•  15
    Refusals and Requests: In Defense of Consistency
    Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 1-11. forthcoming.
    Physicians place significant weight on the distinction between acts and omissions. Most believe that autonomous refusals for procedures, such as blood transfusions and resuscitation, ought to be respected, but they feel no similar obligation to accede to requests for treatment that will, in the physician’s opinion, harm the patient (e.g., assisted death). Thus, there is an asymmetry. In this paper, we challenge the strength of this distinction by arguing that the ordering of values should be the…Read more
  •  25
    Exploring the potential utility of AI large language models for medical ethics: an expert panel evaluation of GPT-4
    with Michael Balas, Jordan Joseph Wadden, Philip C. Hébert, Marika D. Warren, Victoria Seavilleklein, Daniel Wyzynski, Alison Callahan, Sean A. Crawford, Parnian Arjmand, and Edsel B. Ing
    Journal of Medical Ethics 50 (2): 90-96. 2024.
    Integrating large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 into medical ethics is a novel concept, and understanding the effectiveness of these models in aiding ethicists with decision-making can have significant implications for the healthcare sector. Thus, the objective of this study was to evaluate the performance of GPT-4 in responding to complex medical ethical vignettes and to gauge its utility and limitations for aiding medical ethicists. Using a mixed-methods, cross-sectional survey approach, a…Read more
  •  14
    Prescribing safe supply: ethical considerations for clinicians
    with Katherine Duthie, Helgi Eyford, and S. Monty Ghosh
    Journal of Medical Ethics 49 (6): 377-382. 2023.
    The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the drug poisoning epidemic in a number of ways: individuals use alone more often, there is decreased access to harm reduction services and there has been an increase in the toxicity of the unregulated drug supply. In response to the crisis, clinicians, policy makers and people who use drugs have been seeking ways to prevent the worst harms of unregulated opioid use. One prominent idea is safe supply. One form of safe supply enlists clinicians to prescribe o…Read more
  •  1001
    The Case for an Autonomy-Centred View of Physician-Assisted Death
    Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 17 (3): 345-356. 2020.
    Most people who defend physician-assisted death (PAD) endorse the Joint View, which holds that two conditions—autonomy and welfare—must be satisfied for PAD to be justified. In this paper, we defend an Autonomy Only view. We argue that the welfare condition is either otiose on the most plausible account of the autonomy condition, or else is implausibly restrictive, particularly once we account for the broad range of reasons patients cite for desiring PAD, such as “tired of life” cases. Moreover,…Read more
  •  517
    Value promotion as a goal of medicine
    Journal of Medical Ethics 47 (7): 494-501. 2021.
    In this paper, we argue that promoting patient values is a legitimate goal of medicine. Our view offers a justification for certain current practices, including birth control and living organ donation, that are widely accepted but do not fit neatly within the most common extant accounts of the goals of medicine. Moreover, we argue that recognising value promotion as a goal of medicine will expand the scope of medical practice by including some procedures that are sometimes rejected as being outs…Read more
  •  947
    Is There a Right to the Death of the Foetus?
    Bioethics 31 (4): 313-320. 2017.
    At some point in the future – perhaps within the next few decades – it will be possible for foetuses to develop completely outside the womb. Ectogenesis, as this technology is called, raises substantial issues for the abortion debate. One such issue is that it will become possible for a woman to have an abortion, in the sense of having the foetus removed from her body, but for the foetus to be kept alive. We argue that while there is a right to an abortion, there are reasons to doubt that there …Read more
  •  13
    Taking the long view on slippery slope objections
    Journal of Medical Ethics 47 (10): 674-675. 2021.
    Canada’s new medical assistance in dying law is ethically superior to the previous version. I agree with Udo Shuklenk and Jocelyn Downie1 that both social determinants of health and slippery slope objections to the recent amendments are unsuccessful.[1] Despite this broad agreement, I worry that the authors’ argument against the slippery slope objection is too focused on the current amendments at the expense of future changes. Before I address that argument, I have one point about the social det…Read more
  •  15
    The Wrong Argument for a Bad Law
    American Journal of Bioethics 21 (8): 77-79. 2021.
    Kyle Fritz argues for the following conditional statement: if healthcare providers should be allowed to conscientiously object to providing abortions in jurisdictions where abortions...