A biography of the Spanish-born Jewish philosopher, rabbi, and physician of the Middle Ages who spent a good deal of his life in Egypt and whose works influenced the thinking of Jews, Christians, and Moslems.

Biological ontologies are used to organize, curate, and interpret the vast quantities of data arising from biological experiments. While this works well when using a single ontology, integrating multiple ontologies can be problematic, as they are developed independently, which can lead to incompatibilities. The Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies Foundry was created to address this by facilitating the development, harmonization, application, and sharing of ontologies, guided by a set of overarching principles. One challenge in reaching these goals was that the (...) OBO principles were not originally encoded in a precise fashion, and interpretation was subjective. Here we show how we have addressed this by formally encoding the OBO principles as operational rules and implementing a suite of automated validation checks and a dashboard for objectively evaluating each ontology’s compliance with each principle. This entailed a substantial effort to curate metadata across all ontologies and to coordinate with individual stakeholders. We have applied these checks across the full OBO suite of ontologies, revealing areas where individual ontologies require changes to conform to our principles. Our work demonstrates how a sizable federated community can be organized and evaluated on objective criteria that help improve overall quality and interoperability, which is vital for the sustenance of the OBO project and towards the overall goals of making data FAIR. Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest. (shrink)

In this article, we outline a novel approach to understanding the role of responsibility in health promotion. Efforts to tackle chronic disease have led to an emphasis on personal responsibility and the identification of ways in which people can ‘take responsibility’ for their health by avoiding risk factors such as smoking and over-eating. We argue that the extent to which agents can be considered responsible for their health-related behaviour is limited, and as such, state health promotion which assumes certain forms (...) of moral responsibility should be avoided. This indicates that some approaches to health promotion ought not to be employed. We suggest, however, that another form of responsibility might be more appropriately identified. This is based on the claim that agents have prudential reasons to maintain their health, in order to pursue those things which make their lives go well—i.e. that maintenance of a certain level of health is rational for many agents, given their pleasures and plans. On this basis, we propose that agents have a self-regarding prudential responsibility to maintain their health. We outline the implications of a prudential responsibility approach to health promotion. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has led a number of countries to introduce restrictive ‘lockdown’ policies on their citizens in order to control infection spread. Immunity passports have been proposed as a way of easing the harms of such policies, and could be used in conjunction with other strategies for infection control. These passports would permit those who test positive for COVID-19 antibodies to return to some of their normal behaviours, such as travelling more freely and returning to work. The introduction of (...) immunity passports raises a number of practical and ethical challenges. In this paper, we seek to review the challenges relating to various practical considerations, fairness issues, the risk to social cooperation and the impact on people’s civil liberties. We make tentative recommendations for the ethical introduction of immunity passports. (shrink)

It is unclear whether someone’s responsibility for developing a disease or maintaining his or her health should affect what healthcare he or she receives. While this dispute continues, we suggest that, if responsibility is to play a role in healthcare, the concept must be rethought in order to reflect the sense in which many health-related behaviours occur repeatedly over time and are the product of more than one agent. Most philosophical accounts of responsibility are synchronic and individualistic; we indicate here (...) what paying more attention to the diachronic and dyadic aspects of responsibility might involve and what implications this could have for assessments of responsibility for health-related behaviour. (shrink)

The Principle of Procreative Beneficence claims that we have a moral obligation, where choice is possible, to choose to create the best child we can. The existence of this moral obligation has been proposed by John Harris and Julian Savulescu and has proved controversial on many levels, not least that it is eugenics, asking us to produce the best children we can, not for the sake of that child's welfare, but in order to make a better society. These are strong (...) claims that require robust justification that can be open to scrutiny and debate. This article argues that robust justifications are currently lacking in the work of Savulescu and Harris. The justifications provided for their conclusions about this obligation to have the best child possible rely heavily on Derek Parfit's Non-Identity Problem and the intuitive response this provokes in many of us. Unfortunately Harris and Savulescu do not embrace the entirety of the Non-Identity Problem and the puzzle that it presents. The Non-Identity Problem actually provides a refutation of PPB. In order to establish PPB as a credible and defendable principle, Harris and Savulescu need to find what has eluded Parfit and many others: a solution to the Non-Identity Problem and thus an overturning of the refutation it provides for PPB. While Harris and Savulescu do hint at possible but highly problematic solutions to the Non-Identity Problem, these are not developed or defended. As a result their controversial is left supported by little more than intuition. (shrink)

