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1Phenomenology, Cosmetic Surgery, and ComplicityIn Kristin Zeiler & Lisa Folkmarson Käll (eds.), Feminist Phenomenology and Medicine, State University of New York Press. pp. 81-99. 2014.
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9What High-Income States Should Do to Address Industrial Antibiotic PollutionPublic Health Ethics 13 (3): 275-287. 2020.Antibiotic resistance is widely recognized as a major threat to public health and healthcare systems worldwide. Recent research suggests that pollution from antibiotics manufacturing is an important driver of resistance development. Using Sweden as an example, this article considers how industrial antibiotic pollution might be addressed by public actors who are in a position to influence the distribution and use of antibiotics in high-income countries with publicly funded health systems. We iden…Read more
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Bioethics and Border Crossing: Perspectives on Giving, Selling and Sharing Bodies (edited book)Routledge: Oxon. 2016.
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33Sustainable healthcare resource allocation, grounding theories and operational principles: response to our commentatorsJournal of Medical Ethics 48 (1): 38-38. 2022.We proposed adding a sustainability principle to the operational ethical principles guiding public healthcare resources allocation decisions. All our commentators acknowledge our core message: healthcare needs to pay attention to the future. They also strengthen our proposal by offering support by luck egalitarian and Rawlsian arguments, and helpfully point out ambiguities and gaps requiring attention in the further development of the proposal, and its practical implementation.
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35Sustainability principle for the ethics of healthcare resource allocationJournal of Medical Ethics 47 (2): 90-97. 2021.We propose a principle of sustainability to complement established principles used for justifying healthcare resource allocation. We argue that the application of established principles of equal treatment, need, prognosis and cost-effectiveness gives rise to what we call negative dynamics: a gradual depletion of the value possible to generate through healthcare. These principles should therefore be complemented by a sustainability principle, making the prospect of negative dynamics a further fac…Read more
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1Understanding ExploitationIRB: Ethics & Human Research 33 (2): 1-5. 2011.The term “exploitation” is notoriously hard to define. Yet it is frequently invoked to frame moral concerns about clinical research. Recently, a group of influential authors have proposed a so-called nonexploitation framework for the ethics of randomized controlled trials that appears to address these concerns. This article challenges one basic assumption of that framework: the idea that nonexploitation in research requires participants to be protected from excessive risks, which are understood …Read more
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20Reproductive Choice, Enhancement, and the Moral Continuum ArgumentJournal of Medicine and Philosophy 39 (1): 41-54. 2014.It is often argued that it does not matter morally whether biomedical interventions treat or prevent diseases or enhance nondisease traits; what matters is whether and how much they promote well-being. Therapy and enhancement both promote well-being, the argument goes, so they are not morally distinct but instead continuous. I provide three reasons why this argument should be rejected when it is applied to choices concerning the genetic makeup of future people. First, it rests on too simple a co…Read more
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37“Paid to Endure”: Paid Research Participation, Passivity, and the Goods of WorkAmerican Journal of Bioethics 19 (9): 11-20. 2019.A growing literature documents the existence of individuals who make a living by participating in phase I clinical trials for money. Several scholars have noted that the concerns about risks, consent, and exploitation raised by this phenomenon apply to many (other) jobs, too, and therefore proposed improving subject protections by regulating phase I trial participation as work. This article contributes to the debate over this proposal by exploring a largely neglected worry. Unlike most (other) w…Read more
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24The ethics of implementing human papillomavirus vaccination in developed countriesMedicine, Health Care and Philosophy 14 (1): 19-27. 2010.Human papillomavirus (HPV) infection is the world’s most common sexually transmitted infection. It is a prerequisite for cervical cancer, the second most common cause of death in cancer among women worldwide, and is also believed to cause other anogenital and head and neck cancers. Vaccines that protect against the most common cancer-causing HPV types have recently become available, and different countries have taken different approaches to implementing vaccination. This paper examines the ethic…Read more
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4REPROGENETICS and the “Parents Have Always Done It” ArgumentHastings Center Report 41 (1): 43-49. 2011.A common argument in favor of using reprogenetic technologies to enhance children goes like this: parents have always aimed at enhancing their children through upbringing and education, so why not use new tools to accomplish the same goal? But reprogenetics differs significantly from good childrearing and education, in its means, if not its ends.
