Columbia, South Carolina, United States of America
  •  29
    There is a curious asymmetry in cases where the use of religious language involves a breakdown in communication and leads to a seemingly intractable dispute. Why does the use of religious language in such cases almost always arise on the side of patients and their families, rather than on the side of clinicians or others who work in healthcare settings? I suggest that the intractable disputes arise when patients and their families use religious language to frame their problem and the possibiliti…Read more
  •  84
    Recommendations for Nanomedicine Human Subjects Research Oversight: An Evolutionary Approach for an Emerging Field
    with Leili Fatehi, Susan M. Wolf, Jeffrey McCullough, Ralph Hall, Frances Lawrenz, Jeffrey P. Kahn, Cortney Jones, Stephen A. Campbell, Rebecca S. Dresser, Arthur G. Erdman, Christy L. Haynes, Robert A. Hoerr, Linda F. Hogle, Moira A. Keane, Nancy M. P. King, Efrosini Kokkoli, Gary Marchant, Andrew D. Maynard, Martin Philbert, Gurumurthy Ramachandran, Ronald A. Siegel, and Samuel Wickline
    Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics 40 (4): 716-750. 2012.
    Nanomedicine is yielding new and improved treatments and diagnostics for a range of diseases and disorders. Nanomedicine applications incorporate materials and components with nanoscale dimensions where novel physiochemical properties emerge as a result of size-dependent phenomena and high surface-to-mass ratio. Nanotherapeutics and in vivo nanodiagnostics are a subset of nanomedicine products that enter the human body. These include drugs, biological products, implantable medical devices, and c…Read more
  • Ritual, society and community
    In David Solomon, Ruiping Fan & Bingxiang Luo (eds.), Ritual and the moral life: reclaiming the tradition, Springer. 2012.
  •  44
    Current philosophical and legal bioethical reflection on reprogenetics provides little more than a rationalization of the interests of science. There are two reasons for this. First, bioethicists attempt to address ethical issues in a “language of precision” that characterizes science, and this works against analogical and narratological modes of discourse that have traditionally provided guidance for understanding human nature and purpose. Second, the current ethical and legal debate is framed …Read more
  •  4
    Why Bioethics Needs the Philosophy of Medicine: Some Implications of Reflection on Concepts of Health and Disease
    Theoretical Medicine: An International Journal for the Philosophy and Methodology of Medical Research and Practice 18 (1-2): 145-163. 1997.
    Germund Hesslow has argued that concepts of health and disease serve no important scientific, clinical, or ethical function. However, this conclusion depends upon the particular concept of disease he espouses; namely, on Boorse's functional notion. The fact/value split embodied in the functional notion of disease leads to a sharp split between the "science" of medicine and bioethics, making the philosophy of medicine irrelevant for both. By placing this disease concept in the broader context of …Read more
  •  20
    The two sides of inter-ethics
    HEC Forum 12 (3): 185-190. 2000.
  •  17
    The concept of faith: A philosophical investigation (review)
    International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 41 (2): 126-128. 1997.
  •  22
    A Sympathetic but Critical Assessment of Nanotechnology Initiatives
    with Robert Best and Robin Wilson
    Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics 34 (4): 655-657. 2006.
  •  10
    ”Merely fact-minded sciences make merely factminded people.”“ …the positivistic concept of science in our time is, historically speaking, a residual concept. It has dropped all the questions which had been considered under the now narrower, now broader concepts of metaphysics….all these ‘metaphysical’ questions, taken broadly – commonly called specifically philosophical questions – surpass the world understood as the universe of mere facts. They surpass it precisely as being questions with the i…Read more
  •  4
    Grammacentrism and the Transformation of Rhetoric
    Philosophy and Rhetoric 28 (1). 1995.
  •  13
    What Is Unique About Nanomedicine? The Significance of the Mesoscale
    with Ronald A. Siegel
    Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics 40 (4): 780-794. 2012.
