Jake Earl

Walter Reed Army Institute of Research
Georgetown University
  •  2
    Ethical Justifications for Waiving Informed Consent for a Perianal Swab in Critical Burn Care Research
    with Jeffrey W. Shupp and Ben Krohmal
    American Journal of Bioethics 24 (4): 110-113. 2024.
    The case (Dawson et al. 2024) describes an Institutional Review Board (IRB) chair who seeks consultation about waiving the requirement that investigators obtain prospective, informed consent for co...
  •  9
    The case describes researchers who are seeking ethics guidance on communicating with participants in a phase-1 COVD-19 vaccine trial about FDA-authorized COVID-19 vaccines (Wilfond, Duenas, and Johnson 2023). The researchers want help choosing among three options they have identified for encouraging participants to obtain one of the authorized vaccines. We argue that research ethics consultants should consider going beyond this question to address another ethics concern the researchers might hav…Read more
  •  171
    What Follows from State-Mandated Pregnancy?
    with Caitlin J. Cain
    Annals of Internal Medicine 176 (2): 270-271. 2023.
    This Ideas and Opinions article revisits an argument from Judith Jarvis Thomson in her essay “A Defense of Abortion” that abortion can be an ethical choice even if we assume that fetuses have full moral personhood and moral rights. The authors examine the implications of laws that require a pregnant person to care for another with their body and what other impositions states may also require of citizens to care for others.
  •  313
    Compensation and Limits on Harm in Animal Research
    Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 32 (3): 313-327. 2022.
    Although researchers generally take great care to ensure that human subjects do not suffer very serious harms from their involvement in research, the situation is different for nonhuman animal subjects. Significant progress has been made in reducing unnecessary animal suffering in research, yet researchers still inflict severe pain and distress on tens of thousands of animals every year for scientific purposes. Some bioethicists, scientists, and animal welfare advocates argue for placing an uppe…Read more
  •  111
    The Ethics of Information-Gathering in Innovative Practice
    with David Wendler
    Internal Medicine Journal 50 (12): 1583-1587. 2020.
    Innovative practice involves medical interventions that deviate from standard practice in significant ways. For many patients, innovative practice offers the best chance of successful treatment. Because little is known about most innovative treatments, clinicians who engage in innovative practice might consider including extra procedures, such as scans or blood draws, to gather information about the innovation. Such information-gathering interventions can yield valuable information for modifying…Read more
  •  339
    Against procreative moral rights
    Bioethics 36 (5): 569-575. 2021.
    Many contemporary ethical debates turn on claims about the nature and extent of our alleged procreative moral rights: moral rights to procreate or not to procreate as we choose. In this article, I argue that there are no procreative moral rights, in that generally we do not have a distinctive moral right to procreate or not to procreate as we choose. However, interference with our procreative choices usually violates our nonprocreative moral rights, such as our moral rights to bodily autonomy or…Read more
  •  257
    Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 Human Challenge Trials: Too Risky, Too Soon
    with Liza Dawson and Jeffrey Livezey
    Journal of Infectious Diseases 222 (3): 514-516. 2020.
    Eyal et al have recently argued that researchers should consider conducting severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) human challenge studies to hasten vaccine development. We have conducted (J. L.) and overseen (L. D.) human challenge studies and agree that they can be useful in developing anti-infective agents. We also agree that adults can autonomously choose to undergo risks with no prospect of direct benefit to themselves. However, we disagree that SARS-CoV-2 challenge st…Read more
  •  198
    Parental Obligations and Bioethics: The Duties of a Creator collects and supplements Bernard G. Prusak’s work on the ethics of procreation and parenthood, and applies his unique theoretical approach to related issues in bioethics and social philosophy. In this review, I’ll first summarize what I take to be the argumentative core of the book, and then offer a brief critical assessment.
  •  241
    The Belmont Report and Innovative Practice
    Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 63 (2): 313-326. 2020.
    One of the Belmont Report’s most important contributions was the clear and serviceable distinction it drew between standard medical practice and biomedical research. A less well-known achievement of the Report was its conceptualization of innovative practice, a type of medical practice that is often mistaken for research because it is new, untested, or experimental. Although the discussion of innovative practice in Belmont is brief and somewhat cryptic, this does not reflect the significant prog…Read more
  •  13
    The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Childhood and Children is an impressive collection of original essays on conceptual and normative issues related to the first (post-natal) phases of human life. As co-editor Anca Gheaus notes in her introduction to the collection, philosophers’ historical inattention to these issues is “puzzling”, given the importance of childhood and children for both individual and societal flourishing (p. 1). Attentive readers will be even more puzzled by this fact,…Read more
  •  39
    Innovative Practice, Clinical Research, and the Ethical Advancement of Medicine
    American Journal of Bioethics 19 (6): 7-18. 2019.
    Innovative practice occurs when a clinician provides something new, untested, or nonstandard to a patient in the course of clinical care, rather than as part of a research study. Commentators have noted that patients engaged in innovative practice are at significant risk of suffering harm, exploitation, or autonomy violations. By creating a pathway for harmful or nonbeneficial interventions to spread within medical practice without being subjected to rigorous scientific evaluation, innovative pr…Read more
  •  685
    Several philosophers have recently argued that policies aimed at reducing human fertility are a practical and morally justifiable way to mitigate the risk of dangerous climate change. There is a powerful objection to such “population engineering” proposals: even if drastic fertility reductions are needed to prevent dangerous climate change, implementing those reductions would wreak havoc on the global economy, which would seriously undermine international antipoverty efforts. In this article, we…Read more
  •  29
    Review of John P. Lizza, ed., Potentiality: Metaphysical and Bioethical Dimensions (review)
    American Journal of Bioethics 15 (8): 10-12. 2015.
    Each of the 13 articles in this collection wrestles with intricate metaphysical and moral aspects of the widespread belief that a thing’s potential—what it could, would, might, or will be, but isn’t yet—matters for how we should treat that thing. As John Lizza explains in his lucid introduction, the articles are grouped into three parts according to their aims and theoretical constraints. In this review, I briefly summarize and offer some critical discussion of each part.
  •  3542
    Population Engineering and the Fight against Climate Change
    Social Theory and Practice 42 (4): 845-870. 2016.
    Contrary to political and philosophical consensus, we argue that the threats posed by climate change justify population engineering, the intentional manipulation of the size and structure of human populations. Specifically, we defend three types of policies aimed at reducing fertility rates: choice enhancement, preference adjustment, and incentivization. While few object to the first type of policy, the latter two are generally rejected because of their potential for coercion or morally objectio…Read more
  •  584
    A portable defense of the Procreation Asymmetry
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 47 (2-3): 178-199. 2017.
    The Procreation Asymmetry holds that we have strong moral reasons not to create miserable people for their own sakes, but no moral reasons to create happy people for their own sakes. To defend this conjunction against an argument that it leads to inconsistency, I show how recognizing ‘creation’ as a temporally extended process allows us to revise the conjuncts in a way that preserves their intuitive force. This defense of the Procreation Asymmetry is preferable to others because it does not requ…Read more