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19 results in Cambridge Elements

Pure Cloning

Pure Cloning
  • Tuija Takala, Matti Häyry
  • Published online:
    14 February 2025
    Print publication:
    13 March 2025
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  • This Element explores the rationality and morality of the kind of human reproductive cloning that does not involve genetic enhancements or other biological alterations in the individuals produced. The analysis is needed because, sooner or later, the technique will be safe enough to be tested; yet its pros and cons have not been sufficiently investigated. The literature abounds with defenses and criticisms of cloning but these do not distinguish between impure and pure forms, the one allowing the combination of reproduction and amendments, the other not. Therefore, cloning is condemned or condoned on grounds that have more to do with enhancements than the reproductive act. This Element shows how the conceptual landscape changes when the distinction is made visible and the arguments targeted at the production of a new life without the support or burden of the enhancement factor. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
The Artificial Womb on Trial

The Artificial Womb on Trial
  • Teresa Baron
  • Published online:
    07 February 2025
    Print publication:
    27 February 2025
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  • Artificial womb technology is approaching over the scientific horizon. Recent proof-of-principle experiments using foetal animals have prompted a new surge of bioethical interest in the topic: scholars have asked what ectogenesis would mean for individuals, family, oppressed groups, and society at large; how we can or should regulate the technology; and whose interests motivate ectogenic research. However, a full investigation of the bioethics of ectogenesis must ask, 'how do we get there?' This Element places the research and development process itself under the microscope and explores the bioethical issues raised by human subject trials of ectogenic prototypes. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
The Three Pillars of Ethical Research with Nonhuman Primates

The Three Pillars of Ethical Research with Nonhuman Primates
  • A Work Developed in Collaboration with the National Anti-Vivisection Society
  • L. Syd M Johnson, Andrew Fenton, Mary Lee Jensvold
  • Published online:
    04 December 2024
    Print publication:
    02 January 2025
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  • The Three Pillars (Harmonization, Replacement, and Justice) describe an ethical path forward and away from the use of nonhuman primates in harmful research and scientific use. Conducting nonhuman primate research in an ethical way that acknowledges their moral importance requires satisfying more rigorous guidelines and regulations modeled on those that apply to similarly vulnerable human subjects, especially children and incarcerated persons. This Element argues for the moral necessity of harmonizing human and nonhuman primate research ethics, regulations, and guidelines in a way that protects all primates, human and nonhuman. The authors call for the replacement of nonhuman primates in research with human-relevant methods that do not simply shift research onto other nonhuman animals, and challenge publics, governments, and scientific communities worldwide to implement justice in the selection and use of all research subjects. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Capacity, Informed Consent and Third-Party Decision-Making

Capacity, Informed Consent and Third-Party Decision-Making
  • Jacob M. Appel
  • Published online:
    03 June 2024
    Print publication:
    17 October 2024
  • This Element examines three related topics in the field of bioethics that arise frequently both in clinical care and in medico-legal settings: capacity, informed consent, and third-party decision-making. All three of these subjects have been shaped significantly by the shift from the paternalistic models of care that dominated medicine in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain prior to the 1960s to the present models that privilege patient autonomy. Each section traces the history of one of these topics and then explores the major ethics issues that arise as these issues are addressed in contemporary clinical practice, paying particular attention to the role that structural factors such as bias and social capital play in their use. In addition, the volume also discusses recent innovations and proposals for reform that may shape these subjects in the future in response both to technological advances and changes in societal priorities.
Euthanasia as Privileged Compassion

Euthanasia as Privileged Compassion
  • Martin Buijsen
  • Published online:
    17 May 2024
    Print publication:
    13 June 2024
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  • This Element overviews developments and issues in Dutch euthanasia practice. Following an outline of the history of the Dutch Euthanasia Act and a survey of the most critical trends and figures, some current issues are explored in depth: euthanasia and incompetency, euthanasia by nonphysicians, and euthanasia for those who consider their lives completed. This Element is intended for a general readership, including undergraduate students in law, medicine, or ethics. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
One Health Environmentalism

