Philosophy Commons^™

What Do We Owe The Other Animals In Health-Related Research?, Jessica A. Du Toit

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In this dissertation, I provide an account of the protections to which most captive non-human animals are morally entitled when they participate in health-related research. At least in the animal ethics literature, it is uncontroversial that the protections currently afforded to captive research animals are inadequate. This has much to do with the fact that most animals who serve as research participants are 1) sentient and, thus, have important morally considerable interests; 2) unable to provide informed consent to their research participation; and 3) seriously harmed as a result of their participation.

Unsurprisingly, then, a number of authors have proposed …

Heightened Technology In The Care Of Type 1 Diabetes: An Ethical Symbiosis?, Susanna Larsen

OUR Journal: ODU Undergraduate Research Journal

This paper explores the common negative consequences and ethical issues associated with the evolving medical technology used in the care of Type 1 diabetes. In this paper, I will discuss the ethical impacts of technology on diabetic youth: their view of self, their mechanical requirements, and their health priorities. In order to define the scope of the issues, I will use the following intellectual tools: feminist theory, care ethics, and philosophical discussions of control. This paper will also outline some possible solutions to these ethical issues.

Dementia And The Fragility Of Self: Navigating Ethical Considerations In Medical Decision-Making, Grace Sauers

Scripps Senior Theses

As the global population ages, the incidence of degenerative memory disorders such as Alzheimer's and dementia is expected to rise. The frequency of complex medical decision-making challenges for these patients will subsequently increase. It is now common practice for patients to provide advance directives outlining the care they wish to receive; in the case they are deemed incompetent to perform adequate decision making. However, patients with dementia occasionally express wishes contrary to those stated in their advance directives. This divergence creates ambiguity about which wishes should be honored and for who those wishes are being honored for. I aim to …

Public Goods From Private Data: An Effectiveness And Justification Dilemma For Digital Contact Tracing, Andrew Buzzell

The Journal of Sociotechnical Critique

Debate about the adoption of digital contact tracing (DCT) apps to control the spread of COVID-19 has focussed on risks to individual privacy. This emphasis reveals significant challenges to ethical deployment of DCT, but generates constraints which undermine justification to implement DCT. It would be a mistake to view this result solely as the successful operation of ethical foresight analysis, preventing deployment of potentially harmful technology. Privacy-centric analysis treats data as private property, frames the relationship between individuals and governments as adversarial, entrenches technology platforms as gatekeepers, and supports a conception of emergency public health authority as limited by individual …

Righting Health Policy: Bioethics, Political Philosophy, And The Normative Justification Of Health Law And Policy, D. Robert Macdougall

Publications and Research

In Righting Health Policy, D. Robert MacDougall argues that bioethics needs but does not have adequate tools for justifying law and policy. Bioethics’ tools are mostly theories about what we owe each other. But justifying laws and policies requires more; at a minimum, it requires tools for explaining the legitimacy of actions intended to control or influence others. It consequently requires political, rather than moral, philosophy. After showing how bioethicists have consistently failed to use tools suitable for achieving their political aims, MacDougall develops an interpretation of Kant’s political philosophy. On this account the legitimacy of health laws does …

Medical Expertise, Patient Expertise, And Surrogate Decision Making: The Importance Of Co-Deliberation In Medical Decision-Making, Lindsey Grossheim

Theses

In biomedicine, there are many cases where a patient is incapacitated and unable to make their medical decisions. Often, these patients have no declared decision-maker. This thesis explores solutions which promote these patients’ ability to receive beneficent care and have a respect for their autonomy by proposing a requirement for co-deliberation between a medical professional (medical expert) and someone who knows the patient well (patient expert). This thesis studies a case and applies three solutions: one where each expert has full authority and a final solution where the two experts co-deliberate. Co-deliberation is a conversation between the two experts to …

Autonomy, Paternalism, And The Moral Foundations Of The Fiduciary Relationship, Austin Horn

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The fiduciary relationship is a legal relationship that describes those interactions in which one party is entrusted to exercise discretionary power on behalf of another’s interests. In recent years, the fiduciary relationship proven to be a powerful tool for providing clarity to complex bioethical issues. But the exciting promise of the fiduciary relationship for bioethical analysis is threatened by at least two conceptual problems: moral-legal equivocation and paternalism. Legal-moral equivocation refers to the problem of assuming that the normative demands of a legal relationship are also morally normative. The cogent use of the fiduciary relationship in bioethical analysis requires …

