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26The Story of Bioethics: From Seminal Works to Contemporary Explorations (review)Hastings Center Report 35 (3): 50. 2005.
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Social control and medical models in geneticsIn John L. Buckley (ed.), Genetics Now, University Press of America. pp. 75. 1978.
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47A draft model aggregated code of ethics for bioethicistsAmerican Journal of Bioethics 5 (5). 2005.Bioethicists function in an environment in which their peers - healthcare executives, lawyers, nurses, physicians - assert the integrity of their fields through codes of professional ethics. Is it time for bioethics to assert its integrity by developing a code of ethics? Answering in the affirmative, this paper lays out a case by reviewing the historical nature and function of professional codes of ethics. Arguing that professional codes are aggregative enterprises growing in response to a field…Read more
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11Reply to Rawls's, race, and 20th century bioethicsBioethics 38 (6): 578-580. 2024.Bioethics, EarlyView.
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18Anchor bias, autonomy, and 20th‐century bioethicists' blindness to racismBioethics 38 (4): 275-281. 2024.The central thesis of this article is that by anchoring bioethics' core conceptual armamentarium in a four-principled theory emphasizing autonomy and treating justice as a principle of allocation, theorists inadvertently biased 20th-century bioethical scholarship against addressing such subjects as ableism, anti-Black racism, classism, and other forms of discrimination, placing them outside of the scope of bioethics research and scholarship. It is also claimed that these scope limitations can be…Read more
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15A counter history of the birth of bioethics, which focuses on the dissenters and whistleblowers who challenged law and institutions rather than simply the development of new technologies.
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12Union College’s Rapaport Everyday Ethics Across the Curriculum InitiativeTeaching Ethics 9 (2): 5-24. 2009.
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88The relationship between moral philosophy and medical ethics reconsideredKennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 17 (3): 271-276. 2007.: Medical ethics often is treated as applied ethics, that is, the application of moral philosophy to ethical issues in medicine. In an earlier paper, we examined instances of moral philosophy's influence on medical ethics. We found the applied ethics model inadequate and sketched an alternative model. On this model, practitioners seeking to change morality "appropriate" concepts and theory fragments from moral philosophy to valorize and justify their innovations. Goldilocks-like, five commentato…Read more
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331Triage and Equality: An Historical Reassessment of Utilitarian Analyses of TriageKennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 2 (2): 103-123. 1992.We distinguish and review aspects of the history of two models of triage: egalitarian and utilitarian. Egalitarian triage is widely and successfully practiced in battlefield medicine, as well as in the emergency room and the ICU. Utilitarian triage has been sporadically practiced and typically collapses under the pressure of public scrutiny. Unfortunately, the two models tend to be conflated, confusing our understanding of the past and confounding our ability to plan for the future.
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31Stem Cell Rhetoric and the Pragmatics of NamingAmerican Journal of Bioethics 2 (1): 52-53. 2002.
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65On Being a Bioethicist: A Review of John H. Evans Playing God?: Human Genetic Engineering and the Rationalization of Public Bioethical Debate (review)American Journal of Bioethics 2 (2): 65-69. 2002.(2002). On Being a Bioethicist: A Review of John H. Evans Playing God?: Human Genetic Engineering and the Rationalization of Public Bioethical Debate. The American Journal of Bioethics: Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 65-69
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36Negotiating international bioethics: A response to Tom Beauchamp and Ruth MacklinKennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 8 (4): 423-453. 1998.In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Negotiating International Bioethics: A Response to Tom Beauchamp and Ruth MacklinRobert Baker (bio)AbstractCan the bioethical theories that have served American bioethics so well, serve international bioethics as well? In two papers in the previous issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, I contend that the form of principlist fundamentalism endorsed by American bioethicists like Tom Beauchamp and Ruth Macklin will not play …Read more
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119Medical ethics' appropriation of moral philosophy: The case of the sympathetic and the unsympathetic physicianKennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 17 (1): 3-22. 2007.Philosophy textbooks typically treat bioethics as a form of "applied ethics"-i.e., an attempt to apply a moral theory, like utilitarianism, to controversial ethical issues in biology and medicine. Historians, however, can find virtually no cases in which applied philosophical moral theory influenced ethical practice in biology or medicine. In light of the absence of historical evidence, the authors of this paper advance an alternative model of the historical relationship between philosophical et…Read more
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24Medical Ethics in a Time of De-CommunizationKennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 2 (4): 363-370. 1992.In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Medical Ethics in a Time of De-CommunizationRobert Baker (bio)Ethics is often treated as a matter of ethereal principles abstracted from the particulars of time and place. A natural correlate of this approach is the attempt to measure actual codes of ethics in terms of basic principles. Such an exercise can be illuminating, but it can also obscure the circumstances that make a particular codification of morality a meaningful response…Read more
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93Confidentiality in professional medical ethicsAmerican Journal of Bioethics 6 (2). 2006.In his deftly argued, “A Defense of Unqualified Confidentiality” (Kipnis 2006), Kenneth Kipnis challenges the received view that a physician's duty of confidentiality must be balanced against a dut...
