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Physician-Assisted DeathIn Ezio Di Nucci, Ji-Young Lee & Isaac A. Wagner (eds.), The Rowman & Littlefield Handbook of Bioethics, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 2022.
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24Agency, duties and the "Ashley treatment"Journal of Medical Ethics 35 (11): 658-661. 2009.In 2006, a paper in the journal Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine described a novel case of growth attenuation therapy and other treatments carried out on Ashley, a severely cognitively, neurologically and physically disabled 6-year-old girl. Some of the moral arguments that have sprung up in respect of the so-called “Ashley treatment” are considered, and it is suggested that they all miss something—that the proper treatment of Ashley may have as much to do with doctors’ duties to th…Read more
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The lawyer's prestigeIn Catherine Stanton, Sarah Devaney, Anne-Maree Farrell & Alexandra Mullock (eds.), Pioneering Healthcare Law: Essays in Honour of Margaret Brazier, Routledge. 2015.
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Vulnerabilities and power : the political side of health researchIn Graeme T. Laurie (ed.), The Cambridge handbook of health research regulation, Cambridge University Press. 2021.
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9By posing the question of what it is that marks the difference between something like terrorism and something like civil society, Brassington argues that commonsense moral arguments against terrorism or political violence imply that the modern democratic polis might also be morally unjustifiable. In exploring this problem, Brassington identifies a tension between the primary values of truth and normativity in the standard accounts of moral theory.
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34What passive euthanasia isBMC Medical Ethics 21 (1): 1-13. 2020.BackgroundEuthanasia can be thought of as being either active or passive; but the precise definition of “passive euthanasia” is not always clear. Though all passive euthanasia involves the withholding of life-sustaining treatment, there would appear to be some disagreement about whether all such withholding should be seen as passive euthanasia.Main textAt the core of the disagreement is the question of the importance of an intention to bring about death: must one intend to bring about the death …Read more
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538An Ethics Framework for Big Data in Health and ResearchAsian Bioethics Review 11 (3): 227-254. 2019.Ethical decision-making frameworks assist in identifying the issues at stake in a particular setting and thinking through, in a methodical manner, the ethical issues that require consideration as well as the values that need to be considered and promoted. Decisions made about the use, sharing, and re-use of big data are complex and laden with values. This paper sets out an Ethics Framework for Big Data in Health and Research developed by a working group convened by the Science, Health and Policy…Read more
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20What a drag it is getting old: a response to RäsänenJournal of Medical Ethics 45 (7): 467-468. 2019.In this brief response to Joona Räsänen’s argument for the coherence and desirability of being able legally to change one’s age, I outline a couple of reasons for thinking that the case he makes is deeply flawed. As such, I contend that we have no reason to think that age should be the kind of thing that one should be able to change legally. Moreover, we have at least one good reason for thinking that legal age change would be positively undesirable.
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20Correction to: On Rights of Inheritance and BequestThe Journal of Ethics 23 (2): 143-143. 2019.The article “On Rights of Inheritance and Bequest”, written by “Iain Brassington”, was originally published electronically on the publisher’s Internet portal on 23 April 2019 without open access.
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33On Rights of Inheritance and BequestThe Journal of Ethics 23 (2): 119-142. 2019.What attitude would a just state take to the inheritance of property? Would confiscatory taxes on the estate of the deceased be morally acceptable, or would they represent some kind of wrong? While there is a good amount of political philosophical scholarship that considers the desirability of inheritance tax, there appears to be little that has considered it from the perspective of rights theory, asking what kind of thing a right to bequeath or to inherit would be, and whether those putative ri…Read more
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14The Topsy-Turvy Cloning LawMonash Bioethics Review 29 (3): 1-18. 2011.In debates about human cloning, a distinction is frequently drawn between therapeutic and reproductive uses of the technology. Naturally enough, this distinction influences the way that the law is framed. The general consensus is that therapeutic cloning is less morally problematic than reproductive cloning — one can hold this position while holding that both are morally unacceptable — and the law frequently leaves the way open for some cloning for the sake of research into new therapeutic techn…Read more
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17Perchance to Dream: Pathology, Pharmacology, and Politics in a 24-Hour EconomyCambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 27 (2): 295-305. 2018.
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7Public Health and Globalisation: Why a National Health Service is Morally IndefensibleImprint Academic. 2007.Claims that there are good arguments for a public health service that do not amount to arguments for a national health service, but for something that looks far more like a transnational health service.
