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26Coordination and expertise foster legal textualismProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 119 (44). 2022.A cross-cultural survey experiment revealed a dominant tendency to rely on a rule’s letter over its spirit when deciding which behaviors violate the rule. This tendency varied markedly across (k = 15) countries, owing to variation in the impact of moral appraisals on judgments of rule violation. Compared with laypeople, legal experts were more inclined to disregard their moral evaluations of the acts altogether and consequently exhibited stronger textualist tendencies. Finally, we evaluated a pl…Read more
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341Conscientious Objection in Healthcare: The Requirement of Justification, the Moral Threshold, and Military RefusalsJournal of Religious Ethics 52 (1): 133-155. 2023.A dogma accepted in many ethical, religious, and legal frameworks is that the reasons behind conscientious objection (CO) in healthcare cannot be evaluated or judged by any institution because conscience is individual and autonomous. This paper shows that this background view is mistaken: the requirement to reveal and explain the reasons for conscientious objection in healthcare is ethically justified and legally desirable. Referring to real healthcare cases and legal regulations, this paper arg…Read more
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306Rational framing effects and morally valid reasonsBehavioral and Brain Sciences 247 (45). 2022.I argue that the scope of rational framing effects may be broader than Bermúdez assumes. Even in many “canonical experiments,” the explanation of the judgment reversals or shifts may refer to reasons, including moral ones. Referring to the Asian disease paradigm (ADP), I describe how non-consequentialist reasons related to fairness and the distinction between doing and allowing may help explain and justify the typical pattern of choices in the cases like ADP.
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205Value choices in European COVID-19 vaccination schedules: how vaccination prioritization differs from other forms of priority settingJournal of Law and the Biosciences 9 (2). 2022.With the limited initial availability of COVID-19 vaccines in the first months of 2021, decision-makers had to determine the order in which different groups were prioritized. Our aim was to find out what normative approaches to the allocation of scarce preventive resources were embedded in the national COVID-19 vaccination schedules. We systematically reviewed and compared prioritization regulations in 27 members of the European Union, the United Kingdom, and Israel. We differentiated between tw…Read more
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Coordination and expertise foster legal textualismProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119 (44). 2022.A cross-cultural survey experiment revealed a widespread tendency to rely on a rule’s letter over its spirit when deciding which acts violate the rule. This tendency’s strength varied markedly across (k = 15) field sites, owing to cultural variation in the impact of moral appraisals on judgments of rule violation. Compared to laypeople, legal experts were more inclined to disregard their moral evaluations of the acts altogether, and consequently exhibited more pronounced textualist tendencies. F…Read more
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313Reductionist methodology and the ambiguity of the categories of race and ethnicity in biomedical research: an exploratory study of recent evidenceMedicine, Health Care and Philosophy (1): 1-14. 2022.In this article, we analyse how researchers use the categories of race and ethnicity with reference to genetics and genomics. We show that there is still considerable conceptual “messiness” (despite the wide-ranging and popular debate on the subject) when it comes to the use of ethnoracial categories in genetics and genomics that among other things makes it difficult to properly compare and interpret research using ethnoracial categories, as well as draw conclusions from them. Finally, we briefl…Read more
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398Towards the multileveled and processual conceptualisation of racialised individuals in biomedical researchSynthese 201 (1): 1-36. 2023.In this paper, we discuss the processes of racialisation on the example of biomedical research. We argue that applying the concept of racialisation in biomedical research can be much more precise, informative and suitable than currently used categories, such as race and ethnicity. For this purpose, we construct a model of the different processes affecting and co-shaping the racialisation of an individual, and consider these in relation to biomedical research, particularly to studies on hypertens…Read more
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373The Disconnection That Wasn’t: Philosophy in Modern Bioethics from a Quantitative PerspectiveAmerican Journal of Bioethics 22 (12): 36-40. 2022.Blumenthal-Barby and her colleagues (2022) situate their discussion of philosophy and bioethics in the context of (reportedly) widely held assumption that, when compared to the early days of bioethics, the role of philosophy is now diminished across the field – the assumption we call the Disconnection Thesis. This assumption can be summarized, to use the authors’ own words, by the phrase “philosophy’s glory days in bioethics are over“. While in no place of the article they explicitly endorse the…Read more