One Health Environmentalism
  • Benjamin Capps
  • Published online:
    19 April 2024
    Print publication:
    16 May 2024
  • One Health emerges from the contingent scientific, social, and political realities of environmentalism. The concept mixes the land, sea, and sky with geopolitics on the global stages of the United Nations and World Health Organization. It inspires new investment in conservation and public health, motivates interdisciplinary collaboration, and in practice implicates green economies and animal law as well. This Element does not tackle all of this but attempts to situate One Health in the catastrophe of COVID-19; a socio-ecological upheaval prophetic of the inevitable next pandemic evolving from planetary climate crisis of our own making. One Health Environmentalism argues that humanity's future depends upon extending an olive branch to biotic communities, by being less speciesist and less blind to the rights in nature.
Art and Artificial Intelligence

Art and Artificial Intelligence
  • Göran Hermerén
  • Published online:
    04 April 2024
    Print publication:
    02 May 2024
  • The overriding question discussed in this Element can be stated simply as: can computers create art? This Element presents an overview of the controversies raised by various answers to this question. A major difficulty is that the technology is developing rapidly, and there are still many uncertainties and knowledge gaps as to what is possible today and in the near future. But a number of controversial issues are identified and discussed. The position taken on controversial issues will depend on assumptions made about the technology, about the nature and location of consciousness, about art and creativity. Therefore, a number of hypothetical answers are outlined, related to the assumptions made.
Conscientious Objection in Medicine

Conscientious Objection in Medicine
  • Mark Wicclair
  • Published online:
    12 March 2024
    Print publication:
    11 April 2024
  • The Element examines ethical and conceptual issues about conscientious objection in medicine. Concepts analyzed include conscientious objection, conscientious provision, conscience, moral complicity, and moral integrity. Several ongoing ethical controversies are identified and critically analyzed. One is a disagreement about whether conscientious objection is compatible with physicians' professional obligations. The Element argues that incompatibilists fail to offer a justifiable specification of professional obligations that supports their position. The Element also argues that a challenge for compatibilists who support a reason-giving requirement is to specify justifiable and unambiguous criteria for reviewing objectors' reasons. Arguments for and against requirements to inform and refer patients are critically analyzed, and an alternative, context-dependent requirement is offered. Another subject of controversy is about the justifiability of asymmetry between responses to conscientious objectors and conscientious providers. Typically, only the former receive accommodation. The Element critically examines arguments for asymmetry and maintains that none provides a convincing justification.
Philosophical, Medical, and Legal Controversies About Brain Death

Philosophical, Medical, and Legal Controversies About Brain Death
  • L. Syd M Johnson
  • Published online:
    22 February 2024
    Print publication:
    21 March 2024
  • This Element considers current legal, ethical, metaphysical, and medical controversies concerning brain death. It examines the implicit metaphysical and moral commitments and dualism implied by neurological criteria for death. When these commitments and worldview are not shared by patients and surrogates, they give rise to distrust in healthcare providers and systems, and to injustice, particularly when medicolegal definitions of death are coercively imposed on those who reject them. Ethical obligations to respect persons and patient autonomy, promote patient-centered care, foster and maintain trust, and respond to the demands of justice provide compelling ethical reasons for recognizing reasonable objections. Each section illustrates how seemingly academic debates about brain death have real, on-the-ground implications for patients and their families.
Antinatalism, Extinction, and the End of Procreative Self-Corruption

Antinatalism, Extinction, and the End of Procreative Self-Corruption
  • Matti Häyry, Amanda Sukenick
  • Published online:
    19 February 2024
    Print publication:
    14 March 2024
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  • This Element provides an exploration of antinatalism, the view that assigns a negative value to reproduction. First, the history of Western philosophy as a two-and-a-half millennia reaction to antinatalist sentiments. Human life has no obvious meaning and philosophers have been forced to build elaborate theories to invent imaginary purposes. Second, analysis of the concept of antinatalism in the light of human extinction. If people stop having children, the species will cease to exist, and this prospect has prompted attempts to find alternatives and excuses. Third, outlines a normative view defending antinatalism both theoretically and practically. If it is wrong to bring about suffering in the absence of redeeming meaning and if it is possible to create meaning only by imposing a pronatalist mentality upon children before they can make up their own minds, parents morally corrupt themselves by procreating. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
The Methods of Neuroethics

The Methods of Neuroethics
  • Luca Malatesti, John McMillan
  • Published online:
    12 January 2024
    Print publication:
    08 February 2024
  • This Element offers a framework for exploring the methodological challenges of neuroethics. The aim is to provide a roadmap for the methodological assumptions, and related pitfalls, involved in the interdisciplinary investigation of the ethical and legal implications of neuroscientific research and technology. It illustrates these points via the debate about the ethical and legal responsibility of psychopaths. Argument and the conceptual analysis of normative concepts such as 'personhood' or 'human agency' is central to neuroethics. This Element discusses different approaches to establishing norms and principles that regulate the practices addressed by neuroethics and that involve the use of such concepts. How to characterize the psychological features central to neuroethics, such as autonomy, consent, moral understanding, moral motivation, and control is a methodological challenge. In addition, there are epistemic challenges when determining the validity of neuroscientific evidence.
What Placebos Teach Us about Health and Care

What Placebos Teach Us about Health and Care
  • A Philosopher Pops a Pill
  • Dien Ho
  • Published online:
    26 September 2023
    Print publication:
    14 December 2023
  • Placebo effects raise some fundamental questions concerning the nature of clinical and medical research. This Element begins with an overview of the different roles placebos play, followed by a survey of significant studies and dominant views about placebo mechanisms. It then critically examines the concept of placebo and offers a new definition that avoids the pitfalls of other attempts. The main philosophical lesson is that background medical theories provide the ontology for clinical and medical research. Because these theories often contain incoherent and arbitrary classifications, the concept of placebo inherits the same messiness. The Element concludes by highlighting some impending challenges for placebo studies.
Immune Ethics

Immune Ethics
  • Walter Glannon
  • Published online:
    14 July 2023
    Print publication:
    03 August 2023
  • The immune system maintains homeostasis within human organisms and protects them from pathogenic threats. But sometimes it cannot provide this protection on its own, and vaccines may be necessary to ensure our health and survival. Immune functions can become dysregulated and result in autoimmune disease or multi-system damage. Pharmacological and genomic interventions may activate or modulate immune functions to prevent these outcomes. This Element is an analysis and discussion of some of the ethical implications of these interventions. After describing the main components of innate and adaptive immunity and how it might be enhanced, it considers the potential benefit and harm from vaccines against addiction and viruses, immunotherapy for cancer, neuroimmunomodulating agents to prevent or treat neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative diseases, and gene editing of immunity to enable xenotransplantation and prevent infectious disease. The Element concludes with an exploration of a possible outcome of natural competition between humans and microbes.
Pathographies of Mental Illness

Pathographies of Mental Illness
  • Nathan Carlin
  • Published online:
    22 September 2022
    Print publication:
    20 October 2022
  • This Element is a survey of the field of pathographies of mental illness. It explores classic texts in the field as well as other selected contemporary memoirs. In doing so, the reader is introduced to psychiatric information about various mental illnesses through a narrative lens, emphasizing experience. Because clinical research is evidenced-based and aims to produce generalizable knowledge (i.e., trends), the reading of pathographies can complement these findings with practical experiential insights. By pairing psychiatric information with pathographies, certain personal themes become apparent that are different from the empirical trends identified by scientific and medical researchers. Based on the survey presented here, this Element identifies seven such themes, laying the foundation for future research, inquiry, practice, and policy.
Controlling Love

