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25The Strange Tale of Three Identical Strangers: Cinematic Lessons in BioethicsHastings Center Report 49 (1): 21-23. 2019.Tim Wardle’s 2018 documentary film Three Identical Strangers is an exploration of identity, family, and loss. It’s also about nature versus nurture and the boundaries of ethically permissible research, particularly research involving children. The film tells the story of identical triplets who were separated soon after birth in 1961. A different family adopted each boy, without being told that their son had two identical brothers. The adoption agency responsible for finding the families was coll…Read more
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9Addressing 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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26Listen! The Value of Public Engagement in Pandemic EthicsAmerican Journal of Bioethics 9 (11): 17-19. 2009.
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13Against 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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16Does 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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15Principles 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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23More 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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22Our 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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20Legal 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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15Response 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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25It’s the Idiom, Stupid: A Plea for Formal Rhetorical Analysis in BioethicsAmerican Journal of Bioethics 19 (1): 67-69. 2019.
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26Why 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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36What 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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139Utilitarianism, 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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41Bioethics 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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22Engaging 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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12Two 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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53Bariatric 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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77Why the Old Sexual Morality of the New Natural Law Undermines Traditional MarriageSocial Theory and Practice 34 (4): 591-622. 2008.
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34Patient 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
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84Bioethics and the Philosophy of Medicine: A Thirty-Year PerspectiveJournal of Medicine and Philosophy 31 (6): 565-568. 2006.
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41The Ethics of Animal Research: Exploring the Controversy (edited book)Mit Press. 2012.A balanced, accessible discussion of whether and on what grounds animal research can be ethically justified.
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38Collectivizing Rescue Obligations in BioethicsAmerican Journal of Bioethics 15 (2): 3-11. 2015.Bioethicists invoke a duty to rescue in a wide range of cases. Indeed, arguably, there exists an entire medical paradigm whereby vast numbers of medical encounters are treated as rescue cases. The intuitive power of the rescue paradigm is considerable, but much of this power stems from the problematic way that rescue cases are conceptualized—namely, as random, unanticipated, unavoidable, interpersonal events for which context is irrelevant and beneficence is the paramount value. In this article,…Read more
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17One Exemption Too Many: The Case for Mandated CCHD ScreeningAmerican Journal of Bioethics 16 (1): 3-5. 2016.
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25Public reasons for private vows: a response to GilboaPublic Affairs Quarterly 23 (3): 261-273. 2009.The question of whether a liberal state ought to recognize same-sex marriage must be situated within a broader inquiry into the proper relationship between political liberalism and marriage simpliciter. This general inquiry invites a diverse set of responses to the narrower question.A first widely held view—call it thick marital egalitarianism—sees a straightforward link from central liberal values, such as neutrality, equality, and nondiscrimination, to the full and equal inclusion of all willi…Read more
Kansas City, Missouri, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Applied Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |