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83Basic Liberties, Consent, and Chemical RestraintsAmerican Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 15 (2). 2024.We thank all the thoughtful authors for their insightful comments. In this response, we try to address some of themes that emerged from the commentaries. We leave aside some of those comments that...
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317Mental Privacy, Cognitive Liberty, and Hog-tyingJournal of Bioethical Inquiry 1-16. forthcoming.As the science and technology of the brain and mind develop, so do the ways in which brains and minds may be surveilled and manipulated. Some cognitive libertarians worry that these developments undermine cognitive liberty, or “freedom of thought.” I argue that protecting an individual’s cognitive liberty undermines others’ ability to use their own cognitive liberty. Given that the threatening devices and processes are not relevantly different from ordinary and frequent intrusions upon one’s bra…Read more
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211Abolishing morality in biomedical ethicsBioethics 38 (4): 316-325. 2024.In biomedical ethics, there is widespread acceptance of moral realism, the view that moral claims express a proposition and that at least some of these propositions are true. Biomedical ethics is also in the business of attributing moral obligations, such as “S should do X.” The problem, as we argue, is that against the background of moral realism, most of these attributions are erroneous or inaccurate. The typical obligation attribution issued by a biomedical ethicist fails to truly capture the…Read more
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236Protecting Future Generations by Enhancing Current GenerationsIn Fabrice Jotterand & Marcello Ienca (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Ethics of Human Enhancement, Routledge. 2023.It is plausible that current generations owe something to future generations. One possibility is that we have a duty to not harm them. Another possibility is that we have a duty to protect them. In either case, however, to satisfy the duties to future generations from environmental or political degradation, we need to engage in widespread collective action. But, as we are, we have a limited ability to do so, in part because we lack the self-discipline necessary for successful collective action. …Read more
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16An Open Discussion of the Impact of OpenNotes on Clinical Ethics: A Justification for Harm-Based Exclusions from Clinical Ethics DocumentationJournal of Clinical Ethics 33 (4): 303-313. 2022.The OpenNotes (ON) mandate in the 21st Century Cures Act requires that patients or their legally authorized representatives be able to access their medical information in their electronic medical record (EMR) in real time. Ethics notes fall under the domain of this policy. We argue that ethics notes are unique from other clinical documentation in a number of ways: they lack best-practice guidelines, are written in the context of common misconceptions surrounding the purpose of ethics consultatio…Read more
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245Default Positions in Clinical EthicsJournal of Clinical Ethics 34 (3): 258-269. 2023.Default positions, predetermined starting points that aid in complex decision-making, are common in clinical medicine. In this article, we identify and critically examine common default positions in clinical ethics practice. Whether default positions ought to be held is an important normative question, but here we are primarily interested in the descriptive, rather than normative, properties of default positions. We argue that default positions in clinical ethics function to protect and promote …Read more
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195Ignorance and moral judgment: Testing the logical priority of the epistemicConsciousness and Cognition 108 (C): 103472. 2023.It has recently been argued that a person’s moral judgments (about both their own and others’ actions) are constrained by the nature and extent of their relevant ignorance and, thus, that such judgments are determined in the first instance by the person’s epistemic circumstances. It has been argued, in other words, that the epistemic is logically prior to other normative (e.g., ethical, prudential, pecuniary) considerations in human decision-making, that these other normative considerations figu…Read more
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319Welfare, Abortion, and Organ Donation: A Reply to the RestrictivistCambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 33 (2): 290-295. 2024.We argued in a recent issue of this journal that if abortion is restricted,1 then there are parallel obligations for parents to donate body parts to their children. The strength of this obligation to donate is proportional to the strength of the abortion restrictions. If abortion is never permissible, then a parent must always donate any organ if they are a match. If abortion is sometimes permissible and sometimes not, then organ donation is sometimes obligatory and sometimes not. Our argument w…Read more
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369Ignorance and Moral Judgment: Testing the Logical Priority of the EpistemicConsciousness and Cognition. forthcoming.It has recently been argued that a person’s moral judgments (about both their own and others’ actions) are constrained by the nature and extent of their relevant ignorance and, thus, that such judgments are determined in the first instance by the person’s epistemic circumstances. It has been argued, in other words, that the epistemic is logically prior to other normative (e.g., ethical, prudential, pecuniary) considerations in human decision-making, that these other normative considerations figu…Read more
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656The Conditions for Ethical Chemical RestraintsAmerican Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 15 (1): 3-16. 2024.The practice of medicine frequently involves the unconsented restriction of liberty. The reasons for unilateral liberty restrictions are typically that being confined, strapped down, or sedated are necessary to prevent the person from harming themselves or others. In this paper, we target the ethics of chemical restraints, which are medications that are used to intentionally restrict the mental states associated with the unwanted behaviors, and are typically not specifically indicated for the co…Read more
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255The Duty to Edit the Human GermlineRes Publica 29 (3): 347-365. 2022.Many people find the manipulation of the human germline—editing the DNA of sperm or egg cells such that these genetic changes are passed to the resulting offspring—to be morally impermissible. In this paper, I argue for the claim that editing the human germline is morally permissible. My argument starts with the claim that outcome uncertainty regarding the effects of germline editing shows that the duty to not harm cannot ground the prohibition of germline editing. Instead, if germline editing i…Read more
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353Societal Collapse and Intergenerational Disparities in SufferingNeuroethics 15 (3): 1-12. 2022.The collapse of society is inevitable, even if it is in the distant future. When it collapses, it is likely to do so within the lifetimes of some people. These people will have matured in pre-collapse society, experience collapse, and then live the remainder of their lives in the post-collapse world. I argue that this group of people—the transitional generation—will be the worst off from societal collapse, far worse than subsequent generations. As the transitional generation, they will suffer di…Read more
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486Two internal critiques for theists who oppose moral enhancement on a process virtue basisBioethics 36 (4): 367-373. 2021.Bioethics, Volume 36, Issue 4, Page 367-373, May 2022.
