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5The Unified Brain-Based Determination of Death: Conceptual ChallengesAmerican Journal of Bioethics 24 (6): 57-60. 2024.Since the early 1980s, James Bernat’s scholarship has accompanied and shaped most scientific and policy developments on death determination. In 1981, he, Charles Culver, and Bernard Gert provided a...
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338“Just” accuracy? Procedural fairness demands explainability in AI‑based medical resource allocationAI and Society 1-12. 2022.The increasing application of artificial intelligence (AI) to healthcare raises both hope and ethical concerns. Some advanced machine learning methods provide accurate clinical predictions at the expense of a significant lack of explainability. Alex John London has defended that accuracy is a more important value than explainability in AI medicine. In this article, we locate the trade-off between accurate performance and explainable algorithms in the context of distributive justice. We acknowled…Read more
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37Mapping trust relationships in organ donation and transplantation: a conceptual modelBMC Medical Ethics 24 (1): 1-14. 2023.The organ donation and transplantation (ODT) system heavily relies on the willingness of individuals to donate their organs. While it is widely believed that public trust plays a crucial role in shaping donation rates, the empirical support for this assumption remains limited. In order to bridge this knowledge gap, this article takes a foundational approach by elucidating the concept of trust within the context of ODT. By examining the stakeholders involved, identifying influential factors, and …Read more
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30Correction to: Mapping trust relationships in organ donation and transplantation: a conceptual modelBMC Medical Ethics 25 (1): 1-2. 2024.
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27Global Environmental Justice and Bioethics: Overcoming Beneficence and Individual ResponsibilityAmerican Journal of Bioethics 24 (3): 55-57. 2024.Ray and Cooper (2024) argue for the need to incorporate the fight for environmental justice into the bioethics agenda. While they convincingly argue that the principle of justice involves environme...
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3Controversias actuales sobre el consentimiento para la donación de órganosIn López de la Vieja & Ma Teresa (eds.), Ensayos sobre bioética, Universidad De Salamanca. 2009.
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573Public knowledge and attitudes towards consent policies for organ donation in Europe. A systematic reviewTransplantation Reviews 33 (1): 1-8. 2019.Background: Several countries have recently changed their model of consent for organ donation from opt-in to opt-out. We undertook a systematic review to determine public knowledge and attitudes towards these models in Europe. Methods: Six databases were explored between 1 January 2008 and 15 December 2017. We selected empirical studies addressing either knowledge or attitudes towards the systems of consent for deceased organ donation by lay people in Europe, including students. Study selection,…Read more
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45Bioética, reanimación cardiopulmonar y donación de órganos en asistoliaDilemata 13 283-296. 2013.The so-called uncontrolled donation after circulatory determination of death (uDCDD) have been implemented in several countries, including Spain and France, to increase the availability of organs for transplantation. These protocols allow obtaining kidneys, livers and lungs of patients who do not survive cardio-pulmonary resuscitation performed in out-of-hospital settings. Simultaneously with the development and recent proliferation of these protocols, some emergency teams have begun to employ u…Read more
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191Objectives To increase postmortem organ donation rates, several countries are adopting an opt-out (presumed consent) policy, meaning that individuals are deemed donors unless they expressly refused so. Although opt-out countries tend to have higher donation rates, there is no conclusive evidence that this is caused by the policy itself. The main objective of this study is to better assess the direct impact of consent policy defaults per se on deceased organ recovery rates when considering the ro…Read more
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24Este libro es un homenaje a la trayectoria intelectual y académica de la profesora María Teresa López de la Vieja, Catedrática emérita de la Universidad de Salamanca. En él se trazan algunos de los caminos que, con su obra, nos invita a transitar. El volumen recoge contribuciones de colegas de varias nacionalidades y procedentes de diversos ámbitos de reflexión que le son afines: la filosofía moral y política, la literatura, la teoría de la argumentación, los estudios feministas, las éticas apli…Read more
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24A Slippery Argument: Ableism in the Debate on Medical Assistance in DyingAmerican Journal of Bioethics 23 (11): 99-102. 2023.In this commentary, we criticize the argument that allowing euthanasia for people with disabilities is ableist. We analyze the distinction between facts and values in medical assistance in dying, the expressivist objection, and the problem of crypwashing.