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6The Notion of health and the morality of genetic interventionMedicine, Health Care and Philosophy 9 (2): 181-192. 2005.In the present paper it is argued that genetic interventions on human embryos are in principle permissible if they promote the health of the persons that these embryos will one day become and impermissible if they compromise their health. This so called health-intervention principle is reached by, inter alia, rejecting alternative approaches to the problem of the permissibility of genetic intervention. The health-intervention principle can be interpreted in different ways depending on how the no…Read more
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9Taking Advantage of InjusticeSocial Theory and Practice 39 (4): 557-580. 2013.What, if anything, is wrong with taking advantage of people’s unjust circumstances when they both benefit from and consent to the exchange? The answer, some believe, is that such exchanges are wrongfully exploitative. I argue that this answer is incomplete at best, and I elaborate a different one: to take advantage of injustice is to become complicit in its reproduction. I also argue that the case for third-party interference with mutually beneficial and consensual exchanges, while normally cons…Read more
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13Pharmaceutical Pollution from Human Use and the Polluter Pays PrinciplePublic Health Ethics 16 (2): 152-164. 2023.Human consumption of pharmaceuticals often leads to environmental release of residues via urine and faeces, creating environmental and public health risks. Policy responses must consider the normative question how responsibilities for managing such risks, and costs and burdens associated with that management, should be distributed between actors. Recently, the Polluter Pays Principle (PPP) has been advanced as rationale for such distribution. While recognizing some advantages of PPP, we highligh…Read more
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3Exploitation in Biomedical ResearchIn Erick Valdés & Juan Alberto Lecaros (eds.), Handbook of Bioethical Decisions. Volume II: Scientific Integrity and Institutional Ethics, Springer Verlag. pp. 2147483647-2147483647. 2023.Biomedical research on human subjects involves exposing individuals to risks and burdens for the benefit of others, and therefore raises concerns about exploitation. While the concept of exploitation has received significant attention in recent research ethical literature, its relevance and implications in this area remain unclear and contested. This chapter explains how this concept is nonetheless important for understanding the ethical complexities of human subject research and the proper desi…Read more
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15Kidney Sales and the Analogy with Dangerous EmploymentHealth Care Analysis 23 (2): 107-121. 2015.Proponents of permitting living kidney sales often argue as follows. Many jobs involve significant risks; people are and should be free to take these risks in exchange for money; the risks involved in giving up a kidney are no greater than the risks involved in acceptable hazardous jobs; so people should be free to give up a kidney for money, too. This paper examines this frequently invoked but rarely analysed analogy. Two objections are raised. First, it is far from clear that kidney sales and …Read more
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12Does the ethical appropriateness of paying donors depend on what body parts they donate?Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 19 (3): 463-473. 2016.The idea of paying donors in order to make more human bodily material available for therapy, assisted reproduction, and biomedical research is notoriously controversial. However, while national and international donation policies largely oppose financial incentives they do not treat all parts of the body equally: incentives are allowed in connection to the provision of some parts but not others. Taking off from this observation, I discuss whether body parts differ as regards the ethical legitima…Read more
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10Global Health Impact: Extending Access to Essential Medicines, Nicole Hassoun. Oxford University Press, 2020, xv + 301 pages (review)Economics and Philosophy 38 (1): 158-164. 2022.
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16Just implementation of human papillomavirus vaccinationJournal of Medical Ethics 38 (4): 247-249. 2012.Many countries are now implementing human papillomavirus vaccination. There is disagreement about who should receive the vaccine. Some propose vaccinating both boys and girls in order to achieve the largest possible public health impact. Others regard this approach as too costly and claim that only girls should be vaccinated. We question the assumption that decisions about human papillomavirus vaccination policy should rely solely on estimates of overall benefits and costs. There are important s…Read more
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283Exploitation and Joint ActionJournal of Social Philosophy 50 (3): 280-300. 2019.Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.
