By Soogeun S Lee. In 2018, the UK government published a Code of Conduct, hereafter the Code, for using artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in the NHS. The Code contains ten principles that outline a gold-standard of ethical conduct of AI developers and implementers within the NHS. Considering the importance of trust in traditional medical practice, […]
Latest articles
Who should get to choose their surrogates?
By Mark Christopher Navin, Jason Adam Wasserman, Devan Stahl, and Tom Tomlinson, Clinical ethics consultants regularly witness something like the following progression: A patient is determined to lack decision-making capacity (DMC). In the absence of an Advanced Care Planning document that names a surrogate decision maker (e.g. a Durable Power of Attorney for Health Care), […]
Discrimination on the basis of vaccination status (is inherently wrong)
By Michael Kowalik. The worldwide spread of SARS-CoV-2 has re-invigorated the debate about the ethical permissibility of vaccine mandates and immunity certification. Public attitudes towards this complex issue are nevertheless dominated by fear, half-truths and ungrounded value-judgements, limiting the scope of rational deliberation in favour of ideological partisanship. My paper, ‘Ethics of Vaccine Refusal’, is […]
Self-experimentation with vaccines
By Jonathan Pugh, Dominic Wilkinson and Julian Savulescu. A group of citizen scientists has launched a non-profit, non-commercial organisation named ‘RaDVaC’, which aims to rapidly develop, produce, and self-administer an intranasally delivered COVID-19 vaccine. As an open source project, a white paper detailing RaDVaC’s vaccine rationale, design, materials, protocols, and testing is freely available online. […]
Should trans girl Ellie Anderson be allowed to have children posthumously?
By Joona Räsänen Ellie Anderson died at the age of 16. Ellie’s unexpected death left her mother, Louise, grappling not only with the grief of losing her child but with a complex problem. Ellie wanted to have children – there is nothing unusual in such a desire. However, Ellie’s case is challenging in many ways. […]
Is there only one Mental Capacity Act – or are there two?
By Mike Stone I repeatedly come across, in guidance and protocols written by clinicians and clinical bodies, the claim or implication that 999 paramedics make ‘THE decision’ about CPR. And that relatives and family-carers, merely contribute to the decision-making of paramedics. I must ask: where does that belief, come from? Imagine a relative and a […]
In defence of social egg freezing
By Thomas Søbirk Petersen. In my latest JME article I defend social egg-freezing. Social egg freezing (or ‘non-medical egg freezing’) is, roughly speaking, the process whereby healthy women freeze their eggs to preserve their future fertility for reasons that have nothing directly to do with medical issues. However, some feminist bioethicists worry that women’s legal […]
How to ethically conduct research with Black populations at the intersection of COVID-19 and Black lives matter
By Natasha Crooks, Geri Donenberg, Alicia Matthews. For months now, we have been asking ourselves if it is appropriate to engage populations in research who are disproportionately impacted by COVID-19 and continuously being murdered by institutions (i.e., government, police, hospitals) that are supposed to be protecting them. The current societal context suggests Black lives are […]
Who’s responsible for informing relatives about genetic risk?
By Kalle Grill and Anna Rosén. It is established practice in many countries that healthcare professionals encourage patients to share relevant risk information with genetic relatives. We mostly endorse this practice but question a normative assumption that typically underpins it. Both practitioners and academics in the field are in general agreement that: It is desirable […]
Dialyzing the discourse: a response to Rohrig and Manheim
By Hayden P. Nix and Charles Weijer In a recent blog post, we sought to answer the narrow question: is altruistic kidney donation sufficiently analogous to participation in a SARS-CoV-2 challenge study to justify the risks of SARS-CoV-2 challenge studies? We argued that three morally relevant differences (the risk of adverse effects, the availability of […]