{"title":"Clarifying the definition of 'abortion' in law and clinical practice.","authors":"Johnny Sakr","doi":"10.1007/s11017-026-09750-9","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11017-026-09750-9","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":94251,"journal":{"name":"Theoretical medicine and bioethics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-04-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147629052","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Hana Abbasian, Perisa Ashar, Imeth Illamperuma, Tomisin Adebari
{"title":"Epistemic pluralism and justice at the end of life.","authors":"Hana Abbasian, Perisa Ashar, Imeth Illamperuma, Tomisin Adebari","doi":"10.1007/s11017-026-09751-8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11017-026-09751-8","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":94251,"journal":{"name":"Theoretical medicine and bioethics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-04-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147629626","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ethical thinking and practice in the healthcare professions.","authors":"David T Ozar","doi":"10.1007/s11017-026-09745-6","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s11017-026-09745-6","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Every aspect of what healthcare professionals do for patients is ethically significant, so it might seem strange that, when healthcare professionals are asked if anything ethically significant has occurred, their answer frequently is: \"No, there were no ethical issues here.\" But this answer does not mean that nothing ethically significant occurred during their caregiving. For healthcare professionals attend to the ethical content of their caregiving so routinely, so habitually, that their doing this is rarely thought of as involving a method of ethical reflection. This essay will examine this kind of ethical reflection in detail: its main components, how it works in practice, and how to grow in doing it effectively.</p>","PeriodicalId":94251,"journal":{"name":"Theoretical medicine and bioethics","volume":" ","pages":"85-101"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13021680/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147505738","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Denial of benefits: reply to Cordeiro-Rodrigues.","authors":"Jeremy W Skrzypek","doi":"10.1007/s11017-026-09742-9","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s11017-026-09742-9","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":94251,"journal":{"name":"Theoretical medicine and bioethics","volume":" ","pages":"141-144"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146115509","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Relational ethics and the justification of parental permission in pediatrics.","authors":"Christopher Bobier","doi":"10.1007/s11017-026-09740-x","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s11017-026-09740-x","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Beyond legal requirement, why should physicians obtain parental permission to treat a pediatric patient? Children are not the property of their parents, physicians have the relevant medical expertise, and a physician's primary responsibility is to the child, not the parents. In response, scholars have provided several instrumental reasons grounded in the parent-child relationship beyond legal obligation (e.g., parents know their child best; parents can resist substandard care; doing so fosters parental buy-in). While I agree with these reasons, they are not enough to support parental permission in every case in which it should be obtained. Accordingly, I defend a further reason: physicians should obtain parental permission as part of their role responsibility in the physician-parent relationship. I delineate this largely neglected but morally significant relationship and explain why it helps account for physician responsibilities toward parents in pediatric care.</p>","PeriodicalId":94251,"journal":{"name":"Theoretical medicine and bioethics","volume":" ","pages":"103-120"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146168634","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Killing and letting die: consequence responsibility in guidance control.","authors":"Mingrui Zhao","doi":"10.1007/s11017-026-09744-7","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s11017-026-09744-7","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This paper reassesses the alleged moral difference between killing and letting die by shifting the analysis from permissibility to the allocation of consequence responsibility. Within Fischer and Ravizza's guidance-control framework, responsibility is two-staged: agents are conduct-responsible when their behaviour issues from a mechanism they own that is at least moderately reasons-responsive; and they are consequence-responsible when, in addition, the death arises along a non-deviant, normatively intelligible route from that behaviour. I then operationalise the second stage via a disciplined counterfactual-subtraction procedure that is neutral between actions and omissions and that distinguishes consequence-particulars from consequence-universals. Applied to canonical contrasts, the framework yields patterned results: where both killing and letting die satisfy (or both fail) the same responsibility conditions, they are moral equals with respect to the death; where they come apart, any asymmetry tracks ownership, reasons-responsiveness, or decisive causal contribution rather than the surface doing/allowing label. The upshot is a unified, practice-usable standard for foreseeable-death contexts in end-of-life medicine and clinical governance, clarifying documentation, role delineation, and the evidential focus for retrospective appraisal without presupposing a default moral privilege for omissions.</p>","PeriodicalId":94251,"journal":{"name":"Theoretical medicine and bioethics","volume":" ","pages":"121-133"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13021792/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146222706","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Euthanasia in light of Epicurean ethics and metaphysics.","authors":"Luís Cordeiro-Rodrigues","doi":"10.1007/s11017-025-09738-x","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s11017-025-09738-x","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":94251,"journal":{"name":"Theoretical medicine and bioethics","volume":" ","pages":"135-139"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145770112","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Carlin, Nathan: The secularization of medicine: ritual, salvation, and prophecy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025. 256 pp. (print) ISBN 9780197574003.","authors":"Monica Consolandi","doi":"10.1007/s11017-026-09743-8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11017-026-09743-8","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":94251,"journal":{"name":"Theoretical medicine and bioethics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-02-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146204433","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Uncertainty tolerance in healthcare: towards a normative conception.","authors":"Paul K J Han, Bjørn Hofmann","doi":"10.1007/s11017-025-09731-4","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s11017-025-09731-4","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This paper critically analyzes the meaning of uncertainty tolerance (UT), a phenomenon of growing interest in healthcare. Medical practitioners, educators, and researchers have increasingly acknowledged the importance of UT for both clinicians and patients, and called for greater attention to improving it. However, we argue that the prevailing conception of UT is an inadequate normative ideal, due to its narrow understanding of uncertainty as exclusively an aversive state entailing negative outcomes, and of tolerance as merely the endurance of these outcomes. We show how this endurance-based, outcomes-focused conception of UT is both theoretically incoherent and practically unhelpful. We make the case for an alternative conception based not on endurance but adaptation, and focused not on outcomes but moral virtues, which we view as instrumental capacities that enable adaptation. We develop a provisional integrative taxonomy of these key virtues, discuss both the promises and challenges of this new adaptation-based, virtue-focused conception of UT, and identify fruitful directions for future work.</p>","PeriodicalId":94251,"journal":{"name":"Theoretical medicine and bioethics","volume":" ","pages":"5-27"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12648382/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145305216","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Of rats and humans: rethinking physiological boundaries.","authors":"Ngala Elvis Mbiydzenyuy, Mbawe Zulu","doi":"10.1007/s11017-025-09733-2","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s11017-025-09733-2","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":94251,"journal":{"name":"Theoretical medicine and bioethics","volume":" ","pages":"75-78"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145234736","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}