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.

This essay challenges the view that the provision of health care must take place within a competitive-free system. The author argues that, presuming that there is a requirement to meet the demands of those who cannot pay for health care, a competitive market provides a good way to deal with injustices within the health care system. The author concludes that the demands for justice are best met when indigent individuals use some portion of the funds they receive from the government to purchase one of the many competing forms of health care. This scheme requires a competitive market in the delivery of health care.

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.

There has been a growing concern over establishing norms that ensure the ethically acceptable and scientifically sound conduct of clinical trials. Among the leading norms internationally are the World Medical Association's Declaration of Helsinki, guidelines by the Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences, the International Conference on Harmonization's standards for industry, and the CONSORT group's reporting norms, in addition to the influential U.S. Federal Common Rule, Food and Drug Administration's body of regulations, and information sheets by the Department of Health and Human Services. There are also many norms published at more local levels by official agencies and professional groups.Any account of international standards should cover both scientific and ethical norms at once – the two are conceptually intertwined. Recent sources recognize that “[s]cientifically unsound research on human subjects is unethical in that it exposes research subjects to risks without possible benefit.”

In this paper questions are raised about the use of Halakhic material discussions of medical ethics. Three ways in which one might use Halakhic material in such discussions are distinguishes: (a) as a source for ideas about medical ethics which can be defended independently of their origin; (b) as a basis for mandating certain forms of behaviour for members of the Jewish faith; (c) as the basis for claims about the Jewish view on disputed topics in medical ethics. The first two raise no methodical problems. The third use raises a number of theoretical and practical issues, with which the paper is concerned. Several problems stem from the fact that Halakhah distinguishes between obligations, fulfilment of which is required for all people. With rare exceptions, the obligations imposed up on the Jewish people are more stringent. The pitfall lurking the in third of the three uses is that authors using Halakhic material may correctly conclude that obligations that are supposed to fall only upon the Jewish people fall upon all people. An analysis of this problem follows, along with a plea for a responsible use of Halakhic material in the third way, so as to avoid certain real pitfalls. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this?

In a recent article (Brody 2010), I analyzed the debates surrounding charges of biopiracy, that is, charges that developed countries use biotechnology patents to expropriate the biological/genetic heritage of less developed countries. Such charges often are accompanied by the additional charge that biotechnology patents are used to expropriate the traditional knowledge about the use of these resources possessed by indigenous communities in less developed countries. It is this second charge that is the focus of this essay, which will develop both narrative and normative claims. The narrative claim is that various context specific principles about justice relating to traditional knowledge were adopted during the ..