Individual Planning Is Not Enough: Dementia Directives and the Governance Challenge
A dementia directive — sometimes called an advance directive or living will — is a document in which a person, while sti...
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Read the latest posts from the Bioethics blog
Latest Posts
Shifting Tasks, Shifting Baselines: Mobile Health and the Limits of Empowerment
This editorial appears in the July Issue of the American Journal of Bioethics Jesse Gray’s article “On Mobile Health, Em...
AI Ethics 2.0: Why Frontier AI Demands a New Governance Agenda for Healthcare
AI Ethics 2.0: Why Frontier AI Demands a New Governance Agenda for Healthcare This editorial appears in the July Issue o...
OMB Proposed Rule Change: The New Lysenkoism?
The proposed OMB rule changes (OMB-2026-0034) are problematic and should be withdrawn or substantially altered. At a fun...
The Worship of Medicine
We worship medicine. We put doctors on billboards, make statues of them, and name buildings and parks after them. We mak...
Climate Change: Examining a Fear of the Impractical
Climate change is shaping up to be a global catastrophe. I don’t think this is controversial. There will be food and wat...
Beyond Good Intentions: Structural Justice and the Future of Hospital-based Violence Inter...
Black Americans experience nonfatal firearm assault at a rate more than 20 times that of White Americans. For Black men,...
How the IVF Industry Exploits Down Syndrome Anxiety to Hard Sell the Controversial PGT-A T...
In vitro fertilization (IVF) is emotionally and financially taxing, especially for women of advanced maternal age. As ma...
Mapping the Moral Brain: Probing the Architecture of Ethical Decision-Making with TMS
There is growing research interest in the prevalence of moral injury – a profound psychological harm caused by judgments...
Centering Our Social World in Planetary Health Research Ethics
This editorial appears in the June Issue of the American Journal of Bioethics Planetary ethics, or examining the moral r...
Ashley Revisited: Reflections and Lessons Twenty Years Later
This editorial appears in the June Issue of the American Journal of Bioethics Twenty years ago, Dan Gunther and I publis...
When Social Media Becomes Your Doctor: Ethical Concerns in Women’s Health
From TikTok to Instagram, social media has become one of the most powerful influences on how people understand health an...
Top read essays
America Needs a Marshall Plan for Saving the Future of Science
At the end of World War Two, most of Europe lay in ruins. The Nazis had been defeated but at a terrible price to both th...
We Are Not Okay: Moral Injury And a World on Fire
The following editorial can be found in the April 2024 issue of the American Journal of Bioethics. After giving the name...
The ACOG Slap: In a culture that protects predators, someone was bound to snap
Content warning: This post addresses sexual assault, sexual harassment, and violence. On Saturday, May 20, 2023, at the ...
I Shouldn’t Have to be a Supercrip: Promoting Anti-Ableism and Disability Justice for Bioe...
Becoming a successful bioethics scholar is no easy feat, even for a supercrip like me. I am a supercrip, a person with d...
Why Bioethics Needs Pride: Anti-LGBTQ Laws and Health Disparities
So far this year there have been over 300 anti-LGBTQ laws introduced in the US, already breaking last year’s recor...
Editors Picks
OMB Proposed Rule Change: The New Lysenkoism?
The proposed OMB rule changes (OMB-2026-0034) are problematic and should be withdrawn or substantially altered. At a fun...
Climate Change: Examining a Fear of the Impractical
Climate change is shaping up to be a global catastrophe. I don’t think this is controversial. There will be food and wat...
Ozempic, Coerced Weight-Loss, and Threats to Rationality
Over the last four years, GLP-1 agonists such as Ozempic, touted by many as miracle weight-loss drugs and popularized by...
Updating the Canon: The Story of Henrietta Lacks Is Not Over
Three cases appear in almost every bioethics course: the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the death of Jesse Gelsinger, and the ...
Open Science, Counterscience, and the Limits of Trust
A recent New York Times investigative report by Mike McIntire describes how genetic and brain imaging data from thousand...
How to Write a Winning Normative Bioethics Paper: Lessons from an Editor and Author
Normative bioethics writing can be deceptively hard; what feels like a sharp argument to you might read as unclear, unde...
Virtual Reality in Medical Education: Can Empathy Become a Simulation?
Medical education has always relied on simulators. From wooden mannequins in the 17th century to the digital cadavers of...
Getting it Right: “The Pitt’s” Depiction of Neurodiversity
A decade ago, we wrote an AJOB blog post critiquing the then-new medical drama Chicago Med. We took the pilot to task fo...
‘Tell Them You Love Me’ is Shamefully Ableist: Stop Sensationalizing the Rape ...
In 2015, an exposé in The New York Times Magazine brought national attention to Anna Stubblefield’s sexual assault trial...
The Hopkins-Oxford Psychedelics Ethics (HOPE) Working Group Consensus Statement
The first Hopkins-Oxford Psychedelic Ethics (HOPE) workshop convened to discuss ethical matters relating to psychedelics...
We Are Not Okay: Moral Injury And a World on Fire
The following editorial can be found in the April 2024 issue of the American Journal of Bioethics. After giving the name...
Coercive Sterilization Isn’t A Matter of the Past: A Call to Action for Medical Providers...
Reproductive coercion is alive and well in the United States, violently robbing women of their ability to build f...