{"title":"End-of-Life Decisions for Socially Isolated Patients: Lessons from New York.","authors":"Robert N Swidler","doi":"10.1080/15265161.2025.2530711","DOIUrl":"10.1080/15265161.2025.2530711","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":50962,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Bioethics","volume":"25 9","pages":"113-116"},"PeriodicalIF":20.8,"publicationDate":"2025-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144876665","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Procuring Organs from Unrepresented Patients: Amend the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act.","authors":"Thaddeus Mason Pope","doi":"10.1080/15265161.2025.2529944","DOIUrl":"10.1080/15265161.2025.2529944","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":50962,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Bioethics","volume":"25 9","pages":"105-108"},"PeriodicalIF":20.8,"publicationDate":"2025-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144876672","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Identity Is What Matters in Death Determination, Not the Survival of Consciousness.","authors":"Adam Omelianchuk","doi":"10.1080/15265161.2025.2529945","DOIUrl":"10.1080/15265161.2025.2529945","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":50962,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Bioethics","volume":"25 9","pages":"20-22"},"PeriodicalIF":20.8,"publicationDate":"2025-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144876667","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Non-Beneficial or Harmful: Furthering the Futility Discussion.","authors":"Brandy M Fox, Micah Hester","doi":"10.1080/15265161.2025.2530708","DOIUrl":"10.1080/15265161.2025.2530708","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":50962,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Bioethics","volume":"25 9","pages":"100-102"},"PeriodicalIF":20.8,"publicationDate":"2025-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144876671","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Social Value Misconception in Clinical Research.","authors":"Jake Earl, Liza Dawson, Annette Rid","doi":"10.1080/15265161.2024.2371119","DOIUrl":"10.1080/15265161.2024.2371119","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Clinical researchers should help respect the autonomy and promote the well-being of prospective study participants by helping them make voluntary, informed decisions about enrollment. However, participants often exhibit poor understanding of important information about clinical research. Bioethicists have given special attention to \"misconceptions\" about clinical research that can compromise participants' decision-making, most notably the \"therapeutic misconception.\" These misconceptions typically involve false beliefs about a study's purpose, or risks or potential benefits for participants. In this article, we describe a misconception involving false beliefs about a study's potential benefits for non-participants, or its expected social value. This social value misconception can compromise altruistically motivated participants' decision-making, potentially threatening their autonomy and well-being. We show how the social value misconception raises ethical concerns for inherently low-value research, hyped research, and even ordinary research, and advocate for empirical and normative work to help understand and counteract this misconception's potential negative impacts on participants.</p>","PeriodicalId":50962,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Bioethics","volume":" ","pages":"61-77"},"PeriodicalIF":20.8,"publicationDate":"2025-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141617521","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ryan H Nelson, Brent Kious, Emily Largent, Bryanna Moore, Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby
{"title":"Is Suffering a Useless Concept?","authors":"Ryan H Nelson, Brent Kious, Emily Largent, Bryanna Moore, Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby","doi":"10.1080/15265161.2024.2353799","DOIUrl":"10.1080/15265161.2024.2353799","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>\"Suffering\" is a central concept within bioethics and often a crucial consideration in medical decision making. As used in practice, however, the concept risks being uninformative, ambiguous, or even misleading. In this paper, we consider a series of cases in which \"suffering\" is invoked and analyze them in light of prominent theories of suffering. We then outline ethical hazards that arise as a result of imprecise usage of the concept and offer practical recommendations for avoiding them. Appeals to suffering are often getting at something ethically important. But this is where the work of ethics begins, not where it ends.</p>","PeriodicalId":50962,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Bioethics","volume":" ","pages":"12-19"},"PeriodicalIF":20.8,"publicationDate":"2025-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141262830","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Genital Modifications in Prepubescent Minors: When May Clinicians Ethically Proceed?","authors":"","doi":"10.1080/15265161.2024.2353823","DOIUrl":"10.1080/15265161.2024.2353823","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>When is it ethically permissible for clinicians to surgically intervene into the genitals of a legal minor? We distinguish between <i>voluntary</i> and <i>nonvoluntary</i> procedures and focus on <i>nonvoluntary</i> procedures, specifically in prepubescent minors (\"children\"). We do not address procedures in adolescence or adulthood. With respect to children categorized as female at birth who have no apparent differences of sex development (i.e., non-intersex or \"endosex\" females) there is a near-universal ethical consensus in the Global North. This consensus holds that clinicians may not perform <i>any</i> nonvoluntary genital cutting or surgery, from \"cosmetic\" labiaplasty to medicalized ritual \"pricking\" of the vulva, insofar as the procedure is not strictly necessary to protect the child's physical health. All other motivations, including possible psychosocial, cultural, subjective-aesthetic, or prophylactic benefits as judged by doctors or parents, are seen as categorically inappropriate grounds for a clinician to proceed with a <i>nonvoluntary</i> genital procedure in this population. We argue that the main ethical reasons capable of supporting this consensus turn not on empirically contestable benefit-risk calculations, but on a fundamental concern to respect the child's privacy, bodily integrity, developing sexual boundaries, and (future) genital autonomy. We show that these ethical reasons are sound. However, as we argue, they do not only apply to endosex female children, but rather to all children regardless of sex characteristics, including those with intersex traits and endosex males. We conclude, therefore, that as a matter of justice, inclusivity, and gender equality in medical-ethical policy (we do not take a position as to criminal law), clinicians should not be permitted to perform any nonvoluntary genital cutting or surgery in prepubescent minors, irrespective of the latter's sex traits or gender assignment, unless urgently necessary to protect their physical health. By contrast, we suggest that <i>voluntary</i> surgeries in older individuals might, under certain conditions, permissibly be performed for a wider range of reasons, including reasons of self-identity or psychosocial well-being, in keeping with the circumstances, values, and explicit needs and preferences of the persons so concerned. Note: Because our position is tied to clinicians' widely accepted role-specific duties as medical practitioners within regulated healthcare systems, we do not consider genital procedures performed outside of a healthcare context (e.g., for religious reasons) or by persons other than licensed healthcare providers working in their professional capacity.</p>","PeriodicalId":50962,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Bioethics","volume":" ","pages":"53-102"},"PeriodicalIF":17.0,"publicationDate":"2025-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141635626","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Informed Consent Under Ignorance.","authors":"Daniel Villiger","doi":"10.1080/15265161.2023.2296429","DOIUrl":"10.1080/15265161.2023.2296429","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In recent years, an old challenge to informed consent has been rediscovered: the challenge of ignorance. Several authors argue that due to the presence of irreducible ignorance in certain treatments, giving informed consent to these treatments is not possible. The present paper examines in what ways ignorance is believed to prevent informed consent and which treatments are affected by that. At this, it becomes clear that if the challenge of ignorance truly holds, it poses a major problem to informed consent. The paper argues, however, that from both an empirical and a theoretical point of view, it is not convincing that ignorance prevents informed consent. Still, it seems important that the presence of irreducible ignorance is openly discussed during the informed consent process.</p>","PeriodicalId":50962,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Bioethics","volume":" ","pages":"126-138"},"PeriodicalIF":17.0,"publicationDate":"2025-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139106888","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"From Technocracy to Democracy: The Need for Another Translational Justice.","authors":"Keiichiro Yamamoto, Tomohide Ibuki, Eisuke Nakazawa","doi":"10.1080/15265161.2025.2497999","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2025.2497999","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":50962,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Bioethics","volume":"25 6","pages":"48-50"},"PeriodicalIF":17.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144235873","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}