Field Of Bioethics Research Articles

Network form of teaching bioethics

The digital educational environment makes it possible to widely implement the network form of education. The report gives an example of the exchange of lectures on bioethics between Rostov, Volgograd, Perm Medical Universities, Pushchino State Natural Science Institute. New opportunities are noted for students, masters and graduate students in familiarizing themselves with the ethical values ​​of life. A proposal is put forward to conclude agreements between universities, as provided for by the Federal Law "On Education in the Russian Federation", on the introduction of a network form of liberal education. And, above all, in the field of bioethics.

Ethical issues and dilemmas in spinal cord injury rehabilitation in the developing world: a mixed-method study.

Mixed-method study (small group discussions and online literature search). Identify the ethical issues and dilemmas faced by rehabilitation professionals involved in the service delivery to the persons with spinal cord injury (SCI) in the low income and lower-middle-income countries (LIC/LMIC) located in Asia. Small group discussions in three biomedical conferences in Dhaka, Bangladesh and Kualalampur, Malaysia. Three small group discussions (30-45 min each) were held during three international conferences in 2019. The conferences brought together experts in the fields of neurology, rehabilitation, neurorehabilitation, and bioethics. A summary of SCI practice points and dilemmas were documented including goals of care, duties of rehabilitation professionals, health care worker-patient relationships, roles, and expectations of family members at different care settings. There is a paucity of literature on this topic. The application of the principles of contemporary bioethics in the pluralistic societies of LIC/LMIC can be challenging. The ethical dilemmas faced by rehabilitation professionals working in LIC/LMIC are diverse and different from those reported from the Western and developed countries. Ethical issues and dilemmas identified were understanding patient autonomy in decision making, lack of insurance for SCI rehabilitation, financial challenges, challenges of providing emerging technology in SCI rehabilitation and SCI rehabilitation during disasters. We have summarized the possible ethical issues and dilemmas which rehabilitation professionals in LIC/LMIC may encounter during delivery of SCI rehabilitation services. We hope it generates a discussion on an often-neglected aspect of SCI care in the LIC/LMIC and helps identify the complexities of ethical dilemmas unique to persons with SCI living in a developing country.

If Not Now, Then When? Taking Disability Seriously in Bioethics.

The impression of bioethicists as "dangerous," as articulated in Mouth Magazine in 1994, has continued to be a theme in the disability movement. We respond to three common responses by bioethicists to this impression-namely, this is from the past, and bioethicists are different now; this is an angry and extremist position; and the Americans with Disabilities Act and other disability rights and justice efforts have solved historical inequities. We draw on the historical record and on our collective experiences as bioethicists engaged in clinical consultation and education and as the founding, former, and current directors of a program focused on disability and rehabilitation ethics to argue that ableism and unexamined assumptions about people with disabilities have persisted in bioethics despite decades of counternarratives, research, and divergent perspectives. Ableism and such assumptions can lead to health care decisions that are prone to bias, mistreatment, and a lack of consideration of viable options for living with disability. As the field of bioethics moves toward certification examinations and as new generations join the field's ranks, these problems need to be rectified with solutions at the individual, interpersonal, and structural levels. It is past time to take disability seriously.

Pursuing impact in research: towards an ethical approach

BackgroundResearch proactively and deliberately aims to bring about specific changes to how societies function and individual lives fare. However, in the ever-expanding field of ethical regulations and guidance for researchers, one ethical consideration seems to have passed under the radar: How should researchers act when pursuing actual, societal changes based on their academic work?Main textWhen researchers engage in the process of bringing about societal impact to tackle local or global challenges important concerns arise: cultural, social and political values and institutions can be put at risk, transformed or even hampered if researchers lack awareness of how their ‘acting to impact’ influences the social world. With today’s strong focus on research impacts, addressing such ethical challenges has become urgent within in all fields of research involved in finding solutions to the challenges societies are facing. Due to the overall goal of doing something good that is often inherent in ethical approaches, boundaries to researchers’ impact of something good is neither obvious, nor easy to detect. We suggest that it is time for the field of bioethics to explore normative boundaries for researchers’ pursuit of impact and to consider, in detail, the ethical obligations that ought to shape this process, and we provide a four-step framework of fair conditions for such an approach. Our suggested approach within this field can be useful for other fields of research as well.ConclusionWith this paper, we draw attention to how the transition from pursuing impact within the Academy to trying to initiate and achieve impact beyond the Academy ought to be configured, and the ethical challenges inherent in this transition. We suggest a stepwise strategy to identify, discuss and constitute consensus-based boundaries to this academic activity. This strategy calls for efforts from a multi-disciplinary team of researchers, advisors from the humanities and social sciences, as well as discussants from funding institutions, ethical committees, politics and the society in general. Such efforts should be able to offer new and useful assistance to researchers, as well as research funding agencies, in choosing ethically acceptable, impact-pursuing projects.