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58Death pluralism: a proposalPhilosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine 18 (1): 1-12. 2023.The debate over the determination of death has been raging for more than fifty years. Since then, objections against the diagnosis of brain death from family members of those diagnosed as dead-have been increasing and are causing some countries to take novel steps to accommodate people’s beliefs and preferences in the determination of death. This, coupled with criticism by some academics of the brain death criterion, raises some questions about the issues surrounding the determination of death. …Read more
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60How do people use ‘killing’, ‘letting die’ and related bioethical concepts? Contrasting descriptive and normative hypothesesBioethics 34 (5): 509-518. 2020.Bioethicists involved in end‐of‐life debates routinely distinguish between ‘killing’ and ‘letting die’. Meanwhile, previous work in cognitive science has revealed that when people characterize behaviour as either actively ‘doing’ or passively ‘allowing’, they do so not purely on descriptive grounds, but also as a function of the behaviour’s perceived morality. In the present report, we extend this line of research by examining how medical students and professionals (N = 184) and laypeople (N = 1…Read more
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27Defining Consent: Autonomy and the Role of the FamilyIn Solveig Lena Hansen & Silke Schicktanz (eds.), Ethical Challenges of Organ Transplantation, Transcript Verlag. pp. 43-64. 2021.The ethics of deceased organ procurement (OP) is supposedly based on individual consent to donate, either explicit (opt-in) or presumed (opt-out). However, in many cases, individuals fail to express any preference regarding donation after death. When this happens, the decision to remove or not to remove their organs depends on the policy’s default option or on family preferences. Several studies show that in most countries the family plays a significant and often decisive role in the process of …Read more
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57Absolutely Right and Relatively Good: Consequentialists See Bioethical Disagreement in a Relativist LightAJOB Empirical Bioethics 12 (3): 190-205. 2021.Background Contemporary societies are rife with moral disagreement, resulting in recalcitrant disputes on matters of public policy. In the context of ongoing bioethical controversies, are uncompromising attitudes rooted in beliefs about the nature of moral truth?Methods To answer this question, we conducted both exploratory and confirmatory studies, with both a convenience and a nationally representative sample (total N = 1501), investigating the link between people’s beliefs about moral truth (…Read more
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49Avoiding Violation of the Dead Donor Rule: The Costs to PatientsAmerican Journal of Bioethics 12 (6): 15-17. 2012.The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 6, Page 15-17, June 2012
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15Fuga de cerebros y biografías low cost: nueva etapa en la precarización de la juventudRecerca.Revista de Pensament I Anàlisi 16 13-33. 2015.La normalización de la precariedad entre las personas jóvenes está entrando en lo que parece una nueva fase. De la mano de, entre otros factores, los discursos empresariales y la teoría del capital humano, estamos asistiendo a una vuelta de tuerca en la presión sobre la juventud: ya no basta con la búsqueda «activa» de empleo, ahora hay que invertir en uno mismo como «empresario de sí mismo» y, en esta lógica, si es preciso hay que optar por la «movilidad internacional». Presentamos una revisión…Read more
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72Do Publics Share Experts’ Concerns about Brain–Computer Interfaces? A Trinational Survey on the Ethics of Neural TechnologyScience, Technology, and Human Values 2019 (6): 1242-1270. 2019.Since the 1960s, scientists, engineers, and healthcare professionals have developed brain–computer interface (BCI) technologies, connecting the user’s brain activity to communication or motor devices. This new technology has also captured the imagination of publics, industry, and ethicists. Academic ethics has highlighted the ethical challenges of BCIs, although these conclusions often rely on speculative or conceptual methods rather than empirical evidence or public engagement. From a social sc…Read more
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26Examining Public Trust in Categorical versus Comprehensive Triage CriteriaAmerican Journal of Bioethics 20 (7): 106-109. 2020.Volume 20, Issue 7, July 2020, Page 106-109.
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727The Death Debates: A Call for Public DeliberationHastings Center Report 43 (5): 34-35. 2013.In this issue of the Report, James L. Bernat proposes an innovative and sophisticated distinction to justify the introduction of permanent cessation as a valid substitute standard for irreversible cessation in death determination. He differentiates two approaches to conceptualizing and determining death: the biological concept and the prevailing medical practice standard. While irreversibility is required by the biological concept, the weaker criterion of permanence, he claims, has always suffic…Read more
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32The Dead Donor Rule as Policy IndoctrinationHastings Center Report 48 (S4): 39-42. 2018.Since the 1960s, organ procurement policies have relied on the boundary of death—advertised as though it were a factual, value‐free, and unobjectionable event—to foster organ donation while minimizing controversy. Death determination, however, involves both discoveries of facts and events and decisions about their meaning (whether the facts and events are relevant to establish a vital status), the latter being subjected to legitimate disagreements requiring deliberation. By revisiting the histor…Read more
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64Response to Open Peer Commentaries on “Donation After Circulatory Death: Burying the Dead Donor Rule”American Journal of Bioethics 11 (8). 2011.The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 11, Issue 8, Page W4-W6, August 2011
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76One or two types of death? Attitudes of health professionals towards brain death and donation after circulatory death in three countriesMedicine, Health Care and Philosophy 16 (3): 457-467. 2013.This study examined health professionals’ (HPs) experience, beliefs and attitudes towards brain death (BD) and two types of donation after circulatory death (DCD)—controlled and uncontrolled DCD. Five hundred and eighty-seven HPs likely to be involved in the process of organ procurement were interviewed in 14 hospitals with transplant programs in France, Spain and the US. Three potential donation scenarios—BD, uncontrolled DCD and controlled DCD—were presented to study subjects during individual…Read more