•  335
    How Do We Justify Research into Enhanced Warfighters?
    Journal of Law and the Biosciences 11 (2): 1-13. 2024.
    State militaries have strong interests in developing enhanced warfighters: taking otherwise healthy service personnel (soldiers, marines, pilots, etc.) and pushing their biological, physiological, and cognitive capacities beyond their individual statistical or baseline norm. However, the ethical and regulatory challenges of justifying research into these kinds of interventions to demonstrate the efficacy and safety of enhancements in the military has not been well explored. In this paper, we off…Read more
  •  166
    Military Medical Ethics
    Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 22 (1): 92-109. 2013.
  •  166
    Physician-Assisted Draft Evasion: Civil Disobedience, Medicine, and War
    Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 14 (4): 444-454. 2005.
    From the first days of conscription, physicians have declared their opposition to unjust wars by using their good offices to aid draft evaders
  •  147
    After Feticide: Coping with Late-Term Abortion in Israel, Western Europe, and the United States
    Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 8 (4): 449-462. 1999.
    Although the abortion debate continues to simmer in many places, the general issue of a woman's right to an abortion, at least in the Western democracies, is largely settled. In its place, the question of late-term abortion begins to assume a prominence only recently attributed to abortion itself. The advent of sophisticated fetal screening techniques makes possible detection of potentially severe fetal anomalies that in many cases are detected only late in the pregnancy, resulting in the need f…Read more
  •  141
    abstract During the current round of fighting in the Middle East, Israel has provoked considerable controversy as it turned to targeted killings or assassination to battle militants. While assassination has met with disfavour among traditional observers, commentators have, more recently, sought to justify targeted killings with an appeal to both self‐defence and law enforcement. While each paradigm allows the use of lethal force, they are fundamentally incompatible, the former stipulating moral …Read more
  •  134
    Michael L. Gross replies
    Hastings Center Report 40 (5): 5-5. 2010.
  •  130
    Teaching Military Medical Ethics: Another Look at Dual Loyalty and Triage
    Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 19 (4): 458-464. 2010.
    Military medical ethics is garnering growing attention today among medical personal in the American and other armies. Short courses or workshops in “battlefield ethics” for military physicians, nurses, medics, social workers, and psychologists address the nature of patient rights in the military, care for detainees, enemy soldiers and local civilians, problems posed by limited resources, ethical questions arising in humanitarian missions, as well as end-of-life issues, ethics consultations, care…Read more
  •  123
    Because the goal of military medicine is salvaging the wounded who can return to duty, military medical ethics cannot easily defend devoting scarce resources to those so badly injured that they cannot return to duty. Instead, arguments turn to morale and political obligation to justify care for the seriously wounded. Neither argument is satisfactory. Care for the wounded is not necessary to maintain an army's morale. Nor is there any moral or logical connection between the right to health care (…Read more
  •  111
    Medical ethics education: to what ends?
    Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice 7 (4): 387-397. 2001.
  •  104
    Abortion, particularly late‐term abortion, and neonaticide, selective non‐treatment of newborns, are feasible management strategies for fetuses or newborns diagnosed with severe abnormalities. However, policy varies considerably among developed nations. This article examines abortion and neonatal policy in four nations: Israel, the US, the UK and Denmark. In Israel, late‐term abortion is permitted while non‐treatment of newborns is prohibited. In the US, on the other hand, late‐term abortion is …Read more
  •  95
    Ethics, policy, and rare genetic disorders: The case of gaucher disease in Israel
    Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 23 (2): 151-170. 2002.
    Gaucher disease is a rare, chronic,ethnic-specific genetic disorder affecting Jewsof Eastern European descent. It is extremelyexpensive to treat and presents difficultdilemmas for officials and patients in Israelwhere many patients live. First, high-cost,high-benefit, but low volume treatment forGaucher creates severe allocation dilemmas forpolicy makers. Allocation policies driven bycost effectiveness, age, opportunity or needmake it difficult to justify funding. Processoriented decision making…Read more
  •  93
    Competent patients who refuse life saving medical treatment present a dilemma for healthcare professionals. On one hand, respect for autonomy and liberty demand that physicians respect a patient’s decision to refuse treatment. However, it is often apparent that such patients are not fully competent. They may not adequately comprehend the benefits of medical care, be overly anxious about pain, or discount the value of their future state of health. Although most bioethicists are convinced that par…Read more
  •  93
    Medicalized WEAPONS & Modern WAR
    Hastings Center Report 40 (1): 34-43. 2010.
    “Medicalized” weapons—those that rely on advances in neuroscience, physiology, and pharmacology—offer the prospect of reducing casualties and protecting civilians. They could be especially useful in modern asymmetric wars in which conventional states are pitted against guerrilla or insurgent forces. But may physicians and other medical workers participate in their development?