Can a Robot Be a Person? De-Facing Personhood and Finding It Again with Lévinas

The question “Can a robot be a person?” has emerged of late in the field of bioethics. The paper addresses the question in dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas. It begins with something like an archeological reconstruction of personhood in modernity, in order to locate the context out of which the question posed, “can a robot be a person?” might take on meaning. Descartes, Hume and Kant are the most important exponents of the story, their position emerging in direct contradiction with the classical metaphysics of the person, such as one finds in Thomas Aquinas. Levinas rejects the rationalist perspective of a bodiless mind, a person reduced to her cognitive capacities, no less than the empirical version of a mindless body, both understandings of personhood being de facto prevalent in contemporary bioethics, especially in the Anglo-American version of it. On the other hand, as Levinas suggests, to be a person is to be “manifested in the exteriority of the face, which is not the disclosure of an impersonal Neuter. If so, a robot cannot be a person. The paper tries to show why this is the case.

How Disability Activism Advances Disability Bioethics

In this paper, I argue that, even when disability rights activists are most clearly acting as activists, they can advance the scholarly activity of disability bioethics. In particular, I will argue that even engaging in non-violent direct action, including civil disobedience, is an important way in which disability rights activists directly support the efforts of disability bioethics scholars. I will begin by drawing upon Hilde Lindemann’s work on relational narrative identity to describe how certain damaging master narratives about disability hinder the uptake of arguments from disability bioethics. Then, I will argue that disability activism, especially non-violent direct action and civil disobedience, provides an effective counterstory to some of the worst of these master narratives, thereby laying the groundwork for the scholarly argument s of disability bioethicists to be given more serious consideration. Ultimately, I conclude that the field of bioethics is improved when it abandons the gross grained, generalizations about who disabled people are and how they act put forth by oppressive master narratives in favor of the more nuanced self-descriptions offered by the counterstories being offered by disabled people themselves. So it is that, by challenging these oppressive master narratives that constrain and distort the social meaning of disability, disability activism can improve mainstream bioethics.

Principles and Duties: A Critique of Common Morality Theory.

Tom Beauchamp and James Childress's revolutionary textbook, Principles of Biomedical Ethics, shaped the field of bioethics in America and around the world. Midway through the Principle's eight editions, however, the authors jettisoned their attempt to justify the four principles of bioethics -autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, justice-in terms of ethical theory, replacing it with the idea that these principles are part of a common morality shared by all rational persons committed to morality, at all times, and in all places. Other commentators contend that their theory has never been empirically confirmed and is unfalsifiable, since counterexamples can be deemed irrational, or as held by those living lives not committed to morality. The thesis of this paper is that common morality theory is the artifact of a category mistake-conflating common areas regulated by moral norms with common norms regulating moral conduct-that accords mid-twentieth century American liberal morality the status of transcultural, transtemporal, eternal moral truths. Such a conception offers bioethicists no tools for analyzing moral change-moral progress, regress, reform, evolution, devolution, or revolution-no theoretical basis for deconstructing structural classicism, racism, and sexism, or for facilitating international cooperation on ethical issues in the context of culturally based moral differences.

Colonial Geographies, Black Geographies, and Bioethics.

Structural anti-Black racism exists within the fields of bioethics and medicine. The colonial structures underlying bioethics render the geographies and subjectivities of Black scholars and patients "ungeographic," hidden by dominant White geographies. In this essay, I aim to illuminate more clearly the anti-Black racist structures embedded in bioethics and medicine by engaging with Katherine McKittrick's work Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. Specifically, I apply McKittrick's concepts of Black geographies to the physical spaces of health care (which could be the hospital, intensive care ward, or birthing room) and the discursive space of bioethics journals and texts. Finally, recommendations are made for bioethics to build the capacity to hold a multiplicity of geographies simultaneously.

Speaking Volumes: The Encyclopedia of Bioethics and Racism.

This essay takes as its starting point the claim that addressing anti-Black racism is essential to the work of bioethics in the United States. The essay examines whether and how racism has been addressed in the field's central reference work, the Encyclopedia of Bioethics, throughout its four editions-in 1978, 1995, 2004, and 2014. With consideration of each edition's stated purpose and editorial framing, we find that the subject of racism is obscured by the Encyclopedia's inattention to African American approaches to bioethics, to racism as a bioethics issue, and specifically, to racism as a matter of justice. This essay suggests questions for guiding reflection necessary for giving racism its due in the field of bioethics.