The revised Common Rule adopts the reasonable person standard to guide research disclosure. Some members of the research community contend that the standard is confusing and ill-suited to the research oversight system. Yet the revised rule is not as radical as it might seem. During the 1970s, judges started using the standard to evaluate negligence claims brought by injured patients who said doctors had failed to obtain informed consent to the harmful procedures. In its influential Belmont Report, the National Commission (...) recommended application of a “reasonable volunteer standard” to guide IRBs evaluating research disclosures. Evidence also suggests that IRBs often invoke the reasonable person standard in deliberations about consent forms. But past application of the standard has been informal and uneven. Robust application of the reasonable person standard will require researchers and IRBs to learn more about what ordinary people want and need to know about the studies they are invited to join. Input from people with personal experience as study participants could be particularly useful to this effort. (shrink)

Translational science is a 21st century mission. Government officials and industry leaders are making huge investments in an attempt to transform more basic science discoveries into therapeutic applications. Scientists and policymakers express great excitement about the medical advances that could come with the current bench-to-bedside campaign.A key step in translational science is the move from animal and other preclinical studies to initial human testing. Researchers ability to predict human effects is limited, and first-in-human tests present significant uncertainty. Participants in this (...) form of research face risks and can experience serious, even lethal, harm. Well-known incidents involving Jolee Mohr and Jesse Gelsinger, as well as subjects in the 2006 study of the investigational agent TGN1412, show the dangers that can arise in early human research.The bench-to-bedside campaign will need many volunteers to participate in early human testing. Investigators and regulators must not allow the policy enthusiasm for translational science to overshadow the commitment to protect human subjects. Participants in exploratory research are diverse and as a group lack characteristics usually associated with vulnerable populations, such as impaired decisional ability or economic or educational disadvantage. (shrink)

The term “therapeutic misconception” was coined in 1982 by Paul Appelbaum, Loren Roth, and Charles Lidz. Appelbaum and his colleagues interviewed participants in several psychiatric studies, including a drug trial with a placebo control arm. Appelbaum's group found that many people were unaware of the differences between participating in a study and receiving treatment in the clinical setting. Rather than understanding these differences, study participants tended to believe that therapy and research were governed by the same primary goal: to advance (...) the individual patient's best interests. Appelbaum's group labeled this mistaken belief the therapeutic misconception. (shrink)

Most patients suffering from progressive dementia have thoughts, emotions, perspectives, and perceptions of a world of experience. Decisions about life‐sustaining treatment should incorporate a principled approach to evaluating what life is like for these patients.

In the UK, it has been proposed that alongside the current advice to abstain from alcohol completely in pregnancy, there should be increased screening of pregnant women for alcohol consumption in order to prevent instances of fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. The Scottish Intercollegiate Guidelines Network published guidelines in 2019 recommending that standardised screening questionnaires and associated use of biomarkers should be considered to identify alcohol exposure in pregnancy. This was followed in 2020 by the National Institute for Health and Care (...) Excellence Draft Quality Standard, which recommended that pregnant women should have information on their alcohol consumption recorded throughout their pregnancy and this information transferred to the child’s health records. Most recently, Public Health England has stated that the alcohol intake of all women should be recorded throughout pregnancy, not just at the initial booking appointment and that tools such as blood biomarkers and meconium testing should be researched in order to determine true prevalence rates of alcohol in pregnancy. We argue that this proposed enhanced screening undermines women’s autonomy and their legal right to be sufficiently informed to consent to screening. We argue that there is no evidence that this kind of screening will result in a reduction of fetal harm and there is a danger that undermining the autonomy of women and the trust relationship between women and healthcare professionals may even increase harm to future children. (shrink)

Hastings Center Report, Volume 52, Issue 2, Page 4-6, March‐April 2022.

Scientific explanations are widely recognized to have instrumental value by helping scientists make predictions and control their environment. In this paper I raise, and provide a first analysis of, the question whether explanatory proofs in mathematics have analogous instrumental value. I first identify an important goal in mathematical practice: reusing resources from existing proofs to solve new problems. I then consider the more specific question: do explanatory proofs have instrumental value by promoting reuse of the resources they contain? In general, (...) I argue that the answer to this question is “no” and demonstrate this in detail for the theory of mathematical explanation developed by Marc Lange. (shrink)

This essay explores the theorization of moral valuation outlined in Stefan Bargheer’s Moral Entanglements: Conserving Birds in Britain and Germany when extended to the climate crisis. It considers, first, how ‘nature’ is valued when it confronts people and societies as a source of threat, rather than of recreation or resources. Second, the essay critically examines the role of moral discourse in the collective work of addressing climate change and its relationship to practice.

