By Brianne Helfrich and Mariah Chobany Netflix just announced that they will be re-creating the Stanford Prison Experiment as a reality tv show (titled The New Stanford Prison Experiment) airing this October. The six 45-minute episode series involve 30 participants, and this news has sparked online viral debate and disbelief with many expressing strong concerns […]
Category: Ethics
Three moral logics in responding to adverse events in healthcare
By Laura Hartman Unintended and unwanted outcomes are an inevitable part of healthcare. When something goes wrong, organisations face difficult questions: How should they respond? How can they do justice to those involved? And how can they improve care while maintaining trust? In our recent paper, we develop a conceptual framework that distinguishes three moral […]
Should patients have a say in the authorisation of animal experiments?
By David Azilagbetor Animal experiments are often justified by their potential benefits for patients. They are performed to understand diseases, test possible treatments, and generate knowledge that may eventually improve human health. Yet, when decisions are made about whether animal experiments should be ethically approved, patients themselves are rarely present in the room. This was […]
Listening to women: Epistemic injustice and the Ockenden Report
By Noemi Magnani The Ockenden Report, published on 24 June 2026 following the largest maternity inquiry in NHS history, reveals something significant about what it means to be heard–or not heard–in healthcare. The current maternity crisis is not only a clinical crisis. It is also an epistemic one. The problem identified by the report is […]
Why do we accept harm in sport?
By Jennifer Hardes Dvorak I stepped into a Taekwondo dojang the year I moved to Canada to pursue my PhD studies. As an international student, I was new to the country without any family or friends, and what began as a means of staying active and finding my place in a community soon became a core part of my everyday life. The dojang became my home from home – […]
Computer programs for moral advice
By Lars Lindblom and Erik Gustavsson AI is coming to health care. But what is AI? Ethem Alpaydin’s excellent Machine Learning: The New AI provides a helpful definition: Programing computers to do things, which, if done by humans, would be said to require “intelligence”. This definition captures something important about how to conceive of AI […]
When harm reduction becomes hope: An ethics consult in pediatric innovation
By Alex Gariti Clinical ethics consultation lives at the intersection of medicine and moral uncertainty. It is where abstract principles meet real families, real risks, and real consequences. Sometimes the work is quiet. Sometimes it is wrenching. And sometimes, it is astonishing. Recently, we published a case about a 9-month-old infant with cystic fibrosis (CF) […]
We’re angry at MrBeast for being honest
By Michał Białek MrBeast posted a video paying for 1,000 cataract surgeries, and people got their sight back. Another time he funded 100 wells in Africa, and people got access to clean water. Yet many people got somehow angry with this. “He’s exploiting vulnerable people,” some said. “He’s making money from suffering,” others argued. “It’s […]
Testing AI in real-world medical ethics
By Daniel Sokol This post adds to the literature on AI in medical ethics by testing how freely available AI models perform when presented with realistic ethical scenarios relevant to clinical practice. In May 2025, I wrote a blog about ChatGPT’s performance in an ‘honesty test’ for clinicians. It scored an impressive 43/44, outperforming the […]
When embryo-likeness has moral consequences
By Dr. Johnny Sakr Everyone agrees that stem cell–derived embryo models are not embryos. The harder question is whether that biological distinction is doing more ethical work than it can plausibly bear. In my recent response in the Journal of Medical Ethics, I argue that much of the disagreement about embryo models turns on a […]