The Social Value Misconception in Clinical Research.

Clinical researchers should help respect the autonomy and promote the well-being of prospective study participants by helping them make voluntary, informed decisions about enrollment. However, participants often exhibit poor understanding of important information about clinical research. Bioethicists have given special attention to "misconceptions" about clinical research that can compromise participants' decision-making, most notably the "therapeutic misconception.

Compensation and Limits on Harm in Animal Research.

Although researchers generally take great care to ensure that human subjects do not suffer very serious harms from their involvement in research, the situation is different for nonhuman animal subjects. Significant progress has been made in reducing unnecessary animal suffering in research, yet researchers still inflict severe pain and distress on tens of thousands of animals every year for scientific purposes. Some bioethicists, scientists, and animal welfare advocates argue for placing an upper limit on the suffering researchers may impose on animal subjects, with rare exceptions for research that promises critical social benefits.

Against procreative moral rights.

Many contemporary ethical debates turn on claims about the nature and extent of our alleged procreative moral rights: moral rights to procreate or not to procreate as we choose. In this article, I argue that there are no procreative moral rights, in that generally we do not have a distinctive moral right to procreate or not to procreate as we choose. However, interference with our procreative choices usually violates our nonprocreative moral rights, such as our moral rights to bodily autonomy or to privacy.

The and Innovative Practice.

One of the Belmont Report's most important contributions was the clear and serviceable distinction it drew between standard medical practice and biomedical research. A less well-known achievement of the Report was its conceptualization of innovative practice, a type of medical practice that is often mistaken for research because it is new, untested, or experimental. Although the discussion of innovative practice in Belmont is brief and somewhat cryptic, this does not reflect the significant progress its authors made in understanding innovative practice and the distinctive ethical issues it raises.

Ethics of information-gathering interventions in innovative practice.

Innovative practice involves medical interventions that deviate from standard practice in significant ways. For many patients, innovative practice offers the best chance of successful treatment. Because little is known about most innovative treatments, clinicians who engage in innovative practice might consider including extra procedures, such as scans or blood draws, to gather information about the innovation.

Innovative Practice, Clinical Research, and the Ethical Advancement of Medicine.

Innovative practice occurs when a clinician provides something new, untested, or nonstandard to a patient in the course of clinical care, rather than as part of a research study. Commentators have noted that patients engaged in innovative practice are at significant risk of suffering harm, exploitation, or autonomy violations. By creating a pathway for harmful or nonbeneficial interventions to spread within medical practice without being subjected to rigorous scientific evaluation, innovative practice poses similar risks to the wider community of patients and society as a whole.

Fertility, immigration, and the fight against climate change.

Several philosophers have recently argued that policies aimed at reducing human fertility are a practical and morally justifiable way to mitigate the risk of dangerous climate change. There is a powerful objection to such "population engineering" proposals: even if drastic fertility reductions are needed to prevent dangerous climate change, implementing those reductions would wreak havoc on the global economy, which would seriously undermine international antipoverty efforts. In this article, we articulate this economic objection to population engineering and show how it fails.