Ethics - Bioethics - Research

Bioethics for clinicians: 10. Research ethics.

Medical research involving human subjects raises complex ethical, legal and social issues. Investigators sometimes find that their obligations with respect to a research project come into conflict with their obligations to individual patients. The ethical conduct of research rests on 3 guiding principles: respect for persons, beneficience, and justice. Respect for persons underlies the duty to ...

Bioethics in practice - a quarterly column about medical ethics: ethics of chart review research.

Patients presume their medical records are private. They think their records are not seen by anyone other than their physicians and that this privacy is guaranteed under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, commonly known as the HIPAA law. Patients are surprised that many other people have access to their medical records and their private health information (PHI). In additio...

The bioethics movement and hospital ethics committees.

Reflections on morality, ethics, and bioethics decisions.

From the presumed biological evolutionary origins of a urmorality, there eventually developed a conscious set of morality concepts and rules that became less immediate and more abstract, and increasingly shaped by social factors. Today the concepts and precepts of morality have come to form a complex system in which each specialized professional ethics respond with a certain degree of latitude ...

Neoliberalising Bioethics: Bias, Enhancement and Economistic Ethics

In bioethics there is an ongoing debate about the ethical case for human enhancement through new biomedical technologies. In this debate there are both supporters and opponents of human enhancement technologies such as genetic improvements of cognitive abilities (eg, intelligence). The supporters argue that human enhancement will lead to healthier and therefore better lives, meaning that any de...