Faculty Bibliography

Obviously, health-care workers have the duty, proclaimed in their own professional associations' ethical codes, to put patient interest and safety first and get vaccinated. There is also, clearly, an unarguable foundation for insisting that all health-care workers who have regular patient contact get vaccinated as a job requirement. However, when hospitals and health departments have proposed vaccination mandates for health-care workers, they have almost invariably been met with lawsuits demanding the right to choose. Here, Caplan discusses why legal actions against mandates should be stopped

Others want to cite natural law or religious tradition to support claims of human dignity, yet the invocation of a long intellectual tradition is not an argument but only a sociological case study. Even the Christian notion of dignity that invokes both humanity's likeness to God in the grand scheme of things or praising human creations such as art, medicine, science, and philosophy can be secularised a bit so that it is simply the products of a conscious and socially cooperative, reflective creature that are infused with dignity due to their purposefulness and utility

There is increasing pressure for neuroscientists to communicate their research and the societal implications of their findings to the public. Communicating science is challenging, and the transformation of communication by digital and interactive media increases the complexity of the challenge. To facilitate dialogue with the public in this new media landscape, we suggest three courses of action for the neuroscience community: a cultural shift that explicitly recognizes and rewards public outreach, the identification and development of neuroscience communication experts, and ongoing empirical research on the public communication of neuroscience.

When you get old enough as a practitioner in any field young people seek your advice about what they should do if they want to do what you do. Given that my age seems to be increasing exponentially, this has been happening to me with increasing frequency. Undergraduates, high school students, medical students, those pursuing degrees in law and nursing and even those interested in a mid-career change have been asking me what they need to do if they want to pursue a career in bioethics. I have thought about their question quite a bit. I have come to realize that the answer is not the same for everyone who presents the question. But, the core of the answer is pretty much the same: pursue masters level training in bioethics, acquire familiarity with key social science methods and tools, learn something about a particular sub-area of the health sciences or life sciences, and seek out every opportunity to fine tune your analytical and rhetorical skills by working with others on projects, research, consulting, or teaching activities. At its heart bioethics is an interdisciplinary activity and knowing how to work with others who do empirical, historical, legal and normative work is a must. I had thought that advice to be sound until I heard Zeke Emanuel's plenary address to open the most recent annual meeting of the American Society of Bioethics and the Humanities. Emanuel espoused a vision for future bioethicists that I think is narrow, misguided and wrong. Now I say that in the spirit that Emanuel himself enjoys—vigorous debate about a matter that both of us consider of the gravest importance. Zeke Emanuel, a physician with a degree in political science as well, is one of the best and brightest scholars in the field of bioethics. His writings are solid and exemplify how best to integrate empirical inquiry with normative analysis. And the 'shop' he has run at the NIH Clinical Center for many years prior to moving into the Office of Budget and Management to work on health reform has done an outstanding job training younger scholars in the ins and outs of bioethical inquiry. These facts are precisely why the recent plenary address to the American Society of Bioethics and the Humanities was so disappointing.