IF 2.3 2区哲学

Bioethics Pub Date : 2026-10-17 DOI: 10.1111/bioe.70202

Rui Deng, Ruiping Fan

{"title":"Why Social Egg Freezing for Single Women Should Not Be Prohibited: A Confucian Perspective.","authors":"Rui Deng, Ruiping Fan","doi":"10.1111/bioe.70202","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/bioe.70202","url":null,"abstract":"Beginning with a recent high-profile case in mainland China, this paper argues that the current prohibition on social egg freezing for single women cannot be justified from a Confucian ethical perspective. We first explain why Confucian ethics provides a normatively appropriate and socially salient framework for evaluating reproductive policy in the Chinese context. We then articulate a theoretical model that we term Confucian familist virtue ethics. A central contribution of the paper is to distinguish between Confucian ethical ideals and its minimal standards. While the ideals-such as timely marriage and childbearing within an intact family-are properly the objects of moral aspiration and voluntary cultivation, only violations of the minimal standards warrant legal prohibition. On this basis, we develop three lines of argument to show that although social egg freezing by single women may fall short of Confucian aspirational ideals, it does not violate the ethical minimum. Accordingly, it does not justify coercive state intervention. Finally, we examine the predictive concern that permitting social egg freezing would undermine marital norms or substantially increase single motherhood. We argue that such negative effects are empirically uncertain and in principle manageable through regulatory design. They therefore fail to provide sufficient grounds for a categorical prohibition.","PeriodicalId":55379,"journal":{"name":"Bioethics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2026-10-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149217345","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

From Imminence to Institutional Incidence: Rethinking Fetal Status Beyond Metaphysical Classification. 从迫近性到制度性：超越形而上分类的胎儿地位反思。

IF 2.3 2区哲学

Bioethics Pub Date : 2026-10-17 DOI: 10.1111/bioe.70203

Johnny Sakr

{"title":"From Imminence to Institutional Incidence: Rethinking Fetal Status Beyond Metaphysical Classification.","authors":"Johnny Sakr","doi":"10.1111/bioe.70203","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/bioe.70203","url":null,"abstract":"This response examines Joel Cox's proposal to reconceptualise fetal moral status as \"imminent personhood.\" While welcoming Cox's effort to move beyond static potential/actual personhood binaries, it argues that the concept of imminence remains metaphysically suggestive but institutionally under-determined. Legal systems cannot operate on continuously variable metaphysical properties; they require discrete and administrable allocations of rights, duties, and powers. To address this gap, the paper proposes an institutional incidence framework, in which legal status is understood as the selective assignment of juridical incidents according to regulatory objectives without treating metaphysical classification as dispositive. On this view, the central question is not simply whether the fetus is a person (actual, potential, or imminent), but which incidents of legal status should attach at particular stages and for particular regulatory purposes. This reframes the legal regulation of abortion as a problem of institutional design rather than ontological determination. The paper argues that such an approach better explains existing legal practice, avoids threshold arbitrariness, and enables stable legal regulation amid persistent moral disagreement. While Cox's imminence proposal captures an important phenomenology of fetal development, an institutional incidence framework provides a more durable foundation for legal and policy architecture in pluralistic societies.","PeriodicalId":55379,"journal":{"name":"Bioethics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2026-10-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149217296","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Respectful Debiasing in Democratic Deliberation 在民主审议中尊重偏见。

IF 2.3 2区哲学

Bioethics Pub Date : 2026-10-14 Epub Date: 2026-07-13 DOI: 10.1111/bioe.70156

Shang Long Yeo

引用次数: 0

A Critical Assessment of the Two Previous Public Deliberation Workshops in South Korea 对韩国前两次公众审议研讨会的批判性评价。

