A Comparative Defense of Self-initiated Prospective Moral Answerability for Autonomous Robot harm.

As artificial intelligence becomes more sophisticated and robots approach autonomous decision-making, debates about how to assign moral responsibility have gained importance, urgency, and sophistication. Answering Stenseke's (2022a) call for scaffolds that can help us classify views and commitments, we think the current debate space can be represented hierarchically, as answers to key questions. We use the resulting taxonomy of five stances to differentiate-and defend-what is known as the "blank check" proposal.

The Most Good You Can Do with Your Kidneys: Effective Altruism and the Organ-Shortage Problem.

Effective altruism is a growing philosophical and social movement, whose members design their lives in ways aligned with doing the most good that they can do. The main focus of this paper is to explore what effective altruism has to say about the moral obligations people have to do good with their organs, in the face of an organ-shortage problem. It is argued that an effective altruism framework offers a number of valuable theoretical and practical insights relevant to ongoing debate about how to resolve the organ-shortage problem.

Vulnerable groups and the hollow promise of benefit from human gene editing.

Mainstream academic debate on the ethics of human gene editing is currently not as inclusive as it should be. For example, it currently does not give due consideration to Indigenous groups and cultures, such as those living in rural and remote areas of Canada. Once such people are given due consideration, then several important points emerge, which have so far gone unnoticed or under-emphasized in the debate.

Misusing uteruses? Childrearing capacity and access to transplantable wombs.

In light of recent successful uterus transplantations, it is reasonable to expect that womb transplants will become more commonplace in the future. If this happens, important questions emerge about who should receive the donated wombs. Some arguments have been advanced that suggest that potential recipients should be screened for their anticipated childrearing capacity, as one component of a comprehensive process for determining eligibility.

Infertilitism: unjustified discrimination of assisted reproduction patients.

Current law in Victoria, Australia requires that all prospective assisted reproduction patients provide a criminal background check and child protection order check prior to being eligible for treatment. These presumptions against treatment stipulated in the Assisted Reproductive Treatment Act ( http://www.legislation.

Effective altruists ought to be allowed to sell their kidneys.

Effective altruists aim to do the most good that they can do with the resources available to them, without causing themselves or their dependents significant harm thereby. The argument presented in this paper demonstrates that there are no morally relevant dissimilarities between living kidney donation and living kidney selling for effective altruistic reasons. Thus, since the former is allowed, the latter ought to be allowed as well.

Wickedness, Moral Responsibility, and Access to Transplantable Livers.

Under the current conditions of scarcity of transplantable livers, difficult decisions need to be made about access. There is a growing consensus that it is morally justified to give people with ARESLD lower priority than those whose need is not self-caused. The purpose of this article is to critically examine the conditions under which such prioritization is morally justified, by challenging arguments put forth by Walter Glannon and Daniel Brudney.

Settling for second best: when should doctors agree to parental demands for suboptimal medical treatment?

Background: Doctors sometimes encounter parents who object to prescribed treatment for their children, and request suboptimal substitutes be administered instead (suboptimal being defined as less effective and/or more expensive). Previous studies have focused on parental refusal of treatment and when this should be permitted, but the ethics of requests for suboptimal treatment has not been explored.

Methods: The paper consists of two parts: an empirical analysis and an ethical analysis.

The moral unacceptability of abandoning human embryos.

The focus of this paper is on the ethics of the act of wilfully "abandoning" human embryos. I offer a critique of this unique behaviour, which draws on empirical data about who wilfully abandons their surplus embryos and why. I argue that wilful embryo abandonment is in all cases avoidable.

Parental Virtue and Prenatal Genetic Alteration Research.

Although the philosophical literature on the ethics of human prenatal genetic alteration (PGA) purports to inform us about how to act, it rarely explicitly recognizes the perspective of those who will be making the PGA decision in practice. Here I approach the ethics of PGA from a distinctly virtue-based perspective, taking seriously what it means to be a good parent making this decision for one's child. From this perspective, I generate a sound verdict on the moral standing of human PGA (research): given the current state of the art, good parents have compelling reason not to consent to PGA (research) for their child, especially as part of the first wave(s) of PGA research participants and especially for non-medically oriented purposes.

'My child will never initiate Ultimate Harm': an argument against moral enhancement.

Recently, there has been a lot of philosophical work published on the morality of moral enhancement. One thing that tends to get overlooked in this literature is that there are many different potential methods of morally enhancing humans, and a blanket moral assessment of them may not be warranted. Here I focus on one mode of moral enhancement, namely, prenatal genetic moral enhancement, and offer a normative assessment of it.

Parental wisdom, empirical blindness, and normative evaluation of prenatal genetic enhancement.

The purpose of this paper is to unveil one problem that surrounds the debate over the moral standing of prenatal genetic enhancement (PGE) and to outline a solution to it. The problem is that we have no way to test our speculations about the consequences of prenatal enhancement without begging the question about the moral permissibility of enhancing unborn children. The only way to empirically support our speculations about the consequences of prenatal enhancement is to resort to ethically worrisome (and radical) experimental genetic research.

Good parents would not fulfil their obligation to genetically enhance their unborn children.

The purpose of this paper is to unveil the incompleteness of John Harris' view that parents have a moral obligation to genetically enhance their unborn children. Specifically, here two main conclusions are proposed: (1) at present there exist insufficient empirical data for determining whether prenatal genetic enhancement (PGE) is a moral obligation on prospective parents. Although the purpose of PGE research would be to determine the extent to which PGE is safe and effective, the task of determining the veracity of Harris' premises is impossible to achieve without begging the question; we would be forced to assume the moral permissibility of PGE in order to generate the data that are required for determining its moral standing.