van der Pijl et al 1 argue that if ‘stakes are high’ and there is ‘clear conviction by the care provider’ that it is ‘necessary’, episiotomy may be given after ‘opt-out consent’. Here I caution against the applicability of their approach to vaginal examination (VE): another routine intervention in birth to which they suggest their discussion may apply. I highlight three concerns: first, the subjective and unjustified nature of assessments of ‘necessity’; second, the inadequacy of current consent practices in relation (...) to VE; and third, the significant risk of perpetuating under-recognised harms associated with unwanted or unconsented VE. I argue that opt-out consent cannot be ethically justified for VE. Its use would result in further weakening of consent practices, circumvention of individuals’ autonomy, and greater harm for women and birthing people. At the outset, it is important to recognise that the authors do not claim that their approach should be applied to VE, merely that their discussion may have relevance to consent for other interventions beyond episiotomy ‘where consent is also frequently lacking, and which are under-researched’, including VE.1 Nonetheless, it is easy to assume that episiotomy and VE are sufficiently similar that their analysis might be transferred wholesale. I disagree. There are similarities: both interventions are performed on ‘the most intimate and socially sensitive body parts’1; …. (shrink)

Organisations increasingly use digital nudges to influence their workforces’ behaviour without coercion or incentives. This can expose employees to arbitrary domination by infringing on their autonomy through manipulation and indoctrination. Nudges might furthermore give rise to the phenomenon of “organised immaturity.” Adopting a balanced approach between overly optimistic and dystopian standpoints, I propose a framework for determining the moral permissibility of digital nudging in the workplace. In this regard, I argue that not only should organisations provide pre-discursive justification of nudges (...) but they should also ensure that employees can challenge their implementation whenever necessary through legitimation procedures. Building on Rainer Forst’s concept of the right to justification, this article offers a way to combine contract- and deliberation-based theories for addressing questions in business ethics. I further introduce the concept of meta-autonomy as a capacity that employees can acquire to counter threats of arbitrary domination and to mitigate organised immaturity. (shrink)

The year 2014 brought a new development in the bioethics “laboratory of the states.” Five states adopted “right to try” laws intended to promote terminally ill patients' access to investigational drugs. Many more state legislatures are now considering such laws. The campaign for right to try laws is the latest move in an ongoing effort to give seriously ill patients access to drugs whose safety and effectiveness remain largely unknown. Although scientists and policy‐makers oppose the right to try approach, it (...) has proven quite popular among state legislators and the public. (shrink)

Many countries tightly ration access to publicly funded fertility treatments such as in vitro fertilisation. One basis for excluding people from access to IVF is their body mass index. In this paper, I consider a number of potential justifications for such a policy, based on claims about effectiveness and cost-efficiency, and reject these as unsupported by available evidence. I consider an alternative justification: that those whose subfertility results from avoidable behaviours for which they are responsible are less deserving of treatment. (...) I ultimately stop short of endorsing or rejecting such a justification, though highlight some reasons for thinking it is unlikely to be practicable. (shrink)

Bernard Reginster has argued that in "Nietzsche's terminology, 'experimentation [Versuch]' is a paradigmatic exercise of curiosity."1 According to Reginster, the kind of curiosity in question, as far as Nietzsche's concept of the free spirit is concerned, is not the state of knowing or of being certain of the truth of some proposition, but is rather a matter of the activity or process of truth seeking and of inquiry.2 My own view is very similar: I have argued that experimentalism is a (...) form of virtue for Nietzsche.3 Specifically, as I have suggested, Nietzsche employs experimentalism in two main ways: as a strategy for philosophical engagement, for example through his use of diverse writing styles and authorial... (shrink)

It's not unusual to hear someone say, ‘I'd rather be dead than have Alzheimer's’. In ‘Alzheimer Disease and Preemptive Suicide’,1 Dena Davis explains why this is a reasonable position. People taking this position will welcome the discovery of biomarkers permitting very early AD diagnosis, Davis suggests, for this will enable more of them to end their lives while they remain motivated and able to do so. At the same time, Davis observes, people would have less reason to resort to the (...) drastic remedy of pre-emptive suicide if they had absolute authority over the medical treatment they received as patients with dementia; but the threat of pre-emptive suicide is not, in my view, a sufficient reason to grant competent individuals that authority.If preclinical diagnosis of AD becomes possible, some pre-emptive suicides will probably occur. There would be no ethical or practical way to ban such suicides, and it would be silly to try. Clinicians will undoubtedly try to discourage people seeking biomarker information in furtherance of a suicide plan, but savvy individuals will simply conceal their true motivation for having the tests. The real problem for people intent on self-destruction is that biomarkers are unlikely to deliver a clear suicide signal.First, as Davis notes, work on biomarkers remains in the research stage. No one yet knows whether biomarker tests will prove accurate enough to warrant clinical use. Second, even clinically accepted biomarker tests will generate imperfect information about future disease. Biomarkers may produce more accurate estimates of a person's risk of developing AD, but like all predictive tests, they will also yield false positive and negative results. The …. (shrink)

