Bioethics
-
In this article the authors briefly sketch the nature of Brazilian bioethics. Bioethics emerged in Brazil later than in other Western countries and the 1990's were the most important period for the spread of the discipline in the country. ⋯ With regard to theoretical work, Brazilian bioethics is clearly an importer of theories from countries central to the studies of bioethics, or, in other words, countries where biothics first emerged and was established. The most commonly used theory among Brazilian researchers is principalism.
-
It is widely maintained that a clinical trial is ethical only if some form of equipoise between the treatments being compared obtains. To be in equipoise between two treatments A and B is to be cognitively indifferent between the statement 'A is strictly more effective than B' and its negation. It is natural to claim that equipoise regarding A and B is necessary for randomised assignment to treatments A and B to be beneficent and non-maleficent and is sufficient for such an assignment to be fair. ⋯ Recent reconstructions of equipoise-like concepts in epistemology give clues about how to understand equipoise cognitively. In this paper I examine some of this work and discuss how successful it has been. I suggest that while this work is promising, it still has far to go, and that while equipoise remains the best theory we have of the cognitive justification for clinical trials, it is nonetheless incoherent.