Biomedical subjects

Justin Oakley

Publications and source records attributed to Justin Oakley.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2005

Consequentialism, complacency, and slippery slope arguments.

The standard problem with many slippery slope arguments is that they fail to provide us with the necessary evidence to warrant our believing that the significantly morally worse circumstances they predict will in fact come about. As such these arguments have widely been criticised as 'scare-mongering'. Consequentialists have traditionally been at the forefront of such criticisms, demanding that we get serious about guiding our prescriptions for right action by a comprehensive appreciation of the empirical facts. This is not surprising, since consequentialism has traditionally been committed to the idea that right action be driven by empirical realities, and this hard-headed approach has been an especially notable feature of Australian consequentialism. But this apparent empirical hard-headedness is very selective. While consequentialists have understood their moral outlook and commitments as guided by a partnership with empirical science - most explicitly in their replies to the arguments of their detractors - some consequentialists have been remarkably complacent about providing empirical support for their own prescriptions. Our key example here is the consequentialist claim that our current practises of partiality in fact maximise the good, impartially conceived. This claim has invariably been made without compelling support for the large empirical claims upon which it rests, and so, like the speculative empirical hand-waving of weak slippery slope arguments, it seems similarly to be undermined. While these arguments have presented us with 'wishful thinking' rather than 'scare-mongering', we argue in this paper that their complacency in meeting the relevant empirical justificatory burden remains much the same.

Australia↗

PubMed2005

Public disclosure of surgeon-specific report cards: current status of the debate.

Clinical report cards are at the centre of an escalating debate on ways in which the performance of hospitals and individual doctors can be monitored. Report cards are a method of publishing outcome data that can be focused on a particular hospital, clinical unit, or an individual doctor. Following the public disclosure of results of individual cardiac surgeons in New York State, USA, and the recent Inquiry into paediatric cardiac surgical deaths at the Bristol Royal Infirmary, UK, there is increasing focus on the possibility of the introduction of report cards in Australia. At present, the increasing momentum and implementation of report cards is focused squarely on surgeons, and particularly on cardiac surgeons. This review outlines the events in the USA and UK and looks into the possible impact of the introduction of report cards in Australia.

Australia↗

PubMed2004

Informed consent and surgeons' performance.

This paper argues that the provision of effective informed consent by surgical patients requires the disclosure of material information about the comparative clinical performance of available surgeons. We develop a new ethical argument for the conclusion that comparative information about surgeons' performance--surgeons' report cards--should be provided to patients, a conclusion that has already been supported by legal and economic arguments. We consider some recent institutional and legal developments in this area, and we respond to some common objections to the use of report cards on the clinical performance of surgeons.

Benchmarking↗

PubMed2002

Democracy, embryonic stem cell research, and the Roman Catholic church.

The Roman Catholic Church in Australia has lobbied politicians to prohibit embryonic stem cell research, on the grounds that such research violates the sanctity and inherent dignity of human life. I suggest, however, that reasoned reflection does not uniquely support such conclusions about the morality of stem cell research. A recent parliamentary standing committee report recommended that embryonic stem cell research be allowed to proceed in certain circumstances, and there appears to be widespread support in the Australian community for this position. I argue that the moral value of democracy requires parliamentarians to acknowledge the informed views of the wider community here, and to resist lobbying by church leaders on this issue.

Australia↗

PubMed2002

Editorial.

Explore the source record for details and available documents.

Australia↗

PubMed1994

Medical experimentation, informed consent and using people.

In this paper we argue that the standard focus on problems of informed consent in debates about the ethics of human experimentation is inadequate because it fails to capture a more fundamental way in which such experiments may be wrong. Taking clinical trials as our case in point, we suggest that it is the moral offence of using people as mere means which better characterizes what is wrong with violations of personal autonomy in certain kinds of clinical trials. This account also helps bring out another important way in which the autonomy of the participants in clinical trials may be violated, even in cases where they have given informed consent to their involvement. Where relevant information about the trial is framed in such a way as to induce a patient's participation by appeal to their nonrational preferences, this is also a violation of their autonomy, and one which is distinct from a failure of informed consent. The underlying wrongness of both kinds of violations, we argue, is plausibly captured by the moral offence of using people as mere means.

Coercion↗

PubMed1992

Altruistic surrogacy and informed consent.

A crucial premise in many recent arguments against the moral permissibility of surrogate motherhood arrangements is the claim that a woman cannot autonomously consent to gestating and relinquishing a child to another couple, because she cannot be fully informed about what her future emotional responses will be to the foetus developing within her, and to the giving up of the newborn infant to its social parents. When conjoined with some moral principle about the justifiable limits on the ways others can be expected to exercise their autonomy on our behalf, this claim is often taken to establish that various forms of surrogate motherhood arrangements are morally wrong. In this paper I want to show that there is a serious non sequitur in this kind of argument. That is, I want to show that even if women cannot in fact have this kind of information about what their future emotional responses to pregnancy and relinquishment will be, nothing follows about the wrongness or otherwise of surrogacy. For, when we consider what counts as informed consent in the context of other important ventures with uncertain consequences, it becomes clear that informed consent does not require having this kind of information about one's future emotional states. In putting these arguments, I also hope to clarify some of the connections which might be thought to hold between informed consent and autonomous decision-making generally.

Altruism↗