Controlling Love
  • The Ethics and Desirability of Using ‘Love Drugs'
  • Peter Herissone-Kelly
  • Published online:
    25 August 2022
    Print publication:
    15 September 2022
  • Recent research in neurochemistry has shown there to be a number of chemical compounds that are implicated in the patterns of lust, attraction, and attachment that undergird romantic love. For example, there is evidence that the phenomenon of attachment is associated with the action of oxytocin and vasopressin. There is therefore some reason to suppose that patterns of lust, attraction, and attachment could be regulated via manipulation of these substances in the brain: in other words, by their use as 'love drugs'. A growing bioethical literature asks searching questions about this prospect, and especially about the use of such drugs to enhance or reignite attachment in flagging relationships. This Element examines some of the central arguments on the topic, and sounds a note of caution. It urges that there are reasons to think the states of attachment produced or facilitated by the use of such drugs would not be desirable.
Bioethics, Public Reason, and Religion

Bioethics, Public Reason, and Religion
  • The Liberalism Problem
  • Leonard M. Fleck
  • Published online:
    12 August 2022
    Print publication:
    01 September 2022
  • Can religious arguments provide a reasonable, justified basis for restrictive (coercive) public policies regarding numerous ethically and politically controversial medical interventions, such as research with human embryos, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, or using artificial wombs? With Rawls, we answer negatively. Liberally reasonable policies must address these controversial technologies on the basis of public reasons accessible to all, even if not fully agreeable by all. Further, public democratic deliberation requires participants to construct these policies as citizens who are agnostic with respect to the truth of all comprehensive doctrines, whether secular or religious. The goal of these deliberations is practical, namely, to identify reasonable policy options that reflect fair terms of cooperation in a liberal, pluralistic society. Further, religious advocates may participate in formal policymaking processes as reasonable liberal citizens. Finally, public reason evolves through the deliberative process and all the novel technological challenges medicine generates for bioethics and related public policies.
Roles of Justice in Bioethics

Roles of Justice in Bioethics
  • Matti Häyry
  • Published online:
    19 July 2022
    Print publication:
    11 August 2022
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  • This Element traces the origins and development of bioethics, the principles and values involved in the discipline, and the roles of justice among these principles and values. The main tasks given to the concept of justice have since the late 1970s been nondiscrimination in research, prioritization in medical practice, and redistribution in healthcare. The Element argues that in a world challenged by planet-wide political and environmental threats this is not sufficient. The nature and meaning of justice has to be rethought. The Element does this by dissecting current bioethical approaches in the light of theories of justice as partly clashing interpretations of equality. The overall findings are twofold. Seen against the background of global concerns, justice in bioethics has become a silent guardian of economic sustainability. Seen against the same background, we should set our aims higher. Justice can, and must, be put to better use than it presently is. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Responsibility for Health

Responsibility for Health
  • Sven Ove Hansson
  • Published online:
    19 July 2022
    Print publication:
    11 August 2022
  • This Element offers a broad perspective on responsibility for health. This includes responsibilities in the prevention of disease and accidents, and in the creation of healthcare for all. The professional responsibilities of physicians and nurses are explored, and so are the responsibilities that we all have for our own health. Many of the central problems in healthcare ethics are discussed from a responsibility perspective, for instance paternalism, informed consent, evidence-based medicine, alternative medicine, and the use of artificial intelligence in healthcare. In order to perform this analysis, conceptual tools for responsibility analysis are provided, such as the distinction between blame responsibility and task responsibility and various notions of causality that are relevant for our understanding of responsibility.
The Ethics of Consciousness

The Ethics of Consciousness
  • Walter Glannon
  • Published online:
    17 June 2022
    Print publication:
    14 July 2022
  • This Element examines the main ethical aspects of consciousness  It argues that consciousness is not intrinsically valuable but has value or disvalue for individuals depending on its phenomenology (what it is like to be aware) and content (what one is aware of). These two components of awareness shape normative judgments about how ordered, disordered, altered, restored, diminished and suppressed conscious states can benefit or harm individuals. They also influence moral judgments about whether intentionally causing these states is permissible or impermissible and how these states can affect behavior. After describing its neurobiological basis, this Element discusses ethical and legal issues in six categories of consciousness: phenomenal and access consciousness; intraoperative awareness; prolonged disorders of consciousness, dissociative disorders, the role of consciousness in determining death; and altering and suppressing awareness near the end of life.