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8Early Stopping of Clinical Trials: Charting the Ethical TerrainKennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 21 (1): 51-78. 2011.Randomized and double-blind clinical trials are widely regarded as the most reliable way of studying the effects of medical interventions. According to received wisdom, if a new drug or treatment is to be accepted in clinical practice, its safety and efficacy must first be demonstrated in such trials. For ethical and scientific reasons, it is generally considered necessary to monitor a trial in various ways as it proceeds and to analyze data as they accumulate. Monitoring and interim analyses ar…Read more
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17Clinical trials of germline gene editing: The exploitation problemBioethics 35 (7): 688-695. 2021.Bioethics, Volume 35, Issue 7, Page 688-695, September 2021.
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314Exploitation and Remedial DutiesJournal of Applied Philosophy 38 (1): 55-72. 2019.The concept of exploitation and potentially exploitative real-world practices are the subject of increasing philosophical attention. However, while philosophers have extensively debated what exploitation is and what makes it wrong, they have said surprisingly little about what might be required to remediate it. By asking how the consequences of exploitation should be addressed, this article seeks to contribute to filling this gap. We raise two questions. First, what are the victims of exploitati…Read more
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53This study is a contribution to the bioethical debate about new and possibly emerging reproductive technologies. Its point of departure is the intuition, which many people seem to share, that using such technologies to select non-disease traits – like sex and emotional stability - in yet unborn children is morally problematic, at least more so than using the technologies to avoid giving birth to children with severe genetic diseases, or attempting to shape the non-disease traits of already exist…Read more
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18Cultural Norms, the Phenomenology of Incorporation, and the Experience of Having a Child Born with Ambiguous SexSocial Theory and Practice 36 (1): 133-156. 2010.The influence of pervasive cultural norms on people’s actions constitutes a longstanding problem for autonomy theory. On the one hand, such norms often seem to elude the kind of reflection that autonomous agency requires. On the other hand, they are hardly entirely beyond the pale of autonomy: people do sometimes reflect critically on them and resist them. This paper draws on phenomenological accounts of embodiment in order to reconcile these observations. We suggest that pervasive cultural norm…Read more
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6Medical therapy, research and technology enable us to make our bodies, or parts of them, available to others in an increasing number of ways. This is the case in organ, tissue, egg and sperm donation as well as in surrogate motherhood and clinical research. Bringing together leading scholars working on the ethical, social and cultural aspects of such bodily exchanges, this cutting-edge book develops new ways of understanding them. Bodily Exchanges, Bioethics and Border Crossing both probes the e…Read more
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19A Further Lesson From Existing Kidney MarketsAmerican Journal of Bioethics 14 (10): 27-29. 2014.The target article challenges the increasingly popular portrayal of living kidney sale as potentially a mutually beneficial arrangement, capable not only of saving or improving the lives of patients in need of transplants but also of significantly benefiting poor vendors. Carefully reviewing the literature on harms to vendors in illegal kidney markets and in Iran’s legal market, Koplin argues that many of these harms would persist in the sort of legal regulated system that kidney sale advocates …Read more
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50Better to Exploit than to Neglect? International Clinical Research and the Non‐Worseness ClaimJournal of Applied Philosophy 34 (4): 474-488. 2017.Clinical research is increasingly ‘offshored’ to developing countries, a practice that has generated considerable controversy. It has recently been argued that the prevailing ethical norms governing such research are deeply puzzling. On the one hand, sponsors are not required to offshore trials, even when participants in developing countries would benefit considerably from these trials. On the other hand, if sponsors do offshore, they are required not to exploit participants, even when the latte…Read more
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University of GothenburgSenior Lecturer
Gothenburg, Sweden
Areas of Specialization
Applied Ethics |
Areas of Interest
Social and Political Philosophy |
Normative Ethics |
Applied Ethics |