The integration of digital phenotyping in psychiatry promises unprecedented insights into mental health, particularly in college settings where mental well-being is a growing concern. The COVID-19...

BackgroundThe COVID-19 pandemic has presented extraordinary challenges to worldwide healthcare systems, however, prevalence remains low in some countries. While the challenges of conducting research in high-prevalence countries are well published, there is a paucity from low COVID-19 countries.MethodsA PRISMA guided systematic review was conducted using the databases Ovid-Medline, Embase, Scopus and Web of Science to identify relevant articles discussing ethical issues relating to research in low prevalence COVID-19 countries.ResultsThe search yielded 133 original articles of which only 2 fit the inclusion (...) criteria and aim, with neither specific to low prevalence. Most of the available literature focused on clinical management and resource allocation related to high prevalence countries. These results will be discussed under the ethical dimensions of equity, individual liberty, privacy and confidentiality, proportionality, public protection, provision of care, reciprocity, stewardship and trust..ConclusionsA systematic review failed to identify articles relating to COVID-19 research ethics, specific to low prevalence countries. It shows that there is a significant gap in the literature that warrants further investigation. Common ethical principles were used to present a distinct set of challenges experienced by a country with a low prevalence of COVID-19. This unique perspective of some of the common ethical problems surrounding research, may help guide further discussion and guide research in similar countries. (shrink)

Ms. X is a person with cerebral palsy and schizophrenia. She has intractable bedsores that are a result of her immobility and to poor wound care related to her delusional thinking. Despite intensive community support, the wounds have worsened to the point that she has needed multiple hospitalizations to prevent systemic sepsis, a life‐threatening condition. She is capable of placement decisions and wishes for independence at home but is incapable of making wound care decisions and does not appreciate that immediately (...) returning home from the hospital, instead of going into a special care facility, would likely result in sepsis. The resulting dilemma about discharge planning highlights the complexity involved in weighing concerns around mental illness and capacity for treatment and placement of care. The extent of the care that is required and available in a community or health care system and the slow but relatively certain progression of the symptoms also make the decision challenging. Two commentaries take very different approaches in exploring the question whether Ms. X should be supported to go home or to a special care facility. (shrink)

Duty of care is the core ethical responsibility of healthcare workers. Getting the workforce vaccinated will provide safety to the public, protect the vulnerable population and provide a safe working environment. While most agree that healthcare workers should be prioritised in the vaccination programme, mandatory vaccination remains a complicated and contentious issue with political, legal and ethical dimensions. This study aims to determine the ethical considerations associated with mandatory vaccinations among healthcare workers. A total of 152 abstracts were identified of (...) which, 142 were excluded based on abstracts because they did not meet the inclusion criteria. The remaining ten articles were further evaluated with three articles that fit the inclusion criteria specifically discussing mandatory vaccination among healthcare workers and the ethical issues. Benefits, risks, effectiveness, equity and justice, autonomy, reciprocity and trust were used as a framework to discuss the ethical considerations which resonated both directly from the included papers, as well as more generally from the other literature associated with this search. There is limited literature on the topic of ethical considerations associated with COVID-19 mandatory vaccination of healthcare workers, as a systematic review identified only 3 papers. Benefits, risks, effectiveness, equity and justice, autonomy, reciprocity and trust were among the seven ethical considerations identified and discussed. (shrink)

Flesh of My Flesh is a collection of articles by today's most respected scientists, philosophers, bioethicists, theologians, and law professors about whether we should allow human cloning. It includes historical pieces to provide background for the current debate. Religious, philosophical, and legal points of view are all represented.

Debate over the relationship of law and bioethics is growing - what the relationship has been and what it should be in the future. While George Annas has praised law and rights-talk for creating modern bioethics, Carl Schneider has instead blamed law for hijacking bioethics and stunting moral reflection. Indeed, as modern bioethics approaches the 40-year mark, historians of bioethics are presenting divergent accounts. In one account, typified by Albert Jonsen, bioethics largely grew out (...) of philosophy and theology, not law. In another account, law has deeply shaped bioethics from the start, forging its central commitment to the rights of patients and research subjects and the fields imposition of broad fiduciary responsibilities on health care professionals and researchers.In addition to debating how to properly describe laws historical relationship to bioethics, commentators have argued over whether laws influence in bioethics is now good or bad. (shrink)

