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 – […]
Category: Ethics
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 […]
Ethics is the key to demographic change
By J.Y. Lee In the Global North, the fact that aging populations are increasing while birth rates are decreasing has become a point of great alarm in recent years. The average total fertility rate (TFR) across the globe stands at 2.3 births per woman today, compared to 4.9 back in 1950. However, some countries are […]
Mind the anticipatory gap: factoring future moral change into the governance of human genome editing
By John Danaher. Human genome editing is a potentially transformative emerging technology. Current clinical trials of CRISPR, for example, suggest it can be used as a therapeutic to treat a wide range of hereditary and acquired diseases. More speculatively, it could also be used as an enhancer, improving the capacities of generally normal or healthy […]