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41The Routledge Handbook of Feminist Bioethics (edited book)Routledge. 2022.The Routledge Handbook of Feminist Bioethics is an outstanding resource for anyone with an interest in feminist bioethics, with chapters covering topics from justice and power to the climate crisis. Comprising 42 chapters by emerging and established scholars, the volume is divided into six parts: Foundations of Feminist Bioethics Identity and Identifications Science, Technology and Research Health and Social Care Reproduction and Making Families Widening the Scope of Feminist Bioethics The volum…Read more
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118The Ethical Commitments of Health Promotion Practitioners: An Empirical Study from New South Wales, AustraliaPublic Health Ethics 5 (2): 128-139. 2012.In this article, we provide a description of the good in health promotion based on an empirical study of health promotion practices in New South Wales, the most populous state in Australia. We found that practitioners were unified by a vision of the good in health promotion that had substantive and procedural dimensions. Substantively, the good in health promotion was teleological: it inhered in meliorism, an intention to promote health, which was understood holistically and situated in places a…Read more
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45Risk, Overdiagnosis and Ethical JustificationsHealth Care Analysis 27 (4): 231-248. 2019.Many healthcare practices expose people to risks of harmful outcomes. However, the major theories of moral philosophy struggle to assess whether, when and why it is ethically justifiable to expose individuals to risks, as opposed to actually harming them. Sven Ove Hansson has proposed an approach to the ethical assessment of risk imposition that encourages attention to factors including questions of justice in the distribution of advantage and risk, people’s acceptance or otherwise of risks, and…Read more
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13Not All Publics Are the Same—A Note on Power, Diversity, and Lived Expertise in Public DeliberationAmerican Journal of Bioethics 23 (12): 85-87. 2023.Scheinerman (2023) proposes that at the Human Genome Editing Initiative international summit (held in March 2023) there should have been a parallel, separate Citizens’ Jury, and that the Human Geno...
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11Childhood vaccine refusal and what to do about it: a systematic review of the ethical literatureBMC Medical Ethics 24 (1): 1-17. 2023.Background Parental refusal of routine childhood vaccination remains an ethically contested area. This systematic review sought to explore and characterise the normative arguments made about parental refusal of routine vaccination, with the aim of providing researchers, practitioners, and policymakers with a synthesis of current normative literature. Methods Nine databases covering health and ethics research were searched, and 121 publications identified for the period Jan 1998 to Mar 2022. For …Read more
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62Background There is a growing concern about artificial intelligence (AI) applications in healthcare that can disadvantage already under-represented and marginalised groups (eg, based on gender or race). Objectives Our objectives are to canvas the range of strategies stakeholders endorse in attempting to mitigate algorithmic bias, and to consider the ethical question of responsibility for algorithmic bias. Methodology The study involves in-depth, semistructured interviews with healthcare workers,…Read more
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47Should Biomedical Publishing Be “Opened Up”? Toward a Values-Based Peer-Review ProcessJournal of Bioethical Inquiry 8 (3): 267-280. 2011.Peer review of manuscripts for biomedical journals has become a subject of intense ethical debate. One of the most contentious issues is whether or not peer review should be anonymous. This study aimed to generate a rich, empirically-grounded understanding of the values held by journal editors and peer reviewers with a view to informing journal policy. Qualitative methods were used to carry out an inductive analysis of biomedical reviewers’ and editors’ values. Data was derived from in-depth, op…Read more
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24Sharing precision medicine data with private industry: Outcomes of a citizens’ jury in SingaporeBig Data and Society 9 (1). 2022.Precision medicine is an emerging approach to treatment and disease prevention that relies on linkages between very large datasets of health information that is shared amongst researchers and health professionals. While studies suggest broad support for sharing precision medicine data with researchers at publicly funded institutions, there is reluctance to share health information with private industry for research and development. As the private sector is likely to play an important role in gen…Read more
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26Reports of new healthcare AI interventions should include systematic ethical evaluationsBioethics 36 (6): 728-730. 2022.Bioethics, Volume 36, Issue 6, Page 728-730, July 2022.
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22Pragmatic pluralism: Mutual tolerance of contested understandings between orthodox and alternative practitioners in autologous stem cell transplantationJournal of Bioethical Inquiry 19 (1): 85-96. 2022.High-dose chemotherapy and autologous stem cell transplantation is used to treat some advanced malignancies. It is a traumatic procedure, with a high complication rate and significant mortality. ASCT patients and their carers draw on many sources of information as they seek to understand the procedure and its consequences. Some seek information from beyond orthodox medicine. Alternative beliefs and practices may conflict with conventional understanding of the theory and practice of ASCT, and ‘co…Read more
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73Ethical Guidance for Hard Decisions: A Critical Review of Early International COVID-19 ICU Triage GuidelinesHealth Care Analysis 30 (2): 163-195. 2022.This article provides a critical comparative analysis of the substantive and procedural values and ethical concepts articulated in guidelines for allocating scarce resources in the COVID-19 pandemic. We identified 21 local and national guidelines written in English, Spanish, German and French; applicable to specific and identifiable jurisdictions; and providing guidance to clinicians for decision making when allocating critical care resources during the COVID-19 pandemic. US guidelines were not …Read more
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40Bioethics, Volume 35, Issue 7, Page 623-633, September 2021.
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17Methodological challenges in deliberative empirical ethicsJournal of Medical Ethics 46 (6): 382-383. 2020.The empirical turn in bioethics and the deliberative turn in democracy theory occurred at around the same time, one at the intersection of bioethics and social science,1 2 the other at the intersection of political philosophy and political science.3–5 Empirical bioethics and deliberative democratic approaches both engage with immediate problems in policy and practice with normative intent, so it was perhaps inevitable that they would eventually find one another,6–8 and that deliberative research…Read more
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33Community perspectives on the benefits and risks of technologically enhanced communicable disease surveillance systems: a report on four community juriesBMC Medical Ethics 21 (1): 1-14. 2020.Background Outbreaks of infectious disease cause serious and costly health and social problems. Two new technologies – pathogen whole genome sequencing and Big Data analytics – promise to improve our capacity to detect and control outbreaks earlier, saving lives and resources. However, routinely using these technologies to capture more detailed and specific personal information could be perceived as intrusive and a threat to privacy. Method Four community juries were convened in two demographica…Read more
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14Debating diversity: a commentary on Standards of practice in empirical bioethics researchBMC Medical Ethics 19 (1): 67. 2018.This article provides a commentary on Standards of practice in empirical bioethics research by Ives and colleagues. There is much to admire in the paper, and in the demanding consensus-building process on which it reports. I discuss the problems and limits of methodological standardisation, and a central conceptual tension that appears to have divided participants. I suggest that the finished product should be understood as a record of a methodological conversation, rather than being used as a d…Read more
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30A definition and ethical evaluation of overdiagnosisJournal of Medical Ethics 42 (11): 705-714. 2016.
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31Valuing Healthcare Improvement: Implicit Norms, Explicit Normativity, and Human AgencyHealth Care Analysis 26 (2): 189-205. 2018.I argue that greater attention to human agency and normativity in both researching and practicing service improvement may be one strategy for enhancing improvement science, illustrating with examples from cancer screening. Improvement science tends to deliberately avoid explicit normativity, for paradigmatically coherent reasons. But there are good reasons to consider including explicit normativity in thinking about improvement. Values and moral judgements are central to social life, so an adequ…Read more
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20This article draws on an empirical investigation of how Australia’s cervical screening program came to be the way it is. The study was carried out using grounded theory methodology and primarily uses interviews with experts involved in establishing, updating or administering the program. We found strong differences in experts’ normative evaluations of the program and beliefs about optimal ways of achieving the same basic outcome: a reduction in morbidity and mortality caused by invasive cervical…Read more
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51A Public Health Ethics Approach to Non-Communicable DiseasesJournal of Bioethical Inquiry 10 (1): 17-18. 2013.
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56The “EBM Movement”: Where Did it Come From, Where is it Going, and Why Does it Matter?Social Epistemology 22 (4): 425-431. 2008.Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) has now been part of the dominant medical paradigm for 15 years, and has been frequently debated and progressively modified. One question about EBM that has not yet been considered systematically, and is now particularly timely, is the question of the novelty, or otherwise, of the principles and practices of EBM. We argue that answering this question, and the related question of whether EBM-type principles and practices are unique to medicine, sheds new light on EBM…Read more
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33Beware Dichotomies and Grand Abstractions: Attending to Particularity and Practice in Empirical BioethicsAmerican Journal of Bioethics 9 (6-7): 76-77. 2009.No abstract
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38The Role of Socially Embedded Concepts in Breast Cancer Screening: An Empirical Study with Australian ExpertsPublic Health Ethics 9 (3): 276-289. 2016.It is not clear whether breast cancer screening is a public health intervention or an individual clinical service. The question is important because the concepts best suited for ethical reasoning in public health might be different to the concepts commonly employed in biomedical ethics. We consider it likely that breast screening has elements of a public health intervention and used an empirical ethics approach to explore this further. If breast screening has public health characteristics, it is…Read more
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56Shared Health Governance: The Potential Danger of Oppressive “Healthism”American Journal of Bioethics 11 (7). 2011.The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 11, Issue 7, Page 57-59, July 2011
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27BackgroundCervical cancer disproportionately burdens disadvantaged women. Organised cervical screening aims to make cancer prevention available to all women in a population, yet screening uptake and cancer incidence and mortality are strongly correlated with socioeconomic status. Reaching underscreened populations is a stated priority in many screening programs, usually with an emphasis on something like ‘equity’. Equity is a poorly defined and understood concept. We aimed to explain experts’ pe…Read more
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33A definition and ethical evaluation of overdiagnosis: response to commentariesJournal of Medical Ethics 42 (11): 722-724. 2016.Overdiagnosis is an emerging problem in health policy and practice: we address its definition and ethical implications. We argue that the definition of overdiagnosis should be expressed at the level of populations. Consider a condition prevalent in a population, customarily labelled with diagnosis A. We propose that overdiagnosis is occurring in respect of that condition in that population when the condition is being identified and labelled with diagnosis A in that population ; this identificati…Read more
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19The Ethics of Menu LabellingPublic Health Ethics 8 (1): 94-97. 2015.In this commentary, I explore the ethically relevant dimensions of menu labelling. The evidence that menu labelling changes purchasing or consumption behaviour is contentious and inconclusive; there is some suggestion that menu labelling may preferentially influence the behaviour of healthier and wealthier citizens. Some suggest that menu labelling is unjust, as it fails to direct resources towards those who most need them. An alternative is to see menu labels as just one of a set of strategies …Read more
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University of SydneyRegular Faculty
Areas of Interest
Applied Ethics |
Philosophy of Social Science |