Epistemic Authority and Genuine Ethical Controversies.

In 'Professional Hubris and its Consequences', Eric Vogelstein claims that 'that there are no good arguments in favor of professional organizations taking genuinely controversial positions on issues of professional ethics'. In this response, I defend two arguments in favour of organisations taking such positions: that their stance-taking may lead to better public policy, and that it may lead to better practice by medical professionals. If either of those defences succeeds, then Vogelstein's easy path to his conclusion - that professional organisations should not take such stances - is blocked.

Response: Freedom from Pain as a Rawlsian Primary Good.

In a recent article in this journal, Carl Knight and Andreas Albertsen argue that Rawlsian theories of distributive justice as applied to health and healthcare fail to accommodate both palliative care and the desirability of less painful treatments. The asserted Rawlsian focus on opportunities or capacities, as exemplified in Normal Daniels' developments of John Rawls' theory, results in a normative account of healthcare which is at best only indirectly sensitive to pain and so unable to account for the value of efforts of which the sole purpose is pain reduction. I argue that, far from undermining the Rawlsian project and its application to problems of health, what the authors' argument at most amounts to is a compelling case for the inclusion of freedom from physical pain within its index of primary goods.

A framework for assessing the ethics of doctors' strikes.

The first aim of this article is to offer a framework for constructive and rigorous discussions of the ethics of doctors' strikes, beginning with an in-principle distinction between the questions of how one should conduct oneself while working as a doctor and when and how one can suspend that work. The second is to explore how that framework applies to the contemporary British case of strikes by English junior doctors, with my suggestion being that those strikes do meet all of the criteria proposed. In closing, I gesture towards a further ethical dimension to strikes which is too often overlooked: namely, the responsibilities of employers and others not to misrepresent or demonise those doctors who are engaged in or considering taking industrial action.

Having hands and moral status: a reply to Curtis and Vehmas.

Curtis and Vehmas apply the form of Moore's 'Proof of an External World' to justify continuing to believe that all and only humans have full moral status in the absence of a plausible account of why. I note that the strategy is better suited for the sceptical problems Moore applies it to and suggest that resorting to it reflects too great a pessimism about the accounts available.