Diagnostic Justice: Testing For Covid-19, Ashley Graham Kennedy, Bryan Cwik

Philosophy Faculty Publications and Presentations

Diagnostic testing can be used for many purposes, including testing to facilitate the clinical care of individual patients, testing as an inclusion criterion for clinical trial participation, and both passive and active surveillance testing of the general population in order to facilitate public health outcomes, such as the containment or mitigation of an infectious disease. As such, diagnostic testing presents us with ethical questions that are, in part, already addressed in the literature on clinical care as well as clinical research (such as the rights of patients to refuse testing or treatment in the clinical setting or the rights of …

S3e5: How Can Philosophy Help Deliver The Best Medical Care?, Ron Lisnet, Jessica Miller

The Maine Question

Some may imagine that people who major in and pursue careers in philosophy are relegated to poring through old dusty books about Plato and Socrates. In reality, philosophy majors work in all kinds of fields, including the legal profession and entertainment. One place you might not expect to find a philosopher is in the hospital helping to make decisions about medical care, but that is what bioethicists do. Jessica Miller, a professor of philosophy at UMaine, also is a bioethicist. She uses her expertise to help medical professionals make decisions about care. We speak with Miller about bioethics and how …

Immunotherapy: Therapy Vs. Enhancement, Mariah Daly

Honors Program Theses

The battle against cancer is a long-standing struggle that has resulted in new information and the development of novel medical technologies. Current research aims to figure out a way to reprogram cells and bodily mechanisms to eliminate those cells that are cancerous without destroying healthy cells in the process. Methods which use the body’s own mechanisms, such as immunotherapy, have shown and continue to show potential for specifically targeting cancer cells. Adoptive T cell therapy is one form of immunotherapy that has gained significant attention and focus in the field. Therapies improve conditions up to the normal state of being, …

Normative Pragmatic Selfhood: A Pragmatist Conception Of Value For Marginal Cases, Sam Noel Johnson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

I develop a theory of personal ontology called normative pragmatic selfhood (NPS) to explain what persons are and how they are morally valuable. I also demonstrate the applicability of NPS theory by using it to assess the moral status of marginal cases in bioethical dilemmas. I begin by discussing the concept of intrinsic value and why it is problematic when it comes to persons. I then draw upon John Dewey’s theory of value, specifically the concept of growth, and Kant’s concept of humanity to show that persons are objectively yet extrinsically valuable. Next, I discuss and argue how the psychological …

Moving Beyond ‘Therapy’ And ‘Enhancement’ In The Ethics Of Gene Editing, Bryan Cwik

Philosophy Faculty Publications and Presentations

Since the advent of recombinant DNA technology, expectations (and trepidations) about the potential for altering genes and controlling our biology at the fundamental level have been sky high. These expectations have gone largely unfulfilled. But though the dream (or nightmare) of being able to control our biology is still far off, gene editing research has made enormous strides toward potential clinical use. This paper argues that when it comes to determining permissible uses of gene editing in one important medical context—germline intervention in reproductive medicine—issues about enhancement and eugenics are, for the foreseeable future, a red herring. Current translational goals …

Legal Personhood For Artificial Intelligence, Tyler Jaynes

Tyler Jaynes

Epistemic Injustice And Suicidality, Sam Lilly

Honors Program Theses

This paper extends both Miranda Fricker's framework regarding epistemic injustice, found in her book 'Epistemic Injustice, as well as Ian James Kidd and Havi Carel's essay "Epistemic Injustice and Illness" to a small population of people who identify internally with the desire to kill oneself i.e. suicidality. I argue that a certain population of suicidal people are especially vulnerable targets of epistemic injustice.

Is It Ethical To Genetically Enhance Your Future Child?, Bella Ratner

Scripps Senior Theses

As the science related to genetic engineering becomes more advanced, more and more ethical questions relating to technologies such as CRISPR and preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) arise. If we have the opportunity to choose the genes of our future children in order have children with our desired characteristics, should we do so? Is it okay to mess with some genes of your future child and not others? In this paper, I discuss arguments and objections associated with these questions. The aim of this paper is to show that it is ethical to alter the DNA of your future child or …

The Search For Microbial Martian Life And American Buddhist Ethics, Daniel S. Capper

Faculty Publications

Multiple searches hunt for extraterrestrial life, yet the ethics of such searches in terms of fossil and possible extant life on Mars have not been sufficiently delineated. In response, in this essay I propose a tripartite ethic for searches for microbial Martian life that consists of default nonharm toward potential living beings, default nonharm to the habitats of potential living beings, but also responsible, restrained scientific harvesting of some microbes in limited transgression of these default nonharm modes. Although this multifaceted ethic remains secular and hence adaptable to space research settings, it arises from both a qualitative analysis of authoritative …