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8Addressing the Burdens That Newborn Screening Imposes on Underserved CommunitiesAmerican Journal of Bioethics 23 (7): 79-82. 2023.Newborn screening (NBS) began in the 1960s by testing all newborns for a single condition—phenylketonuria, or PKU—which, when identified and treated early, significantly reduces morbidity. Over the...
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12Wanted: More Assistance in Benefits DesignAmerican Journal of Bioethics 4 (3): 119-121. 2004.No abstract
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24Listen! The Value of Public Engagement in Pandemic EthicsAmerican Journal of Bioethics 9 (11): 17-19. 2009.
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10Against Multiplying Clinical Ethics Standards without Necessity: The Case for Parsimony in Evaluating Decision-making CapacityAmerican Journal of Bioethics 22 (11): 87-89. 2022.Decision-making capacity (DMC) is, in many ways, a central organizing concept of modern health care ethics. Patients with DMC have the moral—if not always the legal—authority to make all manner of...
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13Does Anyone Need to Regulate Parental Access to Fetal Genetic Information?American Journal of Bioethics 22 (2): 28-30. 2022.Prospective parents have long been interested in knowing as much information about their children as early as possible. This interest is not—and never has been—strictly limited to significant “medi...
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12Principles over Propositions: Or, How to Reject Metaphysical Neutrality in BioethicsAmerican Journal of Bioethics 21 (6): 31-34. 2021.The emergence and development of the field of clinical ethics coincided with the revitalization of moral philosophy following the publication of John Rawls’ ma...
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20More than Warm Fuzzy Feelings: The Imperative of Institutional Morale in Hospital Pandemic ResponsesAmerican Journal of Bioethics 20 (7): 92-94. 2020.Volume 20, Issue 7, July 2020, Page 92-94.
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19Our Next Pandemic Ethics Challenge? Allocating “Normal” Health Care ServicesHastings Center Report 50 (3): 79-80. 2020.The pandemic creates unprecedented challenges to society and to health care systems around the world. Like all crises, these provide a unique opportunity to rethink the fundamental limiting assumptions and institutional inertia of our established systems. These inertial assumptions have obscured deeply rooted problems in health care and deflected attempts to address them. As hospitals begin to welcome all patients back, they should resist the temptation to go back to business as usual. Instead, …Read more
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17Legal and Ethical Considerations for Requiring Consent for Apnea Testing in Brain Death DeterminationAmerican Journal of Bioethics 20 (6): 4-16. 2020.The past decade has witnessed escalating legal and ethical challenges to the diagnosis of death by neurologic criteria. The legal tactic of demanding consent for the apnea test, if successful, can halt the DNC. However, US law is currently unsettled and inconsistent in this matter. Consent has been required in several trial cases in Montana and Kansas but not in Virginia and Nevada. In this paper, we analyze and evaluate the legal and ethical bases for requiring consent before apnea testing and …Read more
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12Response to Open Peer Commentaries “Rethinking the Ethical, Legal, and Clinical Foundations of Informed Consent and Shared Decision-Making for Brain Death Determination”American Journal of Bioethics 20 (6). 2020.Volume 20, Issue 6, June 2020, Page W1-W5.
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22It’s the Idiom, Stupid: A Plea for Formal Rhetorical Analysis in BioethicsAmerican Journal of Bioethics 19 (1): 67-69. 2019.
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25Why Are There So Few Ethics Consults in Children’s Hospitals?HEC Forum 30 (2): 91-102. 2018.In most children’s hospitals, there are very few ethics consultations, even though there are many ethically complex cases. We hypothesize that the reason for this may be that hospitals develop different mechanisms to address ethical issues and that many of these mechanisms are closer in spirit to the goals of the pioneers of clinical ethics than is the mechanism of a formal ethics consultation. To show how this is true, we first review the history of collaboration between philosophers and physic…Read more
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33What We Do When We Resuscitate Extremely Preterm InfantsAmerican Journal of Bioethics 17 (8): 1-3. 2017.
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20John Rawls is famous, among other things, for defending two principles in his theory of justice. The first seeks to secure many of the traditional rights and liberties familiar in modern liberal democracies, while the second stipulates Rawls's preferred model for arranging economic institutions. However, the placement of a right to hold personal property among the first principle rights and liberties raises an immediate and fundamental question: what are we to do when the property rights of the …Read more
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11Bioethics: Concepts, conflicts, and controversiesJournal of Medicine and Philosophy 30 (3). 2005.This Article does not have an abstract
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9The Poverty of Value Clarification: Using Ethical Theory to Critique and Transcend the “Givens” of Clinical Ethics ConsultationAmerican Journal of Bioethics 16 (9): 48-51. 2016.