IF 2.3 2区哲学

Bioethics Pub Date : 2026-10-14 Epub Date: 2026-09-14 DOI: 10.1111/bioe.70190

Kyungdo Lee

{"title":"A Critical Assessment of the Two Previous Public Deliberation Workshops in South Korea","authors":"Kyungdo Lee","doi":"10.1111/bioe.70190","DOIUrl":"10.1111/bioe.70190","url":null,"abstract":"Mini-publics, which constitute a microcosmic public deliberation process, are increasingly being used in addressing broad policy decisions. Following the trend of applying mini-publics in diverse policy decisions, the Korean National Health Insurance System experimentally held 16 public deliberation workshops since 2012. This study discusses the 5th and 10th workshops among the 16 conducted, using them as a case example to evaluate the utility and informativeness of mini-publics in health policy making. After briefly explaining the method and results of the two workshops, this study reviews the main arguments that call for the use of public deliberation in societal decisions. Based on these arguments, the study concludes that the results of the two workshops are insufficient to serve as useful information for relevant health policy making and the reasons therefor. The study posits that similar to the two workshops, mini-publics sometimes fail to provide informative results for technically oriented questions, result in serious disagreements and fall short of achieving some deliberative ideals, such as equal participation, reasonableness, and fairness. Given that running a public deliberation process is generally cost-consuming, despite its potential benefits, the current widespread applications of mini-publics should be carefully examined.","PeriodicalId":55379,"journal":{"name":"Bioethics","volume":"40 9","pages":"1039-1049"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2026-10-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/bioe.70190","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148972500","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Maintaining the Divide: The Legitimate Role for the Public in Health and Science Policymaking 维持鸿沟：公众在卫生和科学决策中的合法角色。

IF 2.3 2区哲学

Bioethics Pub Date : 2026-10-14 Epub Date: 2026-07-13 DOI: 10.1111/bioe.70154

Joshua J. Kassner

{"title":"Maintaining the Divide: The Legitimate Role for the Public in Health and Science Policymaking","authors":"Joshua J. Kassner","doi":"10.1111/bioe.70154","DOIUrl":"10.1111/bioe.70154","url":null,"abstract":"Many of the most pressing policy choices we face are matters of health and science. How should we prepare for the next global pandemic? How should we manage the disruption and promise of artificial intelligence? How should we address the challenge of climate change? These choices are permeated by intractable disagreement, especially disagreement over the moral and prudential values we rely on to decide. Nonetheless, we must decide. Proceduralism is one of the most widely endorsed answers to the challenge that such normative disagreement presents. The policy choices we face, however, also include descriptive questions. Given the significant difference between these types of questions, the respective roles they ought to play in our collective decision-making, and the fact that their respective answers ought to be measured against different standards of justification and legitimacy, I argue that proceduralism fails as a complete account of legitimate decision-making and offer a more nuanced and epistemically informed account of legitimate decision-making. I conclude by assessing the implications the alternative account has for the role that the public should play in legitimate health and science policy-making, arguing that the public ought to play a central role in making normative decisions, but should be largely excluded from a participatory role in inquiries meant to decide matters of policy-relevant descriptive fact.","PeriodicalId":55379,"journal":{"name":"Bioethics","volume":"40 9","pages":"986-992"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2026-10-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/bioe.70154","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148431599","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

How Bioethicists Can Contribute to Democratic Deliberation 生物伦理学家如何促进民主审议。

IF 2.3 2区哲学

Bioethics Pub Date : 2026-10-14 Epub Date: 2026-09-11 DOI: 10.1111/bioe.70168

Ben Saunders

引用次数: 0

Should We Use Citizens' Assemblies to Make Health Policy? 我们应该利用公民大会制定卫生政策吗？

IF 2.3 2区哲学

Bioethics Pub Date : 2026-10-14 Epub Date: 2026-04-21 DOI: 10.1111/bioe.70111

Daniel Hutton Ferris, Johannes Kniess

引用次数: 0

Moral Parliament Tool for Allocating Healthcare Resources 用于分配医疗资源的道德议会工具。

IF 2.3 2区哲学

Bioethics Pub Date : 2026-10-14 Epub Date: 2026-04-28 DOI: 10.1111/bioe.70110

Hayley Clatterbuck, Bob Fischer, Arvo Muñoz Morán, Derek Shiller

引用次数: 0

Acting on the Voicelessness Challenge to Democratic Deliberation: A Six-Actor Framework 对民主审议的无声挑战采取行动：六行动者框架。