Black Feminist Bioethics: Centering Community to Ask Better Questions.

This commentary builds off the article "Is Trust Enough? Anti-Black Racism and the Perception of Black Vaccine 'Hesitancy,'" by Yolonda Wilson, and her assertion that the question, "Why don't Black people trust … ?" is insufficient. The commentary describes ways in which a Black feminist approach to knowledge production can facilitate centering community and can lead researchers, health care providers, and bioethicists to ask better questions. Instead of demanding that Black patients change to fit within biomedicine, people in these fields must radically reimagine biomedicine to better meet the needs of Black patients. For this to become a reality, bioethicists must work toward eliminating racism, and the field of bioethics should embrace Black feminist bioethics to work toward this goal.

Bioethics Rooted in Justice: Community-Expert Reflections.

Based on interviews that the author and her colleagues conducted with three community organizers, activists, and health care workers-James Manigault-Bryant, Amika Tendaji, and Amber-Rose Howard-this essay emphasizes the importance of considering how the field of bioethics might be expanded with the integration of abolitionist perspectives and practices. These individuals were selected as interviewees for this special report on reckoning with anti-Black racism because of their dedication to Black abolitionist theory and practice and to centering the communities most harmed by state violence. A crucial lesson to be drawn from the conversations held with Manigault-Bryant, Tendaji, and Howard is that, without centering the experiences of Black health activists and community organizers in bioethics' research, the field is bound to uphold White supremacy, advance colonialism, and neglect entire ways of being in the world.

Anti-Black Racism and Power: Centering Black Scholars to Achieve Health Equity.

In health equity research, anti-Black racism and power imbalances manifest at every phase of the research process and contribute to the marginalization and exclusion of Black scholars. This essay highlights how power operates as a central component of anti-Black racism, and I describe the importance of centering Black scholars in funding, conducting, and implementing health equity research. Interdisciplinary collaboration between the fields of bioethics, public health ethics, and health equity could generate dialogue and develop recommendations to help balance power dynamics, address anti-Black racism, and, ultimately, make meaningful progress toward health equity.

Latinx Bioethics: Toward a Braver, Broader, and More Just Bioethics.

In recognizing that overcoming anti-Blackness and structural racism requires a collective effort, Latinx bioethics has emerged as a space in the larger field of bioethics where Latino scholars, researchers, artists, and other bioethics professionals are contributing to deconstructing anti-Blackness. With attention to race and ethnocultural perspectives, Latinx bioethics draws from bioethical theories and conceptual frameworks to address ethical and moral issues affecting Latino communities. This essay aims to explain how Latinx bioethics aids in centering the Latinx voice and eradicating anti-Blackness in bioethics. After introducing the Latinx bioethics framework and mission, the essay explores the overlap between Black bioethics and Latinx bioethics and discusses why this overlap calls for cross-examination and collaboration in the field. The essay concludes with a summary of recommendations and reflections that bioethics can adopt to begin progressing toward a more inclusive and racially equitable field.

Before The Birth of Bioethics: James M. Gustafson at Yale.

In the 1960s, tucked away at Yale Divinity School, there was a remarkable confluence of bioethics scholars under the tutelage of James M. Gustafson. His students were Jim Childress, Albert R. Jonsen, Tom Beauchamp, LeRoy Walters, Jim Drane, and Stanley Hauerwas, among others. Jonsen later recalled, "That little group was really the beginning of scholarly bioethics." Yet despite Gustafson's influence on the founding generation of bioethics scholars and his prominence as a leading mid-century Christian theologian, his legacy in bioethics is unsecured. This is an unfortunate omission, as Gustafson's contributions to bioethics were not limited to the classroom. In 1969, he brought Paul Ramsey to Yale to deliver the Lyman Beecher Lectures, a collection of talks that would coalesce into Ramsey's The Patient as Person. Gustafson also advised Daniel Callahan as Callahan and Willard Gaylin founded The Hastings Center, on whose founding board of directors Gustafson later served. Through archival research and interviews with Gustafson's former students and colleagues, we recount his biography, consider his pedagogy, and examine the theological pragmatism that informed his engagement with his students and his intellectual commitments before the birth of bioethics. By reviewing Gustafson's contributions to the nascent field of bioethics, we seek to understand why his legacy has been forgotten and to introduce him to a new generation of bioethics scholars.