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67History, Tradition, and the Normative Foundations of Civil MarriageThe Monist 91 (3-4): 446-474. 2008.
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35A Framework for Analyzing the Ethics of Disclosing Genetic Research FindingsJournal of Law, Medicine and Ethics 42 (2): 190-207. 2014.Over the past decade, there has been an extensive debate about whether researchers have an obligation to disclose genetic research findings, including primary and secondary findings. There appears to be an emerging (but disputed) view that researchers have some obligation to disclose some genetic findings to some research participants. The contours of this obligation, however, remain unclear. As this paper will explore, much of this confusion is definitional or conceptual in nature. The exten…Read more
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12For Whom the Burden Tolls: Gender and the Unequal Management of Fetal Risks and Parental ExpectationsAmerican Journal of Bioethics 16 (2): 17-19. 2016.
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19Reframing the Ethical Debate Regarding Incidental Findings in Genetic ResearchAmerican Journal of Bioethics 13 (2): 44-46. 2013.No abstract
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9Beyond Harms and Benefits: Rethinking Duties to Disclose Misattributed ParentageHastings Center Report 45 (4): 37-38. 2015.In this issue of the Hastings Center Report, Amulya Mandava, Joseph Millum, and Benjamin E. Berkman revisit an old conundrum—whether to disclose incidental findings of misattributed parentage—in light of new developments in genomic sequencing that will make that conundrum both more complex and more common. While the authors’ defense of nondisclosure as the appropriate default action in genomic research aligns with prior thinking and practice, their exploration of philosophical foundations is ref…Read more
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136Utilitarianism, vegetarianism, and human health: A response to the causal impotence objectionJournal of Applied Philosophy 24 (3). 2007.abstract It is generally assumed that the link between utilitarianism and vegetarianism is relatively straightforward. However, a familiar objection to utility‐based vegetarianism maintains that, given the massive scale of animal agribusiness, any given person is causally impotent in reducing the overall number of animals raised for food and, thus, in reducing the unfathomably high quantity of disutility engendered thereby. Utilitarians have frequently responded to this objection in two ways: fi…Read more
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21Marriage unhitched from the state: a defensePublic Affairs Quarterly 23 (2): 161-180. 2009.In 1970, President Richard Nixon expressed his unambiguous support for interracial marriage; as for same-sex marriage, he exclaimed, "I can't go that far—that's the year 2000" . Nixon's prescient remark, made shortly after the Supreme Court's 1967 decision in Loving v. Virginia to overturn anti-miscegenation laws, expresses at once hesitancy for, yet resigned acceptance of, the inevitable expansion of civil marriage to include more and more kinds of loving partnerships. Nearly forty years later,…Read more
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40Bioethics and the philosophy of medicine: A thirty-year perspectiveJournal of Medicine and Philosophy 31 (6). 2006.This Article does not have an abstract
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19Engaging Pediatric Health Professionals in Interactive Online Ethics EducationHastings Center Report 44 (6): 15-20. 2014.Bioethical decision‐making in pediatrics diverges from similar decisions in other medical domains because the young child is not an autonomous decision‐maker, while the teen is developing—and should be encouraged to develop—autonomy and decisional capacity. Thus the balance between autonomy and beneficence is fundamentally different in pediatrics than in adult medicine. While ethical dilemmas that reflect these fundamental issues are common, many pediatric physician and nursing training programs…Read more
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9Two Agendas for Bioethics: Critique and IntegrationBioethics 29 (6): 440-447. 2014.Many bioethicists view the primary task of bioethics as ‘value clarification’. In this article, I argue that the field must embrace two more ambitious agendas that go beyond mere clarification. The first agenda, critique, involves unmasking, interrogating, and challenging the presuppositions that underlie bioethical discourse. These largely unarticulated premises establish the boundaries within which problems can be conceptualized and solutions can be imagined. The function of critique, then, is…Read more
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52Bariatric Surgery and the Social Character of the Obesity EpidemicAmerican Journal of Bioethics 10 (12): 20-22. 2010.This Article does not have an abstract
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76Why the Old Sexual Morality of the New Natural Law Undermines Traditional MarriageSocial Theory and Practice 34 (4): 591-622. 2008.
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31Patient Autonomy and the Twenty-First Century PhysicianHastings Center Report 41 (5): 3-3. 2011.In this issue of the Report, Daniel Groll suggests new ways to understand old tensions between autonomy and paternalism. He categorizes disagreements between doctors and patients in four ways. Some are about the ends or goals of medical treatment. For these, he claims, patient choices are based upon patient values, and physicians should neither challenge nor assess them. More common are disagreements about the appropriate means to achieve an agreed-upon goal. These subdivide into two distinct ca…Read more
Kansas City, Missouri, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Applied Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |