Monash Bioethics Review最新文献

Despite the fact that people usually believe that individual health rights have an intrinsic value, they have, in fact, only extrinsic value. They are context dependent. While in normal conditions the current societies try to guarantee individual health rights, the challenge arises in emergency situations. Ones of them are pandemics including current covid-19 pandemic. Emergency situations challenge individual health rights due to insufficient medical resources and non-random criteria of selection of patients. However, there are some reasons to assume that societal and technological processes in the near future will threaten permanently individual health rights in normal conditions. Such processes include progress in commonly available human enhancement technologies, and progress in robotics and automation. In this paper I show how individual health rights will be challenged in both scenarios including catastrophic events and future technological progress. In both cases, the idea of assisted dying is discussed as possibly the unique healthcare principle available for people whose individual health rights will be limited or canceled due to catastrophes or technological and financial exclusion. The special case of future space missions is also discussed as an example of an extreme environment affecting the way moral norms are viewed in health care ethics.

This article assesses the role of an important Russian public institution, the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), in shaping the religious discourse on bioethics in Russia. An important step in this process was the approval of 'The Basis of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church' (2000), one chapter of which is devoted to bioethics. However, certain inadequacies in the creation of this document resulted in the absence of a clear position of the Russian Orthodox Church on some end-of-life issues, reproductive technologies, embryo stem cells, and other topics.Using the example of reproductive dilemmas, the author researches how the ROC clarifies its teaching on issues relating to bioethics. In the 2010s the ROC introduced a new method of taking into account the views of believers and the articulation of the church's position. This article examines the extensive public discussion of a new document, 'Ethical issues Associated with In Vitro Fertilization'.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, ethicists and researchers proposed human challenge studies as a way to speed development of a vaccine that could prevent disease and end the global public health crisis. The risks to healthy volunteers of being deliberately infected with a deadly and novel pathogen were not low, but the benefits could have been immense. This essay is a history of the three major efforts to set up a challenge model and run challenge studies in 2020 and 2021. The pharmaceutical company Johnson and Johnson, the National Institutes of Health in the United States, and a private-public partnership of industry, university, and government partners in Britain all undertook preparations. The United Kingdom's consortium began their Human Challenge Programme in March of 2021.Beyond documenting each effort, the essay puts these scientific and ethical debates in dialogue with the social, epidemiological, and institutional conditions of the pandemic as well as the commercial, intellectual, and political systems in which medical research and Covid-19 challenge studies operated. It shows how different institutions understood risk, benefit, and social value depending on their specific contexts. Ultimately the example of Covid-19 challenge studies highlights the constructedness of such assessments and reveals the utility of deconstructing them retrospectively so as to better understand the interplay of medical research and research ethics with larger social systems and historical contexts.

The Belmont Report continues to be held in high regard, and most bioethical analyses conducted in recent years have presumed that it affects United States federal regulations. However, the assessments of the report's creators are sharply divided. Understanding the historic reputation of this monumental report is thus crucial. We first recount the historical context surrounding the creation of this report. Subsequently, we review the process involved in developing ethical guidelines and describe the report's features. Additionally, we analyze the effect of unfolding events on the subsequent creation of federal regulations, especially on gene therapy clinical trials. Moreover, throughout this paper we evaluate the ethical principles outlined in this report and describe how they overlap with the issue of protecting socially vulnerable groups. Based on the analysis, we conclude that the features of the Belmont Report cannot be considered as having affected the basic sections of the federal regulations for ethical reviews that were made uniform in 1981. Nevertheless, regarding the regulations on gene therapy clinical trials-which were at first expected to be applicable to research involving children-in addition to implementing policies regarding the public review of protocols that passed ethical review, this report's principles are clearly reflected in the key notes that should have been referred to when the report was created.

In May 2021, when the Delta variant of SARS-CoV2 was wreaking havoc in India, the Australian Federal Government banned its citizens and residents who were there from coming back to Australia for 14 days on penalty of fines or imprisonment. These measures were justified on the grounds of protecting the broader Australian public from potentially importing the Delta strain, which officials feared would then seed a local outbreak. Those Australians stranded in India, and their families and communities back home, claimed that they were abandoned by Prime Minister Scott Morrison's government. This case-along with other barriers used as part of border control measures in the name of public health-raises the following question: is it ever morally permissible for a state to ban its citizens and residents from entering their own country during a pandemic? I conclude that it's impermissible. I argue that persons have a right of entry that should be understood as a security right. This security right should be non-derogable because it's a foundational good that is necessary for life-planning purposes. Moreover, it is a right that people should be able to rely upon absolutely, even during pandemics. At the very least, should someone believe that there are rare exceptions to the right of entry on public health grounds, governments have a duty-grounded in the principle of reciprocity-to support those who are temporarily denied entry. In the case of Australians stranded in India, I will argue that the Australian Federal Government failed on all accounts.

This article argues that extended school closures during the Covid-19 pandemic were a moral catastrophe. It focuses on closures in the United States of America and discusses their effect on the pandemic (or lack thereof), their harmful effects on children, and other morally relevant factors. It concludes by discussing how these closures came to pass and suggests that the root cause was structural, not individual: the relevant decision-makers were working in an institutional setting that stacked the deck heavily in favor of extended closures.

The global response to the recent coronavirus pandemic has revealed an ethical crisis in public health. This article analyses key pandemic public health policies in light of widely accepted ethical principles: the need for evidence, the least restrictive/harmful alternative, proportionality, equity, reciprocity, due legal process, and transparency. Many policies would be considered unacceptable according to pre-pandemic norms of public health ethics. There are thus significant opportunities to develop more ethical responses to future pandemics. This paper serves as the introduction to this Special Issue of Monash Bioethics Review and provides background for the other articles in this collection.

Australia's experience of the COVID-19 pandemic has been widely perceived to have been a successful one, based on the relatively few number of lives lost to the virus compared to the rest of the world. There remain, nonetheless, serious ethical challenges at the heart of the Australian response to COVID-19. The broadly positive outcomes of Australia's pandemic response mask more troubling developments within its political culture, and the costs it has imposed on its society. This article examines two concerns in particular: the normalisation of fear and emergency through the language and policy responses adopted by governments, and the significant diminution of individual freedoms and human rights.

Lockdowns and related policies of behavioral and economic restriction introduced in response to the COVID-19 pandemic are criticized, drawing on three sets of ideas and arguments that are organized in accordance with the likely degree of controversy associated with their guiding assumptions. The first set of arguments makes use of cost-benefit reasoning within a broadly utilitarian framework, emphasizing uncertainty, the role of worst-case scenarios, and the need to consider at least the medium term as well as immediate effects. The second draws on assumptions about the political value of basic liberties. The third draws on ideas about the roles of different stages within human life.