The risks of uncontrolled dissemination of GMOs has made it clear that biosafety is a very relevant matter that goes beyond the State boundaries. This approach has had its corresponding reflection at the policy level, which reveals that the public powers and the legislators have been sensitive to this existing preoccupation in ever-growing sectors of society. From the European regulations, one can deduce a set of principles, which must guide the decisions of the public powers in matters related to biosafety: (...) precaution, authorisation and inspection, “step by step”, “case by case”, traceability and transparency, among other. (shrink)

In France, bioethics norms have emerged in close interaction with medical practices. The first bioethics laws were adopted in 1994, with provisions for updates in 2004 and most recently, in 2011. As in other countries, bioethics laws indirectly refer to certain fundamental values. The purpose of this paper is threefold. First, I shall briefly describe the construction of the French bioethics laws and the values they are meant to protect. Secondly, I will show that the practice (...) of clinical ethics, as reported in a few studies on ART, living organ donation and PGD, challenge the role attributed to doctors as “gatekeepers” of those fundamental values. Thirdly, I will suggest that the quality of medical practices would improve if the law focused on strengthening the tacit pact between doctors and patients, rather than putting doctors in charge of enforcing societal values. Doctors, for their part, would limit their role to what they can do best: provide sufficient patient support and safe care. Against those who argue that we should dispense with bioethics laws altogether, I hold that the laws are useful in order to limit the development of abusive practices. However, a new legislative approach should be adopted which would a positive presumption in favor of patients’ requests. (shrink)

In this concise and accessible introductory text, Gómez-Lobo and Keown introduce a "human goods" approach to bioethics as an alternative to the dominant principle-based method in the field (best illustrated by Beauchamp and Childress, Principles of Biomedical Ethics, OUP). Following Aristotle and the natural law tradition, the authors demonstrate how an emphasis on human goods--such as health, life, family, friendship, work and play, the experience of beauty, knowledge, and integrity--provides a necessary context for medical decisions and can help us (...) understand critical issues at the beginning and end of life. The manuscript includes two parts: Foundations and Issues. In the Foundations section the authors explain how one can think about bioethics, offering definitions of ethics and ontology (the study of being) and prudential reasoning. In the Issues section they address genetics, abortion, infanticide, suicide and physician-assisted suicide, nutrition and hydration, and transplantation ethics. The book includes appendices featuring personal statements by Gómez-Lobo on the status of the human embryo and criteria for the determination of death. (shrink)

Who should define what constitutes ethical and lawful medical practice? Judges? Doctors? Scientists? Or someone else entirely? This volume analyses how effectively criminal law operates as a forum for resolving ethical conflict in the delivery of health care. It addresses key questions such as: how does criminal law regulate controversial bioethical areas? What effect, positive or negative, does the use of criminal law have when regulating bioethical conflict? And can the law accommodate moral controversy? By exploring criminal law in theory (...) and in practice and examining the broad field of bioethics as opposed to the narrower terrain of medical ethics, it offers balanced arguments that will help readers form reasoned views on the ethical legitimacy of the invocation and use of criminal law to regulate medical and scientific practice and bioethical issues. (shrink)

This book examines the field of bioethics from an international and regional legal perspective. It focuses on major international law documents such as the United Nations Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights and UNESCO declarations on human cloning and the human genome. Coverage of regional legal instruments includes the Council of Europe Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine (the Oviedo Convention) and its Protocols on cloning, transplantation, and research with human beings. Work on surrogacy issues by the (...) Hague Conference on Private International Law is also discussed, as are some African regional legal instruments on biosafety, and stem cell research. (shrink)

In Islamic law paternity is treated as a consequence of a licit sexual relationship. Since DNA testing makes a clear distinction between legal and biological paternity possible, it challenges the continued correlation between paternity and marriage. This article explores the foundations of paternity regulations in the Islamic ethico-legal tradition, with a particular focus on what is termed here “the licit sex principle,” and investigates the extent to which a harm-based argument can be made either by appeal to or against Islamic (...) paternity regulations. It argues that in Islamic bioethics the definition of harm and its boundaries is a function of both: (1) identification of legal and religious rights and the extent to which these rights are violated; and (2) balancing and reconciling perceived harm against both specific principles in relation to a given issue and also the overarching objectives of Islamic law. The article is divided into three main sections addressing the Islamic legal, ethical, and bioethical dimensions of paternity. (shrink)

Law provides a rich language for thinking about bioethical issues and is a tool for action as well as talk. But the language of the law, often inapt, regularly fails to achieve its desired effect.