In this issue, Paul Menzel and M. Colette Chandler‐Cramer propose a novel advance directive. Besides giving competent people the opportunity to refuse future life‐prolonging medical interventions, they say, advance directives should give people the opportunity to refuse ordinary food and water if they later experience severe dementia.This proposal is both appealing and unsettling. It is appealing because it offers some relief to people seeking to avoid the prolonged decline and extreme incapacity they have witnessed in relatives and friends with advanced (...) dementia. But does it sufficiently protect patients? Menzel and Chandler‐Cramer want to empower competent persons to impose potential discomfort and distress on a later self who cannot understand the reasons for that choice. In this situation, the price of respecting autonomy is paid by a frail incapacitated patient who has no idea why food and water are no longer offered to her. (shrink)

Much of the public debate over laboratory animal use has focused on either the scientist's demand for absolute freedom of inquiry, or the abolitionist's demand for an end to animal use in science. Yet many recent proposals for reform seek instead to balance the interests of laboratory animals in avoiding harm against the interests of research beneficiaries in continued animal use. This essay is an analysis of the intermediate reform positions and their underlying ethical principles. Keywords: animal research, animal experimentation, (...) ethics CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Abstract:I raise several concerns with Earp and colleagues' analysis of enhancement through neurochemical modulation of love as a key issue in contemporary neuroethics. These include: (i) strengthening their deflation of medicalization concerns by showing how the objection that love should be left outside of the scope of medicine would directly undermine the goal of medicine; (ii) developing stronger analysis of the social and political concerns relevant to neurochemical modulation of love, by exploring and suggesting possible counters to ways in which (...) 'wellbeing' may be used as a tool of oppression; (iii) providing reasons to support a broad need for ecological investigation of, and indeed ecological education concerning, neurotechnology; (iv) suggesting ways in which philosophy, and the humanities more broadly, remain directly relevant to responding effectively to issues in contemporary neuroethics. (shrink)

Feminism is an antiauthoritarian movement that has sought to unmask many traditional “authorities” as ungrounded. Given this, it might seem as if feminists are required to abandon the concept of authority altogether. But, we argue, the exercise of authority enables us to coordinate our efforts to achieve larger social goods and, hence, should be preserved. Instead, what is needed and what we provide for here is a way to distinguish legitimate authority from objectionable authoritarianism.

Approaches to supporting autonomy in medicine need to be able to support complex and sensitive decision-making, incorporating reflection on the patient's values and goals. This should involve deliberation in partnership between physician and patient, allowing the patient to take responsibility for her decision. Nowhere is this truer than in decisions around pregnancy and Caesarean section where maternal autonomy can seem to directly conflict with foetal interests. Medical and societal expectations and norms such as the expectations of a ‘mother’, constraints of (...) making decisions in an emergency, and the role of technology in viewing the foetus as a separate patient and surgery as a guarantor of results can all act to limit a woman's autonomy. In considering decisions about Caesarean section, maternal interests in bodily integrity can be dismissed as being less important than the foetus's own interests and the mother's duties to it, despite the inherent risks and impacts of such a major surgical procedure... (shrink)

Bioethics, Volume 36, Issue 5, Page 500-510, June 2022.

