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33Unrealistic optimism in early-phase oncology trialsIRB: Ethics & Human Research 33 (1): 1. 2011.Unrealistic optimism is a bias that leads people to believe, with respect to a specific event or hazard, that they are more likely to experience positive outcomes and/or less likely to experience negative outcomes than similar others. The phenomenon has been seen in a range of health-related contexts—including when prospective participants are presented with the risks and benefits of participating in a clinical trial. In order to test for the prevalence of unrealistic optimism among participants…Read more
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13ICU Care in a PandemicHastings Center Report 51 (6): 58-58. 2021.This letter to the editor responds to commentaries in the September‐October 2021issue of the Hastings Center Report by Douglas B. White and Bernard Lo, by Govind Persad, and by Virginia A. Brown, which were themselves responding, in part, to the article “Life‐Years and Rationing in the Covid‐19 Pandemic: A Critical Analysis,” by MaryKatherine Gaurke, Bernard Prusak, Kyeong Yun Jeong, Emily Scire, and Daniel P. Sulmasy.
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24Life‐Years & Rationing in the Covid‐19 Pandemic: A Critical AnalysisHastings Center Report 51 (5): 18-29. 2021.Hastings Center Report, Volume 51, Issue 5, Page 18-29, September‐October 2021.
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ForewordIn Xavier Symons (ed.), Why conscience matters: a defence of conscientious objection in healthcare, Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. 2022.
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14Controversial arguments are controversialTheoretical Medicine and Bioethics 44 (4): 325-326. 2023.
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7Ethics and EvidenceJournal of Clinical Ethics 30 (1): 56-66. 2019.Towards the end of the last century, bioethics underwent an “empirical turn,” characterized by an increasing number of empirical studies about issues of bioethical concern. Taking a cue from the evidence-based medicine movement, some heralded this as a turn toward evidence-based ethics. However, it has never been clear what this means, and the strategies and goals of evidence-based ethics remain ambiguous. In this article, the author explores what the potential aims of this movement might be, ul…Read more
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67End-of-Life Decision Making: When Patients and Surrogates DisagreeJournal of Clinical Ethics 10 (4): 286-293. 1999.
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43Decision-making in patients with advanced cancer compared with amyotrophic lateral sclerosisJournal of Medical Ethics 34 (9): 664-668. 2008.Aim: Patients with advanced cancer need information about end-of-life treatment options in order to make informed decisions. Clinicians vary in the frequency with which they initiate these discussions.Patients and methods: As part of a long-term longitudinal study, patients with an expected 2-year survival of less than 50% who had advanced gastrointestinal or lung cancer or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis were interviewed. Each patient’s medical record was reviewed at enrollment and at 3 months fo…Read more
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37Commentary: Double Effect—Intention is the Solution, Not the ProblemJournal of Law, Medicine and Ethics 28 (1): 26-29. 2000.
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67Do the ward notes reflect the quality of end-of-life care?Journal of Medical Ethics 22 (6): 344-348. 1996.OBJECTIVES: To study the accuracy of reviewing ward notes (chart review) as a measure of the quality of care rendered to patients with "Do Not Resuscitate" (DNR) orders. DESIGN: We reviewed the charts of 19 consecutive, competent inpatients with DNR orders for evidence that the staff addressed a broad range of patient care needs called Concurrent Care Concerns (CCCs), such as withholding treatments other than resuscitation itself, and attention to patient comfort needs. We then interviewed the p…Read more
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16The virtues and the vices of the outrageousTheoretical Medicine and Bioethics 44 (2): 107-108. 2023.
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27Death Lost in TranslationAmerican Journal of Bioethics 23 (2): 17-19. 2023.We thank Nielsen Busch and Mjaaland for their article on the dead donor rule (Nielsen Busch and Mjaaland 2023). We would like to take this opportunity to go beyond the dead donor rule in order to r...
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40Physician-Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia: Theological and Ethical ResponsesChristian Bioethics 27 (3): 223-227. 2021.Euthanasia and rational suicide were acceptable practices in some quarters in antiquity. These practices all but disappeared as Hippocratic, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim beliefs took hold in Europe and the Near East. By the late nineteenth century, however, a political movement to legalize euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide (PAS) began in Europe and the United States. Initially, the path to legalization was filled with obstacles, especially in the United States. In the last few decades, …Read more
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28Killing and Allowing to Die: Insights from AugustineChristian Bioethics 27 (3): 264-278. 2021.One major argument against prohibiting euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide (PAS) is that there is no rational basis for distinguishing between killing and allowing to die: if we permit patients to die by forgoing life-sustaining treatments, then we also ought to permit euthanasia and PAS. In this paper, the author argues, contra this claim, that it is in fact coherent to differentiate between killing and allowing to die. To develop this argument, the author provides an analysis of Saint Au…Read more
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ForewordIn Xavier Symons (ed.), Why conscience matters: a defence of conscientious objection in healthcare, Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. 2022.
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13Influential Statements on the Provision of Artificial Nutrition and Hydration as a Means of Sustaining LifeThe National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 21 (3): 485-493. 2021.
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21Artificial Nutrition and Hydration and Care at the End of LifeThe National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 21 (3): 453-482. 2021.New Natural Law Theory and the Catholic medico-moral tradition often lead to similar conclusions in hard cases regarding end-of-life care. Considering the provision of artificial nutrition and hydration to patients suffering from post-coma unresponsive wakefulness, however, brings to light subtle ways in which NNL differs from the centuries-old natural law tradition. In this essay, I formalize the methodology embedded within the casuistry of the medico-moral tradition and show how it differs fro…Read more
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5The Changing Face of Health Care: A Christian Appraisal of Managed Care, Resource Allocation, and Patient-Caregiver Relationships (review)Hastings Center Report 29 (5): 42. 1999.Christians have considered the care of the sick to be a form of ministry ever since the time of Jesus. As Christians prepare to commemorate the second millenium of the birth of the founder of their religion, they cannot help but notice that health care is changing more than it ever has in the last 2,000 years. Nor can they help but notice that these changes threaten the notion that health care can be practiced as a genuine ministry in the twenty-first century.
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10Correction to: Whole-brain death and integration: realigning the ontological concept with clinical diagnostic testsTheoretical Medicine and Bioethics 41 (5): 281-282. 2020.My article, “Whole-brain death and integration: Realigning the ontological concept with clinical diagnostic tests”.
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14Physician-Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia: Before, During, and After the Holocaust (edited book)Lexington Books. 2020.This book provides a history of Nazi medical euthanasia programs, demonstrating that arguments in their favor were widely embraced by Western medicine before the Third Reich. Contributors find significant continuities between history and current physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia and urge caution about their legalization or implementation.
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47Should Institutions Disclose the Names of Employees with Covid‐19?Hastings Center Report 50 (3): 25-27. 2020.Prestigious University is a large, private educational institution with a medical school, a university hospital, a law school, and graduate and undergraduate colleges all on a single campus. In the face of the Covid‐19 pandemic, students were told during spring break to return to campus only briefly to retrieve their belongings. Classes then went online. On March 23, 2020, the faculty, students, and staff were emailed the following by the university's director of infection control and public hea…Read more
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32Sedation and care at the end of lifeTheoretical Medicine and Bioethics 39 (3): 171-180. 2018.This special issue of Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics takes up the question of palliative sedation as a source of potential concern or controversy among Christian clinicians and thinkers. Christianity affirms a duty to relieve unnecessary suffering yet also proscribes euthanasia. Accordingly, the question arises as to whether it is ever morally permissible to render dying patients unconscious in order to relieve their suffering. If so, under what conditions? Is this practice genuinely morally…Read more
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74Conscience, tolerance, and pluralism in health careTheoretical Medicine and Bioethics 40 (6): 507-521. 2019.Increasingly, physicians are being asked to provide technical services that many believe are morally wrong or inconsistent with their beliefs about the meaning and purposes of medicine. This controversy has sparked persistent debate over whether practitioners should be permitted to decline participation in a variety of legal practices, most notably physician-assisted suicide and abortion. These debates have become heavily politicized, and some of the key words and phrases are being used without …Read more
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34Whole-brain death and integration: realigning the ontological concept with clinical diagnostic testsTheoretical Medicine and Bioethics 40 (5): 455-481. 2019.For decades, physicians, philosophers, theologians, lawyers, and the public considered brain death a settled issue. However, a series of recent cases in which individuals were declared brain dead yet physiologically maintained for prolonged periods of time has challenged the status quo. This signals a need for deeper reflection and reexamination of the underlying philosophical, scientific, and clinical issues at stake in defining death. In this paper, I consider four levels of philosophical inqu…Read more
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19Engaging Pellegrino’s philosophy of medicine: Can one of the founders of the field still help us today?Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 40 (3): 165-168. 2019.
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3The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (review)Review of Metaphysics 55 (4): 863-864. 2002.This is the third republication of Jonas’s original, first published in 1966, and previously republished in 1979 and 1982. The prestige of repeated republication generally designates a classic, and this book, while still known by too few, deserves such acclaim. As a general rule, philosophers of science concern themselves either with explaining what scientists do or with prescribing what scientists ought to do. Jonas has a different aim. He examines the fundamental underlying presuppositions of …Read more
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25Unlike Diamonds, Defibrillators Aren’t Forever: Why It Is Sometimes Ethical to Deactivate Cardiac Implantable Electrical DevicesCambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 28 (2): 338-346. 2019.
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28Why the Common-Sense Distinction between Killing and Allowing-to-Die Is So Easy to Grasp but So Hard to ExplainCambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 28 (2): 353-358. 2019.
Chicago, Illinois, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Applied Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Areas of Interest
Applied Ethics |
Normative Ethics |