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Alexander Zambrano sets out to refute an argument that I have made on a number of occasions over many years since 1992, which he calls "Harris's Greater Need Argument" (2002). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organ shortage is a major survival issue for millions of people worldwide. Globally 1.2 million people die each year from kidney failure. In this paper, we critically examine and find lacking extant proposals for increasing organ supply, such as opting in and opt out for deceased donor organs, and parochial altruism and paired kidney exchange for live organs. We defend two ethical solutions to the problem of organ shortage. One is to make deceased donor organs automatically available for transplant without requiring consent from the donor or their relatives. The other is for society to buy nonvital organs in a strictly regulated market and provide them to people in need for free. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vaccines, when available, will prove to be crucial in the fight against Covid-19. All societies will face acute dilemmas in allocating scarce lifesaving resources in the form of vaccines for Covid-19. The author proposes The Value of Lives Principle as a just and workable plan for equitable and efficient access. After describing what the principle entails, the author contrasts the advantage of this approach with other current proposals such as the Fair Priority Model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the author comments on articles of professor Inmaculada de Melo-Martin related to medical ethics on topics including mitochondrial DNA that influences one's susceptibility towards disease and suffering, safety of medical technologies, and genetic essentialism.

The author presents a personal narrative of becoming an academic professor dealing with topics including change in life after death of his parents, involvement in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), and research in Oxford University in England.

It seems natural to think that the same prudential and ethical reasons for mutual respect and tolerance that one has vis-à-vis other human persons would hold toward newly encountered paradigmatic but nonhuman biological persons. One also tends to think that they would have similar reasons for treating we humans as creatures that count morally in our own right. This line of thought transcends biological boundaries—namely, with regard to artificially (super)intelligent persons—but is this a safe assumption? The issue concerns ultimate moral significance: the significance possessed by human persons, persons from other planets, and hypothetical nonorganic persons in the form of artificial intelligence (AI). This article investigates why our possible relations to AI persons could be more complicated than they first might appear, given that they might possess a radically different nature to us, to the point that civilized or peaceful coexistence in a determinate geographical space could be impossible to achieve. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, the author discusses ethical issues related to genetic modification of humans particularly with the help of mitochondrial replacement therapy (MRT). Topics discussed include beginning of human cloning techniques in Great Britain, application of MRT with the help of assisted reproduction technology (ART), and the HumanReproductive Cloning Act 2001 drafted by the Great Britain's government.

The idea—the possibility—of reading the mind, from the outside or indeed even from the inside, has exercised humanity from the earliest times. If we could read other minds both prospectively, to discern intentions and plans, and retrospectively, to discover what had been “on” those minds when various events had occurred, the implications for morality and for law and social policy would be immense. Recent advances in neuroscience have offered some, probably remote, prospects of improved access to the mind, but a different branch of technology seems to offer the most promising and the most daunting prospect for both mind reading and mind misreading. You can’t have the possibility of the one without the possibility of the other. This article tells some of this story. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents an edited transcript of a debate on moral enhancement between John Harris and Julian Savulescu during the "Enhancement: Cognitive, