Category: Ethics

The forgotten Australian prisoners of war experimented on by the Nazis

Australian Broadcasting Corporation

The Body Sphere

Amanda Smith

Not all Nazi human experimentations ended with death. Some Australian soldiers may have suffered for years after being guinea pigs for Nazi scientists. Amanda Smith tells their story.

Some of the cruellest, vilest things humans do to each other are done in wartime.

During the Second World War, one of the most shocking things that occurred – in a long list of shocking things – was human medical experimentation in Nazi concentration camps.

Until now, however, it wasn’t known that the Nazis also experimented on Australian POWs.

Konrad Kwiet is the resident historian at the Sydney Jewish Museum. He’s researching the experiments alongside surgeon and academic George Weisz. . . [Full text]

 

Human medical experiments

Australian Broadcasting Corporation

The Body Sphere

Amanda Smith

In 1891, Swedish physician Carl Janson was investigating black smallpox pus. “Calves were only obtainable at considerable cost”, he noted. So instead he experimented on 14 children from an orphanage.

Vulnerable people continued to be used as medical guinea pigs into the 20th century.

Most sinister was the Nazi program, including the little-known story of 5 Australian POWs in Crete who were subject to experimentation without their consent.

The methods of Third Reich doctors were inhumane, so is it ethical to use data from Nazi medical experiments?  . . . [Full text]

 

The Health Care Professional as Person: The Place of Conscience

Canadian Catholic Bioethics Centre

Bioethics Matters

Bridget Campion*

Recently I was asked to present “the Catholic position” on physician-assisted death as part of a panel discussion held at a downtown Toronto hospital. The purpose of the event was not to debate the issue but to educate participants about various points of view. I ran into some difficulty when I was discussing the Catholic Church’s interest in protecting the consciences of health care staff. One panelist immediately redirected our attention to the needs of the patient seeking physician-assisted death and the conversation left the health care professionals behind. In this short article, I would like to bring the focus back to the doctors, nurses, social workers, chaplains, therapists, in short, to the health care staff involved in patient care and who may have objections to performing or assisting in physician-assisted death.. . .  Full Text

Bioethics and natural law: an interview with John Keown

BioEdge

Xavier Symons John Keown*

Bioethics discourse is often divided into two broad categories: utilitarian perspectives and so-called deontological or Kantian approaches to ethics. An alternative viewpoint that receives far less attention is a natural law perspective on ethics and medicine. The natural law approach emphasizes interests or ends common to all members of humanity, and offers a teleological account of morality and human flourishing.

Professor John Keown of Georgetown University’s Kennedy Institute for Ethics recently co-authored a book on natural law with the late Georgetown Professor Alfonso Gómez-Lobo. The book is entitled Bioethics and the Human Goods: An Introduction to Natural Law Bioethics. The Deputy Editor of BioEdge, Xavier Symons, interviewed Professor Keown about his latest work.
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Canadian ethicists prepare for the worst

Bioedge

 Michael Cook

Conscientious objection seems like the paradigmatic ethical choice between right and wrong. An ethicist, of all people, ought to have this option, just as mathematicians count or sopranos sing.

Not so fast, write two healthcare ethicists at the Centre for Applied Ethics at McGill University Health Centre, in Montreal, in the blog Impact Ethics. Now that the Canadian Supreme Court has declared that euthanasia is a human right, it is time to focus on who is entitled to conscientious objection to participating in euthanasia. And perhaps ethicists are not.

We found ourselves asking the following questions: Should a clinical ethicist have the right to conscientious objection in cases of medical aid in dying? Can the role of the clinical ethicist to provide ethics analysis in matters of moral ambiguity be reconciled with a right to opt-out on the basis of personal convictions?

The nub of the question is this: when an ethicist is asked for advice, is she involved as a human being or is she merely a database of ethical choices? The ethicists write:

On the other hand, there is a growing consensus that clinical ethics expertise is grounded in the competence of the clinical ethicist to facilitate a robust process aimed at ensuring fair and transparent healthcare decisions. The clinical ethicist is expected to adopt a stance of neutrality which allows her to facilitate discussion of competing values without allowing her own beliefs to influence the discussion.

On this view, it is not the “rightness” or “wrongness” of the final outcome by which the clinical ethicist is professionally judged, but rather her skill in guiding various stakeholders through a reasonable process; a clinical ethicist’s personal convictions should not impact on her ability to facilitate this process. In this sense, perhaps the right to conscientious objection is antithetical to the provision of clinical ethics consultation, as it seems to call into question the profession’s ability to remain neutral on morally contentious issues.

There is an urgent need, the authors write, to articulate the rights and duties of healthcare ethicists, as in the wake of Carter v Canada, the euthanasia case, the boundaries will be tested.

It would be interesting indeed if Canadian ethicists who oppose euthanasia are told to pack their bags and look elsewhere for jobs. What do unemployed ethicists do? Work in Starbucks? Become an Uber driver? There are some great ideas at the website of the Unemployed Philsophers Guild — making coffee mugs, finger puppets, and scented soap.

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