A child's objection, refusal and dissent regarding participation in non-beneficial biomedical research must be respected, even when the parents or legal representatives have given their permission. There is, however, no consensus on the definition and criteria of a meaningful and valid child's objection. The aim of this article is to clarify this issue. In the first part we describe the problem...

A complete defense of deceptive placebo use must address this ethical objection: deceptive placebo use violates patient autonomy, because deceiving a patient about the placebo nature of a proposed treatment prevents her from giving informed consent to the treatment. Unfortunately, this objection isn't always recognized and clearly disambiguated from other ethical concerns. I consider how well s...

Anthropic bias : observation selection effects in science and philosophy / by Nick Bostrom. p. cm. — (Studies in philosophy) Includes bibliographical references and index.

Permissivism says that for some propositions and bodies of evidence, there is more than one rationally permissible doxastic attitude that can be taken towards that proposition given the evidence. Some critics of this view argue that it condones, as rationally acceptable, sets of attitudes that manifest an untenable kind of arbitrariness. I begin by providing a new and more detailed explication ...