James J. McCartney

The theoretical and practical importance of the dead donor rule.

gan transplantation puts the organ provider, or perhaps those who shared her life, into something like an unwanted relationship of intimacy with a stranger. We might then start to wonder about what kind of “intimacy” this actually is and what are its implications. As I’ve tried to hint, when we’re past the arst blush we’ll see that these and other sources of reluctance are morally complex, invite careful philosophical attention (some of which I have tried to provide in Nelson 2003), and may call for different kinds of social response. Having cleared away some confusion about the nature and signiacance of death and about the possibility of harming those who are dead or permanently insentient, what still needs doing is to determine what kinds of beliefs, desires, values, and interests stand behind various people’s unwillingness to provide organs, and to assess their importance. To justify the restrictions on organ retrieval currently in place—still more to support the even greater restrictions that Koppelman recommends, at least in the near term— it isn’t enough to point out that the dead are as vulnerable to disrespectful treatment as the quick. If that alone makes organ retrieval wrong in the absence of express authorization, then we are seeing the dead and “quasi-dead” as in effect “super-ends,” beings for whom respect requires that we turn a useful moral principle into something like a fetish. And there seems no good reason to do that. ■

The Duty to Vaccinate: Clarifying and Broadening the Basis of the Obligation

ISSN: 1526-5161 (Print) 1536-0075 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/uajb20 The Duty to Vaccinate: Clarifying and Broadening the Basis of the Obligation James J. McCartney To cite this article: James J. McCartney (2017) The Duty to Vaccinate: Clarifying and Broadening the Basis of the Obligation, The American Journal of Bioethics, 17:4, 46-47, DOI: 10.1080/15265161.2017.1284939 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2017.1284939

Questions of Method: One Ethics Consultant's Approach

The canon of ethics consultation includes the formal statement of rules that guide the action, cognition, and perception involved in ethics consultation as undertaken by a skilled or competent practitioner. The discipline of ethics consultation involves the practical actions, behaviors, cognitions, communications, deliberations, judgments and perceptions that normatively comprise ethics consultation. (emphasis in original)

Recent Ethical Controversies About Stem Cell Research

When we think of the state of bioethics at the present time, the moral dimensions of stem cell research and cloning, genetic therapy and counseling, reproductive interventions, organ and tissue transplantation, and life-prolonging (sometimes better described as dying-prolonging) technologies come to mind. All of these issues have come to the forefront because of the incredible and almost unimaginable advances in biology, chemistry, physics, and electronics over the past quarter of a century, which have greatly increased the potential for enhancing human wellbeing. Our cultural values and laws have barely been able to deal, in a coherent way, with the opportunities and dangers posed by the advances which are resulting from this accelerated pace of scientific development. The media, and people at large, are often supportive of these technologies because, although the creation and destruction of new human life and the transformation of human embryos into stem cells are often the “collateral damage” of this research, the focus is generally on how well off everyone would be if we could just develop the research into new and better therapeutic applications. Scientists working in these fields are almost always asking for government support without any restrictive legal guidelines or prohibitions. I believe that it is up to bioethicists to ask the difficult (and often unpopular) ethical questions that relate to contemporary advances in biomedical research that will guide both scientists and public policy in the years to come.