  •  91
    In its American context the case of baby Messenger, a preterm infant disconnected from life-support by his father and allowed to die has generated debate about neonatal treatment protocols. Limited by the legal and ethical norms of the United States, this case did not consider treatment protocols that might be available in other countries such as Denmark and Israel: threshold protocols whereby certain classes of newborns are not treated, and preemptive abortion allowing one to choose late-term a…Read more
  •  89
    Israel: Bioethics in a Jewish-Democratic State
    Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 12 (3): 247-255. 2003.
    Unlike most Western nations, Israel does not recognize full separation of church and state but seeks instead a gentle fusion of Jewish and democratic values. Inasmuch as important religious norms such as sanctity of life may clash with dignity, privacy, and self-determination, conflicts frequently arise as Israeli lawmakers, ethicists, and healthcare professionals attempt to give substance to the idea of a Jewish-democratic state. Emerging issues in Israeli bioethics—end-of-life treatment, ferti…Read more
  •  86
    Medical rules of eligibility permit severely injured Iraqi and Afghan nationals to receive care in Coalition medical facilities only if bed space is available and their injuries result directly from Coalition fire. The first rule favors Coalition soldiers over host-nation nationals and contradicts the principle of impartial, needs-based medical care. To justify preferential care for compatriots, wartime medicine invokes associative obligations of care that favor friends, family, and comrades-in-…Read more
  •  82
    Comradery, community, and care in military medical ethics
    Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 32 (5): 337-350. 2011.
    Medical ethics prohibits caregivers from discriminating and providing preferential care to their compatriots and comrades. In military medicine, particularly during war and when resources may be scarce, ethical principles may dictate priority care for compatriot soldiers. The principle of nondiscrimination is central to utilitarian and deontological theories of justice, but communitarianism and the ethics of care and friendship stipulate a different set of duties for community members, friends, …Read more
  •  76
    ABSTRACT How should physicians act when faced with corporal punishment, such as amputation, or torture? In most cases, the answer is clear: international law, UN resolutions and universal codes of medical ethics absolutely forbid physicians from countenancing torture and corporal punishment in any form. An acute problem arises, however, in decent societies, but not necessarily liberal states, that are, nonetheless, welcome in the world community. The decent society is often governed, in whole or…Read more
  •  71
    Because we are often nagged by the thought that we might not have behaved any differently than those good citizens whose respect for the law and fear of punishment led them to support the Nazi regime, we are fascinated with the behavior of ordinary Germans. Careful to first strip away the pathological explanations of German behavior, Pellegrino and Thomasma ask simply whether ordinary Germans could have reasoned and, by implication, acted differently. Although their affirmative answer is consist…Read more
  •  71
    Responsible citizens are expected to combine ethical judgement with judiciously exercised social activism to preserve the moral foundation of democratic society and prevent political injustice. But do they? Utilizing a research model integrating insights from rational choice theory and cognitive developmental psychology this book carefully explores three exemplary cases of morally inspired activism: Jewish rescue in wartime Europe, abortion politics in the United States, and peace and settler ac…Read more
  •  65
    Speaking in One Voice or Many? The Language of Community
    Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 13 (1): 28-33. 2004.
    Communities are the chief source of philosophical sloppiness these days. Varying endlessly across the entire range of human experience, communities raise the specter of moral relativism that makes ethics sometimes seem a misguided and futile enterprise. Yet the language of communities and their multitude of norms, preferences, and principles present an opportunity, and challenge, to confront abiding moral problems in immeasurably richer and more novel ways. But neither the opportunities nor the …Read more
  •  64
    Herbert J. Bonifacio is an adolescent
    with Shawneequa L. Callier and Christine Grady
    Hastings Center Report. forthcoming.
  •  59
  •  56
    Since 2022, the EU, US, and other nations have imposed medical sanctions on Russia to block the export of pharmaceuticals and medical devices and curtail clinical trials to degrade Russia’s military capabilities. While international law proscribes sanctions that cause a humanitarian crisis, an outcome averted in Russia, the military effects of medical sanctions have been lean. Strengthening medical sanctions risks violating noncombatant and combatant rights to healthcare. Each group’s claim is d…Read more
  •  46
    Is science reporting turning into fast food?
    Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics 9 (1): 5-7. 2009.
  •  45
    Response to open Peer commentaries on “why treat the wounded?”
    American Journal of Bioethics 8 (2). 2008.
    This Article does not have an abstract
  •  44
    The Ethics of Insurgency: A Brief Overview
    Journal of Military Ethics 14 (3-4): 248-250. 2015.
    ABSTRACTAre all forms of guerilla warfare apprehensible? Or can there be such a thing as just guerilla warfare? If so, what would be the reasonable requirements we would make of guerillas in order to consider them just? The remarks below, based on my new book The Ethics of Insurgency; A Critical Guide to Just Guerilla Warfare, summarize my attempts to answer those questions, discussing such issues as legitimate authority, just cause, and compliance with the laws of armed conflict, including the …Read more