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677Half a century of bioethics and philosophy of medicine: A topic‐modeling studyBioethics 36 (9): 902-925. 2022.Topic modeling—a text‐mining technique often used to uncover thematic structures in large collections of texts—has been increasingly frequently used in the context of the analysis of scholarly output. In this study, we construct a corpus of 19,488 texts published since 1971 in seven leading journals in the field of bioethics and philosophy of medicine, and we use a machine learning algorithm to identify almost 100 topics representing distinct themes of interest in the field. On the basis of inte…Read more
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558Reasons to Genome Edit and Metaphysical Essentialism about Human IdentityAmerican Journal of Bioethics 22 (9): 34-36. 2022.In this commentary paper, we are taking one step further in questioning the central assumptions in the bioethical debates about reproductive technologies. We argue that the very distinction between “person affecting” and “identity affecting” interventions is based on a questionable form of material-origin essentialism. Questioning of this form of essentialist approach to human identity allows treating genome editing and genetic selection as more similar than they are taken to be in the standard …Read more
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290Against the Precautionary Approach to Moral Status: The Case of Surrogates for Living Human BrainsAmerican Journal of Bioethics 21 (1): 53-56. 2021.My paper builds on the conceptual tools from three interrelated philosophical debates that—as I believe—may help structure important if chaotic discussions about surrogates for living human brains and resolve some practical issues related to regulatory matters. In particular, I refer to the discussions about the “moral precautionary principle” in research ethics (Koplin and Wilkinson 2019); about normative uncertainty in ethics (MacAskill, Bykvist, and Ord 2020), and about the inductive risk pro…Read more
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14A Data-Driven Argument in Bioethics: Why Theologically Grounded Concepts May Not Provide the Necessary Intellectual Resources to Discuss Inequality and Injustice in Healthcare ContextsAmerican Journal of Bioethics 20 (12): 25-28. 2020.In this paper, we use an innovative, empirical, and–as yet–rarely applied method in bioethics, namely corpus analysis, which is commonly used in literature studies (Moretti 2013), linguistics (Bake...
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330Non-Epistemological Values in Collaborative Research in Neuroscience: The Case of Alleged Differences Between Human PopulationsAmerican Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 11 (3): 203-206. 2020.The goals and tasks of neuroethics formulated by Farahany and Ramos (2020) link epistemological and methodological issues with ethical and social values. The authors refer simultaneously to the social significance and scientific reliability of the BRAIN Initiative. They openly argue that neuroethics should not only examine neuroscientific research in terms of “a rigorous, reproducible, and representative neuroscience research process” as well as “explore the unique nature of the study of the hum…Read more
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338The Normative Significance of Empirical Moral PsychologyDiametros 17 (64): 1-5. 2020.Many psychologists have tried to reveal the formation and processing of moral judgments by using a variety of empirical methods: behavioral data, tests of statistical significance, and brain imaging. Meanwhile, some scholars maintain that the new empirical findings of the ways we make moral judgments question the trustworthiness and authority of many intuitive ethical responses. The aim of this special issue is to encourage scholars to rethink how, if at all, it is possible to draw any normative…Read more
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279Decyzje w sytuacjach niepewności normatywnejPrzeglad Filozoficzny - Nowa Seria 29 (2): 53-72. 2020.Etycy nie poświęcali dotąd wiele uwagi niepewności, koncentrując się często na skrajnie wyidealizowanych hipotetycznych sytuacjach, w których zarówno kwestie empiryczne (np. stan świata, spektrum możliwych decyzji oraz ich konsekwencje, związki przyczynowe między zdarzeniami), jak i normatywne (np. treść norm, skale wartości) były jasno określone i znane podmiotowi. W poniższym artykule – który jest rezultatem projektu dotyczącego różnych typów decyzji w sytuacjach niepewności związanej z postęp…Read more
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22Własność jako konwencjaDiametros 15 102-110. 2008.Recenzja książki: Liam Murphy, Thomas Nagel, The Myth of Ownership. Taxes and Justice, Oxford University Press, Oxford – New York 2002.
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Charles Taylor, Źródła podmiotowości. Narodziny tożsamości nowoczesnejPrincipia 34. 2003.Recenzja książki Charlesa Taylora, Źródła podmiotowości. Narodziny tożsamości nowoczesnej.