Law and Bioethics contains a broad range of essays by scholars interested in the interactions between law and bioethics It includes studies examining the regulation of stem cell research, human rights and bioethics, the regulation of reproductive technologies, and distributive justice in healthcare and pandemic planning.

The law has therefore had two conflicting impacts on medical ethics: the positive effect of eroding paternalism and replacing it with a patient-centered ethic; and the negative effect of encouraging physicians to be more concerned with avoiding litigation than doing the "right" thing.

In most Western countries, health law bioethics are strongly intertwined. This strong connection is the result of some specific factors that, in the early years of these disciplines, facilitated a rapid development of both. In this paper, I analyse these factors and construe a development theory existing of three phases, or ideal‐typical models. In the moralistic‐paternalistic model, there is almost no health law of explicit medical ethics and the little law there is is usually based on traditional morality, combined (...) with paternalist motives, the objections to this modal are that its paternalism and moralism are unacceptable, that it is too static and knows no external control mechanisms. In the liberal model, which is now dominant on most Western countries, law and ethics closely cooperate and converge, both disciplines use the same framework for analysis: they are product‐oriented rather than practice‐oriented; they use the same conceptual categories, they focus on the minimally decent rather than the ideal, and they are committed to the same substantive normative theory in which patient autonomy and patient rights are central. However, each of these four characteristics also result in a certain one‐sidedness. In some countries, a third model is emerging. In this postliberal model, health law is more modest and acknowledges its inherent and normative limits, whereas ethics takes a richer and most ambitious self image. As a result health law and ethics will partly diverge again. (shrink)

In most Western countries, health law bioethics are strongly intertwined. This strong connection is the result of some specific factors that, in the early years of these disciplines, facilitated a rapid development of both. In this paper, I analyse these factors and construe a development theory existing of three phases, or ideal‐typical models. In the moralistic‐paternalistic model, there is almost no health law of explicit medical ethics and the little law there is is usually based on traditional morality, combined (...) with paternalist motives, the objections to this modal are that its paternalism and moralism are unacceptable, that it is too static and knows no external control mechanisms. In the liberal model, which is now dominant on most Western countries, law and ethics closely cooperate and converge, both disciplines use the same framework for analysis: they are product‐oriented rather than practice‐oriented; they use the same conceptual categories, they focus on the minimally decent rather than the ideal, and they are committed to the same substantive normative theory in which patient autonomy and patient rights are central. However, each of these four characteristics also result in a certain one‐sidedness. In some countries, a third model is emerging. In this postliberal model, health law is more modest and acknowledges its inherent and normative limits, whereas ethics takes a richer and most ambitious self image. As a result health law and ethics will partly diverge again. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Law Morality From Morality to Law From Law to Morality Converging Law and Morality Diverging Law and Morality: Beyond the Liberal Model References Further reading.

Fornece um panorama sobre os avanços biotecnológicos, dando ênfase aos aspectos jurídicos e éticos do impacto destes na área genética sobre o homem e o meio ambiente.

This book examines the controversies surrounding biomedical research in the twenty-first century from a human rights perspective, analyzing the evolution and ...

There is burgeoning interest in the field of “Islamic” bioethics within public and professional circles, and both healthcare practitioners and academic scholars deploy their respective expertise in attempts to cohere a discipline of inquiry that addresses the needs of contemporary bioethics stakeholders while using resources from within the Islamic ethico-legal tradition. This manuscript serves as an introduction to the present thematic issue dedicated to Islamic bioethics. Using the collection of papers as a guide the paper outlines several (...) critical questions that a comprehensive and cohesive Islamic bioethical theory must address: (i) What are the relationships between Islamic law (Sharīʿah), moral theology (uṣūl al-Fiqh), and Islamic bioethics? (ii) What is the relationship between an Islamic bioethics and the lived experiences of Muslims? and (iii) What is the relationship between Islamic bioethics and the state? This manuscript, and the papers in this special collection, provides insight into how Islamic bioethicists and Muslim communities are addressing some of these questions, and aims to spur further dialogue around these overaching questions as Islamic bioethics coalesces into a true field of scholarly and practical inquiry. (shrink)

