Keisha Ray, Ph.D.

Recently the term black bioethics has been having its moment. With the world’s recently increased attention to racial justice, institutional racism, and medical racism, there has been more attention to the relationship between black people and health and health care. …

By Dominic Wilkinson @Neonatalethics and Michael Dunn @ethical_mikey In a high court case reported last week, a judge strongly criticised a London hospital’s clinical ethics committee (CEC). The case related to disputed treatment for a gravely ill nine-year old child. There had been a breakdown in the relationship between the clinical team and the child’s […]

Written by Farbod Akhlaghi (University of Oxford) Suppose you have a moral obligation to take care of your ailing parent tomorrow. If you did something that would lower your chances of fulfilling that moral obligation – like going out partying all night tonight – would you thereby have done something morally wrong? We do things […]

STUDENT VOICES | CHYNN PRIZE SECOND-PLACE WINNERBy Elizabeth Wood Last semester I read Carl Elliott’s “The Best-Selling, Billion Dollar Pills Tested on Homeless People.” He introduces a concerning ethical dilemma, namely, the use of homeless populations as participants in phase 1 drug trials. Learning about this practice made me very uncomfortable. As a student at […]

Before there was the Covid-19 pandemic, there was Pandemic. This tabletop game, in which players collaborate to fight disease outbreaks, debuted in 2007. Expansions feature weaponized pathogens, historic pandemics, zoonotic diseases, and vaccine development races. Game mechanics modelled on pandemic vectors provide multiple narratives: battle, quest, detection, discovery. There is satisfaction in playing “against” disease–and winning. Real pandemic is not as tidy as a game. But can games support understanding about the societal challenges we now face? Yes.

The post Social-Change Games Can Help Us Understand the Public Health Choices We Face appeared first on The Hastings Center.

Written by Ben Davies I recently watched an excellent panel discussion, ‘Statues, Slavery and the Struggle for Equality’ with Labour MP Dawn Butler, historian David Olusoga, philosopher Susan Neiman, chaired by writer Yassmin Abdel-Magied. The discussion was wide-ranging but, as the title suggests, included a focus on the recent resurgence of demands to remove various […]

Experts in infectious disease and public health warn that the Covid-19 pandemic will be with us until there is an effective vaccine, possibly 12 to 18 months in the future. This situation has given rise to calls for human challenge studies, in which healthy volunteers are injected with an experimental vaccine and then infected with the disease to test the vaccine’s efficacy. Is this ethically justifiable?

The post Human Challenge Studies for Covid-19 Vaccine: Questions about Benefits and Risks appeared first on The Hastings Center.

Written by Stefan Schubert Utilitarianism is often associated with two psychological features. First, acceptance of instrumental harm for the greater good. The utilitarian is famously willing to kill one to save five in the trolley problem. Second, impartial beneficence. The utilitarian is equally concerned with everyone’s well-being, irrespective of their gender, nationality, or species. And […]

The #BlackBioethics Toolkit serves as a resource on articles about bioethics and race, specifically about African-Americans and Black People in the U.S.…