02/16/2021
Vaccine Distribution and Racial Equity
Most Americans know that African-Americans have a significantly lower life expectancy than White Americans. Most of us don’t think through the implications of that disparity. For example, all working people pay into Social Security, but African-Americans are less likely to live long enough to collect it. In this op-ed, published today in the Allentown, PA … Continue reading Vaccine Distribution and Racial Equity
10/11/2020
The Plug
The Plug is a brief video created by Marije de Haas. De Haas and her collaborators call this “design fiction.” The context is European, where euthanasia is legal in some countries, but where advance directives for euthanasia in the case of dementia are rarely honored. The idea is that the plug is kind of a … Continue reading The Plug
Yeah, I know I said in an earlier post that we spend way too much time obsessing about ventilator triage–something that has never happened in America so far–and not enough time obsessing about why our health care system is so broken. Nonetheless, with my friend Felicia Nimue Ackerman, a philosopher at Brown University, I made … Continue reading Should Age be a Criterion for Triage during the Pandemic?
07/09/2020
Coronavirus Contact Tracing
For three years during the 1960s, I worked for various organizations, all of us trying to end the War in Vietnam. At one point, I was employed by the Fifth Avenue Peace Parade Committee, while my boyfriend worked for the Student Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam (affectionately known as “The Mobe”). Both of … Continue reading Coronavirus Contact Tracing
06/28/2020
Running to Tarshish
The New York Times corroborated something I have long thought to be true: no one who has suffered from the novel coronavirus in America has been denied a respirator due to scarcity. That being said, why has so much energy and rhetoric been spent on the topic of ventilator triage? Ventilator scarcity and the looming … Continue reading Running to Tarshish
04/29/2020
No ventilator, not for me!
We are all obsessed with ventilators. The Covid-19 pandemic has created an extraordinary focus on the availability of ventilators. Ventilators seem to feature in every one of New York State Governor Cuomo’s daily briefings. The Governor of California kindly shipped some ventilators to New York, but faced backlash among some of his own constituents, … Continue reading No ventilator, not for me!
07/27/2019
Other Stuff: A child’s right to an education
Some NYC ultra-Orthodox yeshivas provide little or no secular education to their boys, who leave school illiterate in English and with third-grade math skills. They have never heard of the American Revolution, written an essay, or entered a science fair. They cannot pass the GED and are virtually unemployable outside of their community. Some of … Continue reading Other Stuff: A child’s right to an education
07/26/2019
Avoiding Dementia, Causing Moral Distress
In “Avoiding Deep Dementia,” an essay in the September/October 2018 issue of the Hastings Center Report, legal scholar Norman Cantor explains why he has an advance directive that calls for voluntary stopping of eating and drinking as a means of ending his life if he develops dementia and reaches a particular state of decline. Cantor’s essay and three … Continue reading Avoiding Dementia, Causing Moral Distress
03/24/2018
Sign up to be a research subject
A special issue of IRB: Ethics & Human Research (March-April 2018) is all about “Listening to the Voices of Research Participants.” The main argument for making participants into something more like true “partners,” is that experienced research subjects have a lot to teach researchers. Rebecca Dresser points out that many developments in political science and … Continue reading Sign up to be a research subject
03/13/2018
Being Poor is a Full-time Job
A new article in The Hastings Center Report, by Nir Eyal, Paul Romain, and Christopher Robertson, asks whether it is ethical to ration healthcare by inconvenience and red tape? In other words, given that all societies must ration health care in one way or another, is it ever ethical to push people away from an … Continue reading Being Poor is a Full-time Job
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