rather than the conclusions of a philosophical argument.