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31Balkanizing bioethicsAmerican Journal of Bioethics 3 (2). 2003.This Article does not have an abstract
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75A theory of international bioethics: Multiculturalism, postmodernism, and the bankruptcy of fundamentalismKennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 8 (3): 201-231. 1998.In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Theory of International Bioethics: Multiculturalism, Postmodernism, and the Bankruptcy of Fundamentalism 1Robert Baker (bio)AbstractThis first of two articles analyzing the justifiability of international bioethical codes and of cross-cultural moral judgments reviews “moral fundamentalism,” the theory that cross-cultural moral judgments and international bioethical codes are justified by certain “basic” or “fundamental” moral princ…Read more
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15Before Bioethics: A History of American Medical Ethics From the Colonial Period to the Bioethics RevolutionOxford University Press. 2013.The first history of American medical ethics published in more than a half century, Before Bioethics tracks the evolution of American medical ethics from colonial midwives and physicians' oaths to current bioethical controversies over abortion, AIDS, animal rights, and physician-assisted suicide.
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34A theory of international bioethics: The negotiable and the non-negotiableKennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 8 (3): 233-273. 1998.In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Theory of International Bioethics: The Negotiable and the Non-NegotiableRobert Baker (bio)AbstractThe preceding article in this issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal presents the argument that “moral fundamentalism,” the position that international bioethics rests on “basic” or “fundamental” moral principles that are universally accepted in all eras and cultures, collapses under a variety of multicultural and postmodern …Read more
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27Against AnonymityBioethics 28 (4): 166-169. 2014.In ‘New Threats to Academic Freedom’ Francesca Minerva argues that anonymity for the authors of controversial articles is a prerequisite for academic freedom in the Internet age. This argument draws its intellectual and emotional power from the author's account of the reaction to the on-line publication of ‘ After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?’ – an article that provoked cascades of hostile postings and e-mails. Reflecting on these events, Minerva proposes that publishers should offe…Read more
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51Visibility and the just allocation of health care: A study of Age-Rationing in the British national Health ServiceHealth Care Analysis 1 (2): 139-150. 1993.The British National Health Service (BNHS) was founded, to quote Minister of Health Aneurin Bevan, to ‘universalise the best’. Over time, however, financial constraints forced the BNHS to turn to incrementalist budgeting, to rationalise care and to ask its practitioners to act as gatekeepers. Seeking a way to ration scarce tertiary care resources, BNHS gatekeepers began to use chronological age as a rationing criterion. Age-rationing became the ‘done thing’ without explicit policy directives and…Read more
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78The American medical ethics revolution: how the AMA's code of ethics has transformed physicians' relationships to patients, professionals, and society (edited book)Johns Hopkins University Press. 1999.The American Medical Association enacted its Code of Ethics in 1847, the first such national codification. In this volume, a distinguished group of experts from the fields of medicine, bioethics, and history of medicine reflect on the development of medical ethics in the United States, using historical analyses as a springboard for discussions of the problems of the present, including what the editors call "a sense of moral crisis precipitated by the shift from a system of fee-for-service medici…Read more
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101From Metaethicist to BioethicistCambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 11 (4): 369-379. 2002.I was the graduate student that Albert Jonsen so aptly describes. Bronx born and educated at the City College of New York, I emigrated to the Midwest to study at the Minnesota Center for the Philosophy of Science, where May Brodbeck, Herbert Feigl and other “logical positivists” were engaging in an ongoing dialogue with postpositivists like Paul Feyerabend and Karl Popper. In this environment, I studied philosophy of science, epistemology, and metaethics—the epistemology and logic of ethical con…Read more
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49The Cambridge world history of medical ethics (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2008.The Cambridge World History of Medical Ethics is the first comprehensive scholarly account of the global history of medical ethics. Offering original interpretations of the field by leading bioethicists and historians of medicine, it will serve as the essential point of departure for future scholarship in the field. The volumes reconceptualize the history of medical ethics through the creation of new categories, including the life cycle; discourses of religion, philosophy, and bioethics; and the…Read more
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Clarkson UniversityNon tenure-track faculty
Potsdam, New York, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Experimental Philosophy: Bioethics |
Value Theory |
Areas of Interest
Biomedical Ethics |
Medical Ethics |
Value Theory |
Biomedical Ethics, Miscellaneous |