Cambridge quarterly of healthcare ethics : CQ : the international journal of healthcare ethics committees
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Camb Q Healthc Ethics · Jul 2018
Regulations on Genome Editing of Human Embryos in Japan: Our Moral Moratorium.
The use of human embryos in genome editing research has recently been approved in China and the United Kingdom. In Japan, the debate on regulations on genome editing research studies using human embryos is underway, but is becoming increasingly entangled, to the point of deadlock. ⋯ In this article, we report on this ongoing and entangled debate in Japan concerning the regulations on genome editing technology using human embryos. The most critically needed next step is a grassroots level discussion among various experts such as those in the arts and humanities.
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Recent highly publicized privacy breaches in healthcare and genomics research have led many to question whether current standards of data protection are adequate. Improvements in de-identification techniques, combined with pervasive data sharing, have increased the likelihood that external parties can track individuals across multiple databases. ⋯ However, there has been little discussion of whether and how to communicate the risk to potential donors. We review the ethical arguments behind favoring different types of risk communication in the consent process, and outline how identifiability concerns can be incorporated into either a detailed or a simplified method of communicating risks during the consent process.
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Camb Q Healthc Ethics · Jan 2018
The Chimes of Freedom: Bob Dylan, Epigrammatic Validity, and Alternative Facts.
This essay brings together work I have done over the past 10 years: on the nature of ethics, on the purpose of ethics, and on its foundations in a way that, I hope, as E. M. Forster put it, connects "the prose and the passion." I deploy lessons learned in this process to identify and face what I believe to be crucial challenges to science and to freedom (as defended by, among others, Cicero, Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Thomas Hobbes, John Stuart Mill, and Bertrand Russell). Finally I consider threats to freedom of a different sort, posed by the creation and dissemination of "alternative facts" and by what is sometimes called "super" or "full" artificial intelligence (AI).
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Discussions of conscientious objection (CO) in healthcare often concentrate on objections to interventions that relate to reproduction, such as termination of pregnancy or contraception. Nevertheless, questions of conscience can arise in other areas of medicine. For example, the intensive care unit is a locus of ethically complex and contested decisions. ⋯ In this article, I focus on the question of how clinicians ought to act: should they provide or support a course of action that is contrary to their deeply held moral beliefs? I discuss two secular examples of potential CO in intensive care, and propose that clinicians should adopt a norm of conscientious non-objection (CNO). In the face of divergent values and practice, physicians should set aside their personal moral beliefs and not object to treatment that is legally and professionally accepted and provided by their peers. Although there may be reason to permit conscientious objections in healthcare, conscientious non-objection should be encouraged, taught, and supported.