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189Ethics and Uncertainty: The Guest Editor’s IntroductionDiametros 53 1-5. 2017.Until very recently, normative theorizing in ethics was frequently conducted without even mentioning uncertainty. Just a few years ago, Sven Ove Hansson described this state of affairs with the slogan: “Ethics still lives in a Newtonian world.” In the new Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Probability, David McCarthy writes that “mainstream moral philosophy has not been much concerned with probability,” understanding probability as “the best-known tool for thinking about uncertainty.” This specia…Read more
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301The Fifth Face of Fair Subject Selection: Population GroupingAmerican Journal of Bioethics 20 (2): 41-43. 2020.The article by MacKay and Saylor (2020) claims that the principle of fair subject selection yields conflicting imperatives (e.g. in the case of pregnant women) and should be understood as “a bundle of four distinct sub-principles” (i.e. fair inclusion, burden sharing, opportunity, distribution of third-party risks), each having conflicting normative recommendations (MacKay and Saylor 2020). The authors also offer guidance as to how we should navigate between subprinciples that may conflict with …Read more
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415Deep Uncertainties in the Criteria for Physician Aid-in-Dying for Psychiatric PatientsAmerican Journal of Bioethics 19 (10): 54-56. 2019.In their insightful article, Brent Kious and Margaret Battin (2019) correctly identify an inconsistency between an involuntary psychiatric commitment for suicide prevention and physician aid in dying (PAD). They declare that it may be possible to resolve the problem by articulating “objective standards for evaluating the severity of others’ suffering,” but ultimately they admit that this task is beyond the scope of their article since the solution depends on “a deep and difficult” question about…Read more
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273Racje wewnętrzne i zewnętrzneRoczniki Filozoficzne 67 (1): 231-246. 2019.Artykuł, opublikowany po raz pierwszy w 1979 r., jest jednym z najczęściej cytowanych tekstów filozoficznych z drugiej połowy XX wieku. Tekst Bernarda Williamsa zainicjował kilka ważnych debat, toczących się do dziś w etyce i filozofii działania. Zaproponowana przez niego interpretacja pojęcia racji działania jest, z jednej strony, niezwykle wpływowa, ale z drugiej bardzo niejednoznaczna i często krytykowana. Williams broni stanowiska, które z czasem zaczęto określać jako internalizm racji: pewn…Read more
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435Withdrawal Aversion as a Useful Heuristic for Critical Care DecisionsAmerican Journal of Bioethics 19 (3): 36-38. 2019.While agreeing with the main conclusion of Dominic Wilkinson and colleagues (Wilkinson, Butcherine, and Savulescu 2019), namely, that there is no moral difference between treatment withholding and withdrawal as such, we wish to criticize their approach on the basis that it treats the widespread acceptance of withdrawal aversion (WA) as a cognitive bias. Wilkinson and colleagues understand WA as “a nonrational preference for withholding (WH) treatment over withdrawal (WD) of treatment” (22). They…Read more
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390The normative significance of identifiabilityEthics and Information Technology 21 (4): 295-305. 2019.According to psychological research, people are more eager to help identified individuals than unidentified ones. This phenomenon significantly influences many important decisions, both individual and public, regarding, for example, vaccinations or the distribution of healthcare resources. This paper aims at presenting definitions of various levels of identifiability as well as a critical analysis of the main philosophical arguments regarding the normative significance of the identifiability eff…Read more
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465Conscientious Refusal of Abortion in Emergency Life-Threatening Circumstances and Contested Judgments of ConscienceAmerican Journal of Bioethics 18 (7): 62-64. 2018.Lawrence Nelson (2018) criticizes conscientious objection (CO) to abortion statutes as far as they permit health care providers to escape criminal liability for what would otherwise be the legally wrongful taking of a pregnant woman’s life by refusing treatment (i.e. abortion). His key argument refers to the U.S. Supreme Court judgment (Roe v. Wade 1973) that does not treat the unborn as constitutional persons under the Fourteenth Amendment. Therefore, Nelson claims that within the U.S. legal s…Read more
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424The Saving/Creating Distinction and the Axiology of the Cost–Benefit Approach to Neonatal MedicineAmerican Journal of Bioethics 17 (8): 29-31. 2017.The aim of this commentary is to discuss the axiology of the cost–benefit approach assumed by Travis Rieder (2017) to analyze medical decision making in the case of extremely preterm infants.
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222Normatywne implikacje preferencji wobec osób zidentyfikowanychDiametros 51 113-136. 2017.The results of empirical research show that people prefer to help identified individuals rather than unidentified ones. This preference has an important influence on many private and public decisions, for example concerning vaccination or the distribution of healthcare resources. The aim of this article is to define the terms: “identified”, “unidentified”, “statistical”, and then to analyze three philosophical arguments concerning the normative implications of this preference: 1) contractualism …Read more
Kraków, małopolskie, Poland
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