•  11
    Bioethics: 50 Puzzles, Problems, and Thought Experiments collects 50 cases—both real and imaginary—that have been, or should be, of special interest and importance to philosophical bioethics. Cases are collected together under topical headings in a natural order for an introductory course in bioethics. Each case is described in a few pages, which includes bioethical context, a concise narrative of the case itself, and a discussion of its importance, both for broader philosophical issues and for …Read more
  •  24
    Individual Complicity: The Tortured Patient
    In Chiara Lepora & Robert Goodin (eds.), On complicity and compromise, Oxford University Press. 2013.
    Medical complicity in torture is prohibited by international law and codes of professional ethics. But in the many countries in which torture is common, doctors frequently are expected to assist unethical acts that they are unable to prevent. Sometimes these doctors face a dilemma: they are asked to provide diagnoses or treatments that respond to genuine health needs but that also make further torture more likely or more effective. The duty to avoid complicity in torture then comes into conflict…Read more
  •  120
    On Compromise and Being Compromised
    Journal of Political Philosophy 20 (1): 1-22. 2012.
    Compromise arises in contexts where irreconcilable claims must nonetheless somehow be resolved. Ordinary people in everyday life, politicians and artists, doctors engaging in research, humanitarian workers providing aid in the midst of war – all of them will have faced situations where compromise appeared to be the only reasonable option, and yet will have felt that there was nevertheless something deeply wrong with it. The aim of this paper is to help make sense of that sentiment. The focus of…Read more
  •  70
    On Complicity and Compromise: A Reply to Peter French and Steven Ratner
    Criminal Law and Philosophy 10 (3): 591-602. 2016.
    Peter French’s and Steven Ratner’s thoughtful comments are helpful in advancing the analysis we offered in our book On Complicity and Compromise. Inevitably, there are areas of disagreement and bones to pick. However, our primary concern in this reply will be to press, with their assistance, the more positive agenda.
  •  111
    Grading Complicity in Rwandan Refugee Camps
    Journal of Applied Philosophy 28 (3): 259-276. 2011.
    Complicity with wrongdoing comes in many forms and many degrees. We distinguish subcategories cooperation, collaboration and collusion from connivance and condoning, identifying their defining features and assessing their characteristic moral valences. We illustrate the use of these distinctions by reference to events in refugee camps in and around Rwanda after the 1994 genocide, and the extent to which international organizations and nongovernment organizations were wrongfully complicit with th…Read more
  •  37
    On complicity and compromise: a reply
    Journal of Medical Ethics 43 (4): 277-278. 2017.
    The cautions of our commentators are all well taken, and we are grateful for them. When we say that physicians should respect the wishes of their patients for medical treatment, even if that would make them complicit in torture being inflicted on their patients, Henry Shue reminds us that that assumes that the patients undergoing torture retain minimally adequate decision-making capacity. Insofar as the torture aims at, and succeeds in, producing ‘regression to an infantile state’, patients who …Read more
  •  60
    No Exceptionalism Needed to Treat Terrorists
    with Marion Danis and Alan Wertheimer
    American Journal of Bioethics 9 (10): 53-54. 2009.
    Gesundheit and colleagues offer dramatic examples of the medical treatment of terrorists but then pose the suggestion that those who engage in terrorism forfeit their right to medical care, and, consequently, that physicians have no obligation to treat them. Their argument presupposes that a physician’s obligation to provide medical care depends on the patients’ right to health care. Therefore, someone who commits heinous and abhorrent acts thereby waives the right to health care and the phy…Read more
  •  48
    On complicity and compromise: a précis
    Journal of Medical Ethics 43 (4): 269-269. 2017.
    Complicity consists in one person contributing to someone else's wrongdoing. But there is a diverse cluster ways of being involved in another’s wrongdoing. For a ‘diagnosis by exclusion’, we first fix the meaning of complicity in contrast to that with which it is often wrongly conflated. Literally cooperating in wrongdoing with others, for instance, is more than complicity. Each and every cooperator is actually a co-principal in the wrong jointly committed; and each bears the full responsibility…Read more
  •  54
    On complicity and compromise
    Oxford University Press. 2013.
    Drawing on philosophy, law and political science, and on a wealth of practical experience delivering emergency medical services in conflict-ridden settings, Lepora and Goodin untangle the complexities surrounding compromise and complicity.
  •  852
    The tortured patient: a medical dilemma
    Hastings Center Report 41 (3): 38-47. 2011.
    Torture is unethical and usually counterproductive. It is prohibited by international and national laws. Yet it persists: according to Amnesty International, torture is widespread in more than a third of countries. Physicians and other medical professionals are frequently asked to assist with torture. Medical complicity in torture, like other forms of involvement, is prohibited both by international law and by codes of professional ethics. However, when the victims of torture are also patients i…Read more