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66Moral Enhancement and the Public GoodRoutledge. 2021.Currently, humans lack the cognitive and moral capacities to prevent the widespread suffering associated with collective risks, like pandemics, climate change, or even asteroids. In Moral Enhancement and the Public Good, Parker Crutchfield argues for the controversial, and initially counterintuitive claim that everyone should be administered a substance that makes us better people. Furthermore, he argues that it should be administered without our knowledge. That is, moral bioenhancement should b…Read more
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368A Case Study in the Problem of Policymaker Ignorance: Political Responses to COVID-19Cosmos + Taxis: Studies in Emergent Order and Organization 9 (5 + 6): 18-28. 2021.We apply the analysis that we have developed over the course of several publications on the significance of ignorance for decision-making, especially in surrogate (and, thus, in political) contexts, to political decision-making, such as it has been, during the COVID-19 pandemic (see Scheall 2019; Crutchfield and Scheall 2019; Scheall and Crutchfield 2020; Scheall 2020). Policy responses to the coronavirus constitute a case study of the problem of policymaker ignorance. We argue that political re…Read more
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671The Duty to Protect, Abortion, and Organ DonationCambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 31 (3): 333-343. 2022.Some people oppose abortion on the grounds that fetuses have full moral status and thus a right to not be killed. We argue that special obligations that hold between mother and fetus also hold between parents and their children. We argue that if these special obligations necessitate the sacrifice of bodily autonomy in the case of abortion, then they also necessitate the sacrifice of bodily autonomy in the case of organ donation. If we accept the argument that it is obligatory to override a woman…Read more
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451Ethical Allocation of RemdesivirAmerican Journal of Bioethics 20 (7): 84-86. 2020.As the federal government distributed remdesivir to some of the states COVID-19 hit hardest, policymakers scrambled to develop criteria to allocate the drug to their hospitals. Our state, Michigan, was among those states to receive an initial quantity of the drug from the U.S. government. The disparities in burden of disease in Michigan are striking. Detroit has a death rate more than three times the state average. Our recommendation to the state was that it should prioritize the communities tha…Read more
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776Extrapolating from Laboratory Behavioral Research on Nonhuman Primates Is UnjustifiedJournal of Applied Philosophy 37 (4): 628-645. 2020.Conducting research on animals is supposed to be valuable because it provides information on how human mechanisms work. But for the use of animal models to be ethically justified, it must be epistemically justified. The inference from an observation about an animal model to a conclusion about humans must be warranted for the use of animals to be moral. When researchers infer from animals to humans, it’s an extrapolation. Often non-human primates are used as animal models in laboratory behavioral…Read more
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601Delusion, Proper Function, and JustificationNeuroethics 14 (2): 113-124. 2020.Among psychiatric conditions, delusions have received significant attention in the philosophical literature. This is partly due to the fact that many delusions are bizarre, and their contents interesting in and of themselves. But the disproportionate attention is also due to the notion that by studying what happens when perception, cognition, and belief go wrong, we can better understand what happens when these go right. In this paper, I attend to delusions for the second reason—by evaluating th…Read more
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1541Engendering moral post‐persons: A novel self‐help strategyBioethics 34 (7): 679-686. 2020.Humans are morally deficient in a variety of ways. Some of these deficiencies threaten the continued existence of our species. For example, we appear to be incapable of responding to climate change in ways that are likely to prevent the consequent suffering. Some people are morally better than others, but we could all be better. The price of not becoming morally better is that when those events that threaten us occur, we will suffer from them. If we can prevent this suffering from occurring, the…Read more
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341The Priority of the EpistemicEpisteme 18 (4): 726-737. 2021.Epistemic burdens – the nature and extent of our ignorance (that and how) with respect to various courses of action – serve to determine our incentive structures. Courses of action that seem to bear impossibly heavy epistemic burdens are typically not counted as options in an actor’s menu, while courses of action that seem to bear comparatively heavy epistemic burdens are systematically discounted in an actor’s menu relative to options that appear less epistemically burdensome. That ignorance se…Read more
