{"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}
{"title":"If abortion substantially risks homicide, it should be illegal.","authors":"Matthew Braddock","doi":"10.1007/s11017-025-09737-y","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s11017-025-09737-y","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Is abortion homicide, the morally unjust killing of a person? Should it be illegal? There is widespread disagreement. However, there is a way through the impasse. It is not necessary to establish whether abortion is homicide, only whether it substantially risks homicide. If abortion presents this risk of harm, then lawmakers have a powerful reason to criminalize it. This paper defends The Prevention Argument: if abortion substantially risks committing homicide after 10 weeks' gestation, then lawmakers should criminalize such abortions to prevent the foreseeable harm of mass homicide. Why 10 weeks? Because it is plausible that abortions after 10 weeks endanger an innocent person's life and, if so, the harm preventive case for criminalizing them is strong. This argument deserves a hearing because it has a modest burden of proof and relies on accepted normative principles like the harm principle. It could also be extended to earlier abortions.</p>","PeriodicalId":94251,"journal":{"name":"Theoretical medicine and bioethics","volume":" ","pages":"29-57"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12847071/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145717227","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":"Use of unproven interventions in clinical practice in the Declaration of Helsinki 2024: building on welcome changes.","authors":"Timothy Daly, Ignacio Mastroleo","doi":"10.1007/s11017-025-09725-2","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s11017-025-09725-2","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":94251,"journal":{"name":"Theoretical medicine and bioethics","volume":" ","pages":"71-74"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144984661","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":"Reconsidering the impairment argument against abortion.","authors":"Bruce P Blackshaw","doi":"10.1007/s11017-025-09736-z","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s11017-025-09736-z","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The impairment argument aims to establish the immorality of abortion without relying on the fetus's moral status. Instead, it appeals to logical consistency in moral reasoning: if it is immoral to impair a fetus by causing injury, then it must be even more immoral to impair it by causing death. For this reasoning to succeed, all the morally relevant details between these impairments must be held constant, which the author of the argument, Perry Hendricks, refers to as the ceteris paribus requirement. This requirement has proven difficult to define, and in his latest work, Hendricks suggests a more precise explanation of the ceteris paribus clause based on the valuable goods that obtain from impairments. He also outlines a test to determine if the ceteris paribus clause is broken, thereby causing the impairment argument to fail. In this paper, I argue that this new formulation is too narrow, resulting in fatal counterexamples. Accordingly, I show that in addition to valuable goods, the harms of impairment must be considered, as well as the reasons why impairing a fetus is considered immoral. I demonstrate that these reasons ultimately rest on one's view of the fetus' moral status, rendering the impairment argument superfluous.</p>","PeriodicalId":94251,"journal":{"name":"Theoretical medicine and bioethics","volume":" ","pages":"59-70"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145688880","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":"Reviewers, 2025.","authors":"","doi":"10.1007/s11017-026-09739-4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11017-026-09739-4","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":94251,"journal":{"name":"Theoretical medicine and bioethics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-01-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146021000","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":"McClimans, Leah M. Patient-centered measurement: ethics, epistemology, and dialogue in contemporary medicine. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2024. ISBN: 9.780.197.572.078 (Hardback).","authors":"Silvia Ceruti","doi":"10.1007/s11017-025-09735-0","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11017-025-09735-0","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":94251,"journal":{"name":"Theoretical medicine and bioethics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145656738","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}