The Dual-Use Dilemma

UK Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, POSTnote 340, July 2009. Accompanying podcast available here: http://www.parliament.uk/about/podcasts/FlipsideofScientificFreedom.cfm

Science is primarily used to benefit humanity, but it can be misused, presenting scientists and others with an ethical quandary known as the dual-use dilemma. This note examines three scientific areas posing a significant risk of misuse and considers how to tackle dual-use dilemmas in these and other areas.

Absence of Significant Dissent Should be Sufficient for Deceased Donor Organ Procurement in New Zealand

Co-authored with Nick Douglas. Forthcoming in Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health.

New Zealand’s organ donation rates are among the lowest in the OECD. In a bid to increase organ availability, the New Zealand Human Tissue Act 2008 introduces new consent arrangements for deceased donor organ procurement. This article assesses these new arrangements and presents the case for further reform. The Human Tissue Act 2008 retains a strong consent requirement for organ procurement: organs may not be transplanted unless either the deceased or the family consents. We argue that organ availability could and should be increased by shifting from a model that requires consent to one that requires the absence of significant dissent. We recommend that New Zealand adopt either (1) an organ donation system similar to the existing system for ordering coronial post-mortems, or (2) a variant of the ‘opt-out’ system already in place in several other countries.

Destroying Unwanted Embryos in Research

Co-authored with Julian Savulescu. Published in EMBO Reports, 2009.

Medical Injury Compensation: Beyond 'No-Fault'

Published in the Medical Law Review, 2009.

Consequentialism and the Death Penalty

Published in American Journal of Bioethics, 2008. Co-authored with Dominic Wilkinson. This is our own pdf version. For the journal version, visit http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content%7Econtent=a905338576%7Edb=all

Moral Enhancement

Published in the Journal of Applied Philosophy, 2008.

Opponents of biomedical enhancement often claim that, even if such enhancement would benefit the enhanced, it would harm others. But this objection looks unpersuasive when the enhancement in question is a moral enhancement — an enhancement that will expectably leave the enhanced person with morally better motives than she had previously. In this article I (1) describe one type of psychological alteration that would plausibly qualify as a moral enhancement, (2) argue that we will, in the medium-term future, probably be able to induce such alterations via biomedical intervention, and (3) defend future engagement in such moral enhancements against possible objections. My aim is to present this kind of moral enhancement as a counter-example to the view that biomedical enhancement is always morally impermissible.

Ethics Committees and the Legality of Research

Published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, 2007.

One role of research ethics committees (RECs) is to assess the ethics of proposed health research. In some countries, RECs are also instructed to assess its legality. However, in other countries they are explicitly instructed not to do so. In this paper, I defend the claim that public policy should instruct RECs not to assess the legality of proposed research (‘‘the Claim’’). I initially defend a presumption in favour of the Claim, citing reasons for making research institutions solely responsible for assessing the legality of their own research. I then consider three arguments against the Claim which may over-ride this presumption—namely, that policy should instruct RECs to assess the legality of research because (1) doing so would minimise the costs of assessing the legality of research, (2) whether research is legal may partly determine whether it is ethical and (3) whether research is legal may constitute evidence for whether it is ethical. I reject the first two arguments and note that whether the third succeeds depends on the answer to a more fundamental question about the appropriate nature of REC ethical deliberation. I end with a brief discussion of this question, tentatively concluding that the third argument also fails.

Enhancement in Sport, and Enhancement outside Sport

Published in Studies in Ethics, Law, and Technology

Sport is one of the first areas in which enhancement has become commonplace. It is also one of the first areas in which the use of enhancement technologies has been heavily regulated. Some have thus seen sport as a testing ground for arguments about whether to permit enhancement. However, I argue that there are fairness-based objections to enhancement in sport that do not apply as strongly in some other areas of human activity. Thus, I claim that there will often be a stronger case for permitting enhancement outside of sport than for permitting enhancement in sport. I end by considering some methodological implications of this conclusion.