Faculty Bibliography

For better or worse, the Democrats incorporated a good deal of mainstream Republican thinking about health care reform from the past decade, including mandated coverage and health insurance exchanges, into the Affordable Care Act

The movement to try to close the ever-widening gap between demand and supply of organs has recently arrived at the prison gate. While there is enthusiasm for using executed prisoners as sources of organs, there are both practical barriers and moral concerns that make it unlikely that proposals to use prisoners will or should gain traction. Prisoners are generally not healthy enough to be a safe source of organs, execution makes the procurement of viable organs difficult, and organ donation post-execution ties the medical profession too closely to the act of execution. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a complex mental disorder that straddles the line between psychosis and neurosis. As such, questions about the moral and legal responsibility of persons with BPD are especially vexing. Persons suffering with borderline personality disorder typically are impulsive and suffer from impaired volition. They also lack a stable sense of self. Nonetheless, persons with borderline personality disorder often hold long-term, stable preferences-often related to discontinuing particular problematic behaviors-and have a degree of capacity that we argue creates prima facie conditions for holding them ethically and legally responsible. However, this limited capacity often falls short in smoothly accommodating day-to-day relationships. We argue that while a certain degree of accommodation is appropriate for persons with BPD, the diagnosis of BPD does not by itself provide sufficient grounds for voiding responsibility for criminal acts. Using a hierarchical theory of autonomy recognizing first- and second-order volition, we propose a sliding scale be used to ascertain the degree to which a person with BPD should be exculpated weighing the graveness of the act against an estimation of the congruence of second- and first-order volitions.

he left ventricular assist device originated as a means to provide temporary circulatory support for patients suffering from end-stage heart failure. The device was originally intended to serve as a bridge to cardiac transplantation. Increasingly, however, the left ventricular assist device is being utilized as a destination therapy for those patients who are not candidates for heart transplantation. It is this utilization as a destination therapy that raises additional significant ethical concern related to the risks and benefits of the devices, factors influencing quality of life, and consequences pertaining to end-of-life care