Clark, Robert Victorian Attorney-General the Hon Robert Clark was guest speaker at the 2012 Annual General Meeting of the Caroline Chisholm Centre for Health Ethics. In this extract from his speech, he discusses the relationship between the law and ethics, and the reform of Victoria's laws on guardianship and powers of attorney. While some ethical obligations should not be made into legal duties, he argues that every legal duty is founded upon a moral obligation. The reform of Victoria's laws on (...) guardianship and powers of attorney seeks to make it easier for individuals and their families to provide for their current and future needs, while strengthening the last resort roles of the Office of the Public Advocate and the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal to protect vulnerable people from neglect, abuse and exploitation. (shrink)

Some argue that law is the discipline which has mixed most prominently with bioethics, and that bioethicists can be seduced by the law and by legal procedures. While there is a great consensus that law has influenced bioethics in significant and important ways, certainly much more than it influenced other "law and..." disciplines, scholars dispute as to the exact role which the law plays in bioethics, the goals it purports to achieve and the implications of its relationship (...) with the discipline of bioethics. This Article aims to explore the relationship between law and bioethics and calls for a careful evaluation of the law's contributions to bioethics. Specifically, it will be argued that while the law contributed extensively to the development of bioethics it introduced a language and a way of thinking that are not necessarily appropriate to handle and resolve bioethical issues, and which, in significant portion of cases, was irrelevant and had little impact on decision-making and behavioral patterns of patients. Moreover, law's interference with and shape of bioethical issues resulted in serious threats to some of the major characteristic of such issues and brought about to other societal concerns which the law did not consider seriously. The article will conclude that it is now time to re-evaluate the direction in which bioethics should take in the next years, specifically whether it should continue to integrate with law or other disciplines, or alternatively become a more autonomous and independent discipline. (shrink)

Leon Kass is much misunderstood. He is not simply a Republican ideologue who tailored his ideas to break out of the ivory tower and into the halls of power. Nor does he ook simply to use human nature as a moral guide. When the full range of his writings is considered and set in the tradition of his teachers, Hans Jonas and Leo Strauss, what emerges is a natural law position colored by religious revelation.

This essay looks at the concept of AKEDAH, the essence of which is the travail of the human condition and the trust in vindication and victory, as a salient and deep metaphor for bioethics. The author first delineates the symbol, then shows its theological and ethical significance, and finally suggests its bioethical applications.The LORD said, “Go get Isaac, your only son, the one you dearly love! Take him to the land of Moriah, and I will show you a mountain (...) where you must sacrifice him to me on the fires of an altar.” So Abraham got up early the next morning and chopped wood for the fire. He put a saddle on his donkey and left with Isaac and two servants for the place where God had told him to go.Genesis 22There is silence all around. The Baptist appears, and cries: “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” Soon after that comes Jesus, and in the knowledge that He is the coming Son of Man lays hold of the wheel of the world to set it moving on that last revolution which is to bring all ordinary history to a close. It refuses to turn, and He throws Himself upon it. Then it does turn; and crushes Him. The wheel rolls onward, and the mangled body of the one immeasurably great Man, who was strong enough to think of Himself as the spiritual ruler of mankind and to bend history to His purpose, is hanging upon it still. That is His victory and His reign. (shrink)

Who should define what constitutes ethical and lawful medical practice? Judges? Doctors? Scientists? Or someone else entirely? This volume analyses how effectively criminal law operates as a forum for resolving ethical conflict in the delivery of health care. It addresses key questions such as: how does criminal law regulate controversial bioethical areas? What effect, positive or negative, does the use of criminal law have when regulating bioethical conflict? And can the law accommodate moral controversy? By exploring criminal law in theory (...) and in practice and examining the broad field of bioethics as opposed to the narrower terrain of medical ethics, it offers balanced arguments that will help readers form reasoned views on the ethical legitimacy of the invocation and use of criminal law to regulate medical and scientific practice and bioethical issues. (shrink)

This chapter argues that ethics plays an extremely important role in decision making and lawmaking in bioethics issues. These decisions are not simple case-by-case judgments; rather, they rest upon deeply considered ethical opinions. It also discusses the implications of this epistemic grounding for bioethics and its use of case law materials as an ethical resource. Finally, since many people base their moral judgments on religious beliefs, the religious implications of this legal-moral relationship are considered.