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96What's Wrong with the Brain Drain (?)Developing World Bioethics 12 (3): 113-120. 2012.One of the characteristics of the relationship between the developed and developing worlds is the ‘brain drain’– the phenomenon by which expertise moves towards richer countries, thereby condemning poorer countries to continued comparative and absolute poverty. It is tempting to see the phenomenon as a moral problem in its own right, such that there is a moral imperative to end it, that is separate from (and additional to) any moral imperative to relieve the burden of poverty. However, it is not…Read more
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20John Harris' Argument for a Duty to ResearchBioethics 21 (3): 160-168. 2007.ABSTRACT John Harris suggests that participation in or support for research, particularly medical research, is a moral duty. One kind of defence of this position rests on an appeal to the past, and produces two arguments. The first of these arguments is that it is unfair to accept the benefits of research without contributing something back in the form of support for, or participation in, research. A second argument is that we have a social duty to maintain those practices and institutions that …Read more
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7Enhancing Evolution and Enhancing EvolutionBioethics 24 (8): 395-402. 2010.ABSTRACT It has been claimed in several places that the new genetic technologies allow humanity to achieve in a generation or two what might take natural selection hundreds of millennia in respect of the elimination of certain diseases and an increase in traits such as intelligence. More radically, it has been suggested that those same technologies could be used to instil characteristics that we might reasonably expect never to appear due to natural selection alone. John Harris, a proponent of t…Read more
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25Actions, causes, and psychiatry: a reply to SzaszJournal of Medical Ethics 28 (2): 120-123. 2002.In a recent paper, it was argued forcefully by Thomas Szasz that it is crucial to the scientific credibility of psychiatry that it abandon talk of the behaviour of the mentally “ill” in terms of causes: such behaviour is not caused by their condition—it simply has reasons, which are discounted by the medical model. It is argued in this paper that Szasz's theory is incomplete for two reasons: first, in assuming that reasons are radically different from causes, it cannot account for the possibilit…Read more
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55If Suicide is Painless, is Painlessness Suicide?American Journal of Bioethics 11 (6). 2011.The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 11, Issue 6, Page 54-55, June 2011
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15Facial allograft transplants: where's the catch?Journal of Medical Ethics 34 (10): 723-726. 2008.Face transplantation—or, more properly, facial allograft transplantation —generates much public interest and academic debate. In this paper, we suggest that it is up to opponents of FAT to make the case for its impermissibility. We allow that there is a number of apparently strong arguments that might be deployed against FAT. However, all but one of these turn out not to be compelling after examination. The remaining argument is not so easily dismissed—but its central point is fairly workaday an…Read more
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11Thoughtful doctors: Not immune, but resistant to danger: Response to ‘Medicine in Danger?’ by Gerben Meyer and Jacco P.H. Verburgt, Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 2007Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 10 (4): 479-480. 2007.
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Norberto Bobbio, In Praise of Meekness: Essays on Ethics and Politics (review)Philosophy in Review 21 162-164. 2001.
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12Body art and medical needJournal of Medical Ethics 32 (1): 13-16. 2006.A company called Biojewellery has proposed to take a sample of bone tissue from a couple and to grow this sample into wedding rings. One of the ethical problems that such a proposal faces is that it implies surgery without medical need. To this end, only couples with a prior need for surgery are being considered. This paper examines the question of whether such a stipulation is necessary. It is suggested that, though medical need and the provision of health and wellbeing is overwhelmingly the wa…Read more
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20The case for a duty to research: not yet provenJournal of Medical Ethics 40 (5): 329-330. 2014.In this commentary on ‘Why participating in scientific research is a moral duty’, I take issue with a number of Stjernschantz Forsberg et al's claims. Though abiding by the terms of a contract might be obligatory, this won't show that those terms themselves indicate a duty—even allowing that there's a contract to begin with. Meanwhile, though we might have reasons to participate, not all reasons are moral reasons, and the paper does not establish that the reasons here are moral in character
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76Is there a duty to remain in ignorance?Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 32 (2): 101-115. 2011.Questions about information inform many debates in bioethics. One of the reasons for this is that at least some level of information is taken by many to be a prerequisite of valid consent. For others, autonomy in the widest sense presupposes information, because one cannot be in control of one’s life without at least some insight into what it could turn out to contain. Yet not everyone shares this view, and there is a debate about whether or not there is a right to remain in ignorance of one’s m…Read more
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36Defending the duty to research?Bioethics 25 (1): 21-26. 2010.In 2005, John Harris published a paper in the Journal of Medical Ethics in which he claimed that there was a duty to support scientific research. With Sarah Chan, he defended his claims against criticisms in this journal in 2008. In this paper I examine the defence, and claim that it is not powerful. Although he has established a slightly stronger position, it is not clear that the defence is sufficiently strong to show that there is a duty to support scientific research. Important questions abo…Read more
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98The 2012 report of the Commission on Assisted Dying: providing assistance in the debate that will not die?Clinical Ethics 7 (1): 28-32. 2012.The Commission on Assisted Dying was an unofficial body set up to investigate the legal position on assisted dying in the UK in the autumn of 2010. Its report was published to some degree of media attention in the first week of January 2012; its most headline-grabbing suggestion provided a framework setting out how British law might be reformed to allow assisted dying for the terminally ill. In this paper, I analyse some of the key points of the report and argue that it adds little that could se…Read more
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37On Heidegger, medicine, and the modernity of modern medical technologyMedicine, Health Care and Philosophy 10 (2): 185-195. 2006.This paper examines medicine’s use of technology in a manner from a standpoint inspired by Heidegger’s thinking on technology. In the first part of the paper, I shall suggest an interpretation of Heidegger’s thinking on the topic, and attempt to show why he associates modern technology with danger. However, I shall also claim that there is little evidence that medicine’s appropriation of modern technology is dangerous in Heidegger’s sense, although there is no prima facie reason why it mightn’t …Read more
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183Killing people: what Kant could have said about suicide and euthanasia but did notJournal of Medical Ethics 32 (10): 571-574. 2006.An agent who takes his own life acts in violation of the moral law, according to Kant; suicide, and, by extension, assisted suicide are therefore wrong. By a similar argument, and with a few important exceptions, killing is wrong; implicitly, then, voluntary euthanasia is also wrong. Kant's conclusions are uncompelling and his argument in these matters is undermined on considering other areas of his thought. Kant, in forbidding suicide and euthanasia, is conflating respect for persons and respec…Read more
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University of ManchesterRegular Faculty
Areas of Specialization
Applied Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Areas of Interest
Applied Ethics |
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Philosophy of Law |