Co-producing Bioethics: How Biomedical Scientists and Applied Philosophers Established Bioethics in Australia

Summary This article examines the emergence of bioethics at Monash University and Australia during the late-1970s and early-1980s. Unlike bioethics in the USA, which was born a decade earlier during policy debates over human experimentation and withdrawal of treatment, bioethics in Australia initially emerged in the university context via interactions among research scientists working at the forefront of reproductive medicine and philosophers seeking to address issues of public concern. These interactions occurred in a rapidly changing university sector that was moving towards research translation and a new global knowledge economy. Drawing on oral histories with philosophers and medical scientists involved in these events, as well as archival materials, this article uses a co-productionist analytic lens to critically examine how changing institutional norms encouraged mutually beneficial interactions between philosophers and scientists, which shaped the emergence of a new and distinctive field of bioethics in Australia.

Cousin Marvin's Secret

Cousin Marvin's Secret

HIV and SARS-CoV-2: Tracing a Path of Vaccine Research and Development.

Purpose of ReviewThis review examines the major advances and obstacles in the field of HIV vaccine research as they pertain to informing the development of vaccines against SARS-CoV-2.Recent FindingsAlthough the field of HIV research has yet to deliver a licensed vaccine, the technologies developed and knowledge gained in basic scientific disciplines, translational research, and community engagement have positively impacted the development of vaccines for other viruses, most notably and recently for SARS-CoV-2. These advances include the advent of viral vectors and mRNA as vaccine delivery platforms; the use of structural biology for immunogen design; an emergence of novel adjuvant formulations; a more sophisticated understanding of viral phylogenetics; improvements in the development and harmonization of accurate assays for vaccine immunogenicity; and maturation of the fields of bioethics and community engagement for clinical trials conducted in diverse populations.SummaryDecades of foundational research and investments into HIV biology, though yet to yield an authorized or approved vaccine for HIV/AIDS, have now paid dividends in the rapid development of safe and effective SARS-CoV-2 vaccines. This latter success presents an opportunity for feedback on improved pathways for development of safe and efficacious vaccines against HIV and other pathogens.

Special Report: Ethical Decision-Making in Contemporary Psychiatric Practice—An Evolving Challenge

Special Report: Ethical Decision-Making in Contemporary Psychiatric Practice—An Evolving Challenge

Bioethics and Gerontology: The Value of Thinking Together.

The interdisciplinary field of bioethics focuses on what it means to be a person, flourish as a person, and be respected as a person in different conditions of health, illness, or disability. Bioethics and policy research considers normative questions such as how a good society, through its priorities and investments, should demonstrate its commitments to the lives of different populations. Bioethics and humanities scholarship, often known as "health humanities," shares affinities with age studies and disability studies and with narrative-based approaches to the study of human experience. Gerontology is concerned with the many aspects of life that affect how people age, including social structures and values that influence the experience of growing old. In this article, we briefly explore the evolution of bioethics, from a discourse that emerged in relation to developments in biomedicine, bioscience, and biotechnology; to research ethics; to broader ethical questions emerging from real-world conditions, with attention to how bioethics has considered the experience of aging. Until recently, most age-focused work in bioethics has concerned age-associated illness, particularly end-of-life decision making. Given the reality of population aging and the ethical concerns accompanying the shift in age for most places in the world, the further evolution of bioethics involves greater attention to the support of flourishing in late life and to social justice and health equity in aging societies. We argue that the discourses of bioethics and critical gerontology, in dialogue, can bring a new understanding of privilege and preference, disparity and disadvantage, and reflection and respect for aging individuals.

Promoting Bioethical Literacy in Primary Education: The European Reality and the Case of Greece

The development of biotechnology during the last decades brings societies and policymakers a fresh view on how to communicate and manage the biotechnological knowledge and ethical aspects that arise, concurrently. During the era of biotechnological accomplishments and globalization, a new field of ethics arises, the field of Bioethics. It aims to balance between the dangers that emerge because of the implementation of biotechnological accomplishments on human life and their benefits. With the promotion of Bioethics education, everyone has to realize his personality, his mentality, his citizenship, and his connection to others. Many educational institutes worldwide embody bioethical courses for their students and an adequate number of curricula have been created for this purpose. Researchers and educators accord with the necessity of public ethical and bioethical literacy already from elementary school. At the same time in many seminars organized by the Committees on Bioethics, the appropriateness of teaching Bioethics primarily is presented and organizations worldwide support the introduction of Bioethics courses in the curricula. The majority of European countries have incorporated ethics and bioethics courses into their curricula for Primary Education. Greece amongst other countries is the exception to that rule. The goal of this dissertation is to convince the local education policymakers about the importance of Bioethics education so to include ethics and bioethics courses in the Greek educational system, in all grades and especially in elementary school, based on the necessity for the creation of educated future citizens for the country and the world.