    Unlike drugs and medical devices, for which long standing and continuously improving quality assurance/quality control infrastructures exist, many nano-based products lack well-defined standards that are useful to manufacturers and regulators. Inherent variabilities in nanoparticle sizes and shapes, their large surface-to-volume ratios, and their mesoscale interactions with subcellular structures, suggest new complexities and challenges that must be met before widespread application of nanomedic…Read more
  •  37
    Conflicts of interest serve as a cipher for a radical rupture in the Flexnerian paradigm of medicine, and they can only be addressed if we recognize that health care is now practiced by institutions, not just individual physicians. By showing how "appropriate utilization of services" or "that which is medically indicated" is a function of socioeconomic factors related to institutional responsibilities, I point toward an administrative and organizational ethic as a needed component for addressing…Read more
  •  21
    The ethical issues integral to embryo research and brain death are intertwined with comprehensive views of life that are not explicitly discussed in most policy debate. I consider three representative views – a naturalist, romantic, and theist – and show how these might inform the way practical ethical issues are addressed. I then consider in detail one influential argument in embryo research that attempts to bypass deep values. I show that this twinning argument is deeply flawed. It presupposes…Read more
  •  26
  •  54
    Intolerant tolerance
    Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 19 (2): 161-181. 1994.
    The Hyde Amendment and Roman Catholic attempts to put restrictions on Title X funding have been criticized for being intolerant. However, such criticism fails to appreciate that there are two competing notions of tolerance, one focusing on the limits of state force and accepting pluralism as unavoidable, and the other focusing on the limits of knowledge and advancing pluralism as a good. These two types of tolerance, illustrated in the writings of John Locke and J.S. Mill, each involve an intole…Read more
  •  24
    Embryo Research: The Ethical Geography of the Debate
    Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 22 (5): 495-519. 1997.
    Three basic political positions on embryo research will be identified as libertarian, conservative, and social-democratic. The Human Embryo Research Panel will be regarded as an expression of the social-democratic position. A taxonomy of the ethical issues addressed by the Panel will then be developed at the juncture of political and ethical modes of reflection. Among the arguments considered will be those for the separability of the abortion and embryo research debates; arguments against the po…Read more
  •  42
    A Framework for Understanding Medical Epistemologies
    Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 38 (5): 461-486. 2013.
    What clinicians, biomedical scientists, and other health care professionals know as individuals or as groups and how they come to know and use knowledge are central concerns of medical epistemology. Activities associated with knowledge production and use are called epistemic practices. Such practices are considered in biomedical and clinical literatures, social sciences of medicine, philosophy of science and philosophy of medicine, and also in other nonmedical literatures. A host of different ki…Read more
  •  20
    The Social Conditions for Nanomedicine: Disruption, Systems, and Lock-in
    with Robert Best
    Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics 34 (4): 733-740. 2006.
    Here we consider two ways that nanomedicine might be disruptive. First, low-end disruptions that are intrinsically unpredictable but limited in scope, and second, high end disruptions that involve broader societal issues but can be anticipated, allowing opportunity for ethical reflection
  •  36
    Hegel and the Spirit (review)
    The Owl of Minerva 26 (1): 71-77. 1994.
    In most of the philosophy of the last 150 years, theological concerns have been increasingly marginalized. This does not mean that the issues that were addressed theologically in the past are no longer addressed. Rather, the perennial concerns have been reconstructed so that they are no longer tied to a religious context. Ecclesiology has become political theory, moral theology has become ethics, and doctrines of revelation have become epistemology. Such a list could be made fairly exhaustive, a…Read more
  •  12
    What is Unique about Nanomedicine? The Significance of the Mesoscale
    with Ronald A. Siegel
    Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics 40 (4): 780-794. 2012.
    In prominent funding and policy statements, a particle with at least one dimension in the 1-300 nm size range must have novel physicochemical properties to count as a “nanoparticle.” Size is thus only one factor. Novelty of a particle's properties is also essential to its “nano” classification. When particles in this size range are introduced into living systems, they often interact with their host in novel ways that require some modification of existing methods and models used by pharmaceutical…Read more
  •  23
    Bioethics in a Liberal Society (review)
    International Studies in Philosophy 30 (2): 124-125. 1998.
  •  49
    Many physicians assert that new cost-control mechanisms inappropriately interfere with clinical decision-making. They claim that high costs arise from poorly practiced medicine, and argue that effective utilization of resources is best promoted by advancing the scientific and ethical ideals of medicine. However, the claim is not warranted by empirical evidence. In this essay, I show how it rests upon aesthetic considerations associated with diagnostic elegance. I first consider scientific ration…Read more
  •  20
    A Christian bioethic needs to place the medical approach to sickness, suffering, and death within the context of redemption and the renewal of humanity in the image of God. This can be done by accounting for the way in which the disruptions of the human life-world that attend the illness experience manifest the structure of the problem of evil and point toward an answer that transcends the individual and the medical community. Further, the disease-oriented approach to medicine, when understood i…Read more