Shannon Fyfe

Can Covid-19 vaccines be used off-label? Should they be? These were questions on the minds of parents, pediatricians, and the media when the FDA fully approved the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine for people aged 16 and up. Yet the American Academy of Pediatrics cautioned against pediatric off-label use of the vaccine, and the CDC Covid-19 Vaccine Provider Agreement appears to prohibit it. After briefly contextualizing ethical and legal precedents regarding off-label use, we offer an analysis of the ethical permissibility of and considerations for pediatric off-label Covid-19 vaccination based on individual benefits, risks, and available alternatives. Our analysis challenges the ethics of a blanket prohibition on off-label pediatric Covid-19 vaccination, as it limits clinician ability to provide care they may determine to be clinically and ethically appropriate. At the same time, our analysis acknowledges that Covid-19 creates population-level ethical considerations that are at times in tension with individual health interests.

The aim of my dissertation is to explore philosophical questions motivated by the mass sexual slavery of Yazidi women and girls by the Islamic State. The Islamic State has targeted the Yazidis in Syria for destruction due to religious practices it sees as âdevil worship,â and has engaged in a sustained practice of sexually enslaving Yazidi women and girls. I analyze underlying metaphysical, political, and moral concepts in order to identify the responsibilities of the individual and collective perpetrators, as well bystanders. While the dissertation is motivated by a specific case of violence, I use my analysis of the case and the related concepts to draw out conclusions beyond the circumstances of the Yazidis. I begin by looking at ontological questions about the morality of perpetrators and victims of violence, and I defend a hybrid account of groups that recognizes groups as moral particulars, but also recognizes the individual members of the group as distinct moral and legal entities. I then explore conceptions of harm and wrongdoing, specifically related to sexual slavery, in both individual and group contexts. I defend an account of harm as injury to well-being, which takes into account the subjective experiences of individuals, but I argue for an objective account of the wrongness of sexual slavery. I go on to consider the models we have for thinking about statehood and I argue that the Islamic State should be seen as a non-state actor, rather than as a state, but that it has violated both positive and negative obligations regardless of whether or not it is recognized as a state. I ultimately defend an account of individual, collective, and shared moral responsibility for perpetrators of and bystanders to the harm suffered by the Yazidi women and girls.

In ‘The Complex Case of Ellie Anderson’, Joona Rasanen and Anna Smajdor raise several ethical questions about the case. One question asks, but does not answer, whether Ellie faced discrimination for being transgender when her mother was not allowed access to Ellie’s sperm following her death. In raising the question, the authors imply anti-trans bias may have influenced this determination. However, this inference is not supported by current ethical and legal guidance for posthumous use of gametes, with which Ellie’s case is consistent. We consider the authors’ responses to their other ethical queries, and how their suggestions for what options might have been available to Ellie and her family are instructive for addressing attempts in the USA and UK to restrict minors’ access to gender-affirming medical treatment, including puberty-blocking therapy.

In the last two decades there has been a meteoric rise of international criminal tribunals and courts and also a strengthening chorus of critics against them. Today it is hard to find strong defenders of international criminal tribunals and courts. This book attempts such a defense against an array of critics. It offers a nuanced defense, accepting many criticisms but arguing that the idea of international criminal tribunals can be defended as providing the fairest way to deal with mass atrocity crimes in a global arena. Fairness and moral legitimacy will be at the heart of this defense. The authors take up the economic and political arguments that have been powerfully expressed, as well as arguments about sovereignty, punishment, responsibility, and evidence; but in the end they show that these arguments do not defeat the idea of international criminal courts and tribunals.

When soldiers come home from war, some experience lingering emotional effects from the choices they were forced to make, and the outcomes of these choices. In this article, we consider the gap between objective assessments of blame and subjective assessments of self-blame, guilt, and shame after war, and we suggest a way of understanding how soldiers can understand their moral responsibility from both of these vantage points. We examine arguments from just war theory regarding the objective moral responsibility of combatants and consider the role moral luck plays in our assessment of moral responsibility. We then use P.F. Strawson’s account of the reactive attitudes to demonstrate the limitations of focusing excessively on the objective stance to determine the blameworthiness of soldiers. We argue that we should think about blame alongside moral emotions like guilt and shame, which will allow us to better understand subjective blame and the experiences of soldiers who blame themselves after war. We claim that objective determinations of heroism or responsibility do not adequately capture the complexity of moral emotions for soldiers returning home after war. As part of a shared moral community, civilians owe veterans more than automated responses based on the civilian experience.

In this article, I consider the possibilities and limitations for testimonial justice in an international criminal courtroom. I begin by exploring the relationship between epistemology and criminal law, and consider how testimony contributes to the goals of truth and justice. I then assess the susceptibility of international criminal courts to the two harms of testimonial injustice: epistemic harm to the speaker, and harm to the truth-seeking process. I conclude that international criminal courtrooms are particularly susceptible to perpetrating testimonial injustice. Hearers in the international criminal courtroom should practice testimonial justice, but the institution is not structured in a way that can prevent every instance of testimonial injustice.

Recent philosophical and social conversations around sexual consent focus mainly on two aspects of consent. One consideration is the necessary condition that consent must be present for a sex act to be sex and not rape. The other consideration involves the conditions that are sufficient for consent to be valid. However, it is our contention that these necessary and sufficient conditions oversimplify the social, legal, moral, and interpersonal aspects of sexual experience. Our aim in this paper is to explore and defend the controversial category of “nonconsensual sex.” Accepting the possibility of this category allows us to interrogate the gap between the legal and political objectives of defining and prosecuting rape, and begin to construct a view of ethically ideal sex. We argue that rape and nonconsensual sex are not equivalent, and that institutional responses to rape and sexual assault ought to recognize and address the (albeit problematic) category of nonconsensual sex. We contend that although nonconsensual sex ought not to be legally confused with rape, it is still morally problematic, and should thus be distinguished from fully consensual sex. We then sketch a framework through which institutions should address a range of sexual activity that reflects lived sexual experience. This analysis is in part a response to second-wave feminist and hetero-normative views of rape and sexual assault, which we claim fail to account for the non-binary nature of sex and consent. Our approach is sex-and-desire positive, and focuses on the mutuality of sex without assumptions regarding the sex, gender, sexual orientation or sexual preferences of the persons engaging in potential sex acts.

In this article, I argue that we need a better understanding of the theoretical underpinnings of the current debates in international law surrounding hate speech and inchoate crimes. I construct a theoretical basis for speech acts as incitement to genocide, distinguishing these speech acts from speech as genocide and speech denying genocide by integrating international law with concepts drawn from speech act theory and moral philosophy. I use the case drawn on by many commentators in this area of international criminal law, the trial of media executives for the roles they played in the Rwandan genocide through public speech acts by media entities insulting an ethnic group or advocating violence against an ethnic group. Each of these men were institutional leaders and were charged with using their positions within Rwandan society to distribute what I call genocidal hate speech, genocidal incitement speech, and genocidal participation speech. I argue for a distinction between these three types of speech, and a difference in individual criminal liability for the dissemination of each type of speech. I also argue that there should be a difference in individual criminal liability for speech acts within the context of an ongoing or recent genocide, and speech acts that can be separated from a site of mass violence.