For all the young women and girls sitting in philosophy class wondering where the women are, this is the book for you. This collection of 21 chapters, each on a prominent woman in philosophy, looks at the impact that women have had on the field throughout history. From Hypatia to Angela Davis, The Philosopher Queens will be a guide to these badass women and how their amazing ideas have changed the world. This book is written both for newcomers to philosophy, (...) as well as all those professors who know that they could still learn a thing or two. This book is also for those many people who have told us that there are no great women philosophers. Please pledge, read this book and then feel free to get back to us. (shrink)

BackgroundThe number of autistic students graduating is increasing; however, little is known regarding their transition out of university. Understanding this transition is particularly pertinent with regard to the employment of autistic graduates. It is vital that we understand autistic people’s experiences of the transition and identify what support would be beneficial during this time.MethodThirty-four autistic graduates from the United Kingdom took part in a mixed-methods study exploring their transition experience. Both quantitative and qualitative questions were used to obtain in-depth information (...) concerning participants’ experiences. Participants completed questions regarding their experiences and emotions in relation to the transition, the support they received for the transition, and their career and post-graduation plans.ResultsParticipants reported high levels of fear and low preparedness for the transition. They did not feel well supported in preparing for the transition or for their future career. In the 6 months pre-graduation, 59% of participants had accessed emotion-related transition support and 70% accessed career-related support. Post-graduation, one-third accessed emotion-related or career-related support. Perspectives on this accessed support were mixed, as were transition experiences. Additional support desired included preparation for life changes, career planning, employment accessibility, and autism-specific support. Advice for future students centered on forward planning.ConclusionThese results highlight the importance of supporting autistic students with the transition out of university. Service provision should be tailored to autistic students’ needs and support early planning for the transition. (shrink)

A Vaiṣṇava Poet in Early Modern Bengal: Kavikarṇapūra’s Splendour of Speech. By Rembert Lutjeharms. Oxford Theology and Religion Monographs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. 360. $99.

With the help of the current experiment, we wanted to learn more about the impact of visually demanding vs. cognitively demanding secondary tasks on the attention allocation of older pedestrians during the phase of traffic perception within the process of road crossing. For this purpose, we used two different road crossing tasks as well as two different secondary tasks. The road crossing “stop task” was a signal detection task, where an approaching car had to be detected. The road crossing “go (...) task” was a dynamic visual search task, where the resolution of a busy road situation had to be identified. The visual secondary task was a static visual search task and the cognitive secondary task was a 1-back task. One younger group and one older group of participants completed the tasks as single vs. dual-tasks in all possible combinations. Performance was measured through errors and response time; in addition, the subjective workload was assessed via NASA-TLX. Analyses show that the visual secondary task reduces performance in the road crossing more strongly than the cognitive task, while the visual task itself is less impaired by the road crossing tasks than is the cognitive task. Overall, performance diminishes from single to dual-task completion. Results further indicate age effects in terms of increased errors and response time for older compared to younger participants. In addition to these age effects, age-specific dual-task effects emerge for response time in the go task along with the visual task as well as for response time in the cognitive task along with the go task. Subjective workload is higher in the dual-task conditions than in the single tasks. Findings are discussed with regard to theoretical and practical implications. (shrink)

Volume 24, Issue 8, August 2024, Page 37-40.

Traditionally reproduction, gestation and childbirth have all been regarded as being primarily a woman's domain. As natural reproduction occurs inside a woman's body, respect for autonomy and bodily integrity requires the pregnant woman to have the conclusive say over the fate of the embryo/fetus growing within her. Thus traditionally the ethics and law of reproduction is dominated by the importance of respecting women's reproductive choices. This paper argues that emerging technologies demand a radical rethink of ethics and law in the (...) area of reproduction. The creation and storing of embryos outside of a woman's body and maintaining a pregnancy in a brain dead woman's body and future possibilities such as ectogenesis and male pregnancy raise important issues that cannot simply be answered by appealing to the rights of women to control their bodies. There are those who argue that when reproduction or reproductive products exist outside of a woman's body each gamete donor should have an equal say over the fate of the embryo/fetus. Others, however, argue that giving an equal say to gamete donors in practice usually means allowing the male donor to veto the reproductive enterprise and this is unacceptable. As a result it has been suggested that women should be favoured when it comes to such reproductive choices. This paper examines both sides of this debate in order to answer the fundamental ethical and policy question: 'Is there any reason why women should necessarily retain control over reproduction rather than simply over their own bodies?'. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: To Do No Harm: DES and the Dilemmas of Modern Medicine. By Roberta J. Apfel and Susan M. Fisher.

This paper explores the integration of environmental concern into the workplace by combining insights from the literature on governmentality with work that focuses on the role of emotion in organisational contexts. I build on work by Hargreaves (2008) and Butler (2010) to show that environmental concern is an emerging form of workplace governance which acts by and through the emotions and which intersects with pre-existing forms of power in surprising and complex ways. I conclude by reflecting on some additional theoretical (...) approaches which may offer some tools for developing forms of workplace governance that are more socially and environmentally sustainable. (shrink)