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532Epistemic Burdens, Moral Intimacy, and Surrogate Decision MakingAmerican Journal of Bioethics 20 (2): 59-61. 2020.Berger (forthcoming) states that moral intimacy is important in applying the best interests standard. But what he calls moral intimacy requires that someone has overcome epistemic burdens needed to represent the patient. We argue elsewhere that good surrogate decision-making is first and foremost a matter of overcoming epistemic burdens, or those obstacles that stand in the way of a surrogate decision-maker knowing what a patient wants and how to satisfy those preferences. Berger’s notion of mor…Read more
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952It is better to be ignorant of our moral enhancement: A reply to ZambranoBioethics 34 (2): 190-194. 2019.In a recent issue of Bioethics, I argued that compulsory moral bioenhancement should be administered covertly. Alexander Zambrano has criticized this argument on two fronts. First, contrary to my claim, Zambrano claims that the prevention of ultimate harm by covert moral bioenhancement fails to meet conditions for permissible liberty‐restricting public health interventions. Second, contrary to my claim, Zambrano claims that covert moral bioenhancement undermines autonomy to a greater degree than…Read more
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765Moral Normative Force and Clinical Ethics ExpertiseAmerican Journal of Bioethics 19 (11): 89-91. 2019.Brummett and Salter propose a useful and timely taxonomy of clinical ethics expertise (2019). As the field becomes further “professionalized” this taxonomy is important, and the core of it is right. It needs some refinement around the edges, however. In their conclusion, Brummett and Salter rightly point out that there is a significant difference between the ethicist whose recommendations are procedure- and process-heavy, consensus-driven, and dialogical and the authoritarian ethicist whose reco…Read more
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840Epistemic burdens and the incentives of surrogate decision-makersMedicine, Health Care and Philosophy 22 (4): 613-621. 2019.We aim to establish the following claim: other factors held constant, the relative weights of the epistemic burdens of competing treatment options serve to determine the options that patient surrogates pursue. Simply put, surrogates confront an incentive, ceteris paribus, to pursue treatment options with respect to which their knowledge is most adequate to the requirements of the case. Regardless of what the patient would choose, options that require more knowledge than the surrogate possesses (…Read more
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1400The Conditions For Ethical Application of RestraintsChest 155 (3): 617-625. 2018.Despite the lack of evidence for their effectiveness, the use of physical restraints for patients is widespread. The best ethical justification for restraining patients is that it prevents them from harming themselves. We argue that even if the empirical evidence supported their effectiveness in achieving this aim, their use would nevertheless be unethical, so long as well known exceptions to informed consent fail to apply. Specifically, we argue that ethically justifiable restraint use demands …Read more
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24Placebos and a New Exception to Informed ConsentAmerican Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 9 (3): 200-202. 2018.
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33The Future of Inductive Risk for Disorders of ConsciousnessAmerican Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 7 (1): 56-57. 2016.
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21Decoded Neurofeedback is Unlikely to Enhance Moral CapacitiesAmerican Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 7 (2): 125-126. 2016.
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675The limits of deontology in dental ethics educationInternational Journal of Ethics Education 1 (2): 183-200. 2016.Most current dental ethics curricula use a deontological approach to biomedical and dental ethics that emphasizes adherence to duties and principles as properties that determine whether an act is ethical. But the actual ethical orientation of students is typically unknown. The purpose of the current study was to determine the ethical orientation of dental students in resolving clinical ethical dilemmas. First-year students from one school were invited to participate in an electronic survey that …Read more
Parker Crutchfield
Western Michigan University School Of Medicine
Western Michigan University
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Western Michigan University School Of MedicineProfessor
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Arizona State University
Philosophy - School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies
PhD, 2011
Areas of Specialization
2 more
Epistemology |
Value Theory |
Philosophy of Mind |
Biomedical Ethics |
Public Health |
Medical Ethics |
Neuroethics |