IF 2.3 2区哲学

Bioethics Pub Date : 2026-10-14 Epub Date: 2026-09-09 DOI: 10.1111/bioe.70180

Julian C. Jamison

{"title":"Acting on the Voicelessness Challenge to Democratic Deliberation: A Six-Actor Framework","authors":"Julian C. Jamison","doi":"10.1111/bioe.70180","DOIUrl":"10.1111/bioe.70180","url":null,"abstract":"Political philosophers have long recognized that key stakeholders in policy decisions—children, future generations, nonhuman animals, and individuals with severe cognitive impairments—are structurally unable to participate in the deliberative processes meant to legitimate those decisions. This paper argues that such “voicelessness” is not a marginal complication to be accommodated at the edges of deliberative democracy (DD), but a first-order problem for exactly the large-scale, high-stakes domains—health, biotechnology, and environmental policy chief among them—where the voiceless often constitute the majority of those affected. This exclusion risks systematically neglecting crucial interests and suggests that some degree of surrogacy or representation by proxy is functionally unavoidable, whether or not DD's more demanding commitment to reasoned, preference-transforming deliberation is in play. Building on this recognition, and after critiquing the feasibility of idealized deliberative democracy as well as partial solutions implied by existing work, this paper's central contribution is a more pragmatic, ethically robust Six-Actor Framework. The framework delineates specific roles for policymakers, target populations, general laypeople, technical domain experts, and two novel categories: “benevolent partisans” (e.g., caregivers) and “agent-specific experts” tasked with interpreting or forecasting the interests of the voiceless. The utility of this structured approach is illustrated through three high-stakes policy domains: constructing global health metrics (DALYs) for cost-effectiveness analysis, animal welfare regulation, and the challenges involved when impacting the very existence of future people. This paper offers a path toward a policy process that is both practicable and ethically defensible, specifically for large-scale, high-priority global challenges.","PeriodicalId":55379,"journal":{"name":"Bioethics","volume":"40 9","pages":"1000-1008"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2026-10-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/bioe.70180","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148914501","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Does Public Engagement Have a Role in Biomedical Clinical Research? 公众参与在生物医学临床研究中有作用吗？

IF 2.3 2区哲学

Bioethics Pub Date : 2026-10-14 Epub Date: 2026-05-19 DOI: 10.1111/bioe.70123

Rosamond Rhodes, Gary Ostertag

{"title":"Does Public Engagement Have a Role in Biomedical Clinical Research?","authors":"Rosamond Rhodes, Gary Ostertag","doi":"10.1111/bioe.70123","DOIUrl":"10.1111/bioe.70123","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper, we focus narrowly on the question of the relevance of public engagement in clinical research (PER). Over the past 20 years, demands for public engagement in research have grown dramatically in their number and scope. In the same period, we have also witnessed escalating attacks on expertise in general and science in particular. This paper responds to these developments. We draw on themes in John Rawls's Political Liberalism to make two distinct points which intertwine in the current anti-science, anti-expertise movement and shed light on the pro-PER phenomenon. First, we emphasize the importance of Rawls's awareness of the fragility of liberal democracy and, relatedly, the necessity of observing “the duty of civility,” thus providing a basis for critiquing the tenor of PER advocacy. Second, we draw on Rawlsian insights on justice to explain why PER is not an issue of justice. We also employ findings from studies on human psychology to illuminate the significant difference between expert thinking and lay thinking. Noting the absence of evidence for PER producing benefits, and drawing on our own experience, we make the case that PER has no role in clinical research. It undermines accountability, diverts resources, and complicates the already burdensome research processes.","PeriodicalId":55379,"journal":{"name":"Bioethics","volume":"40 9","pages":"976-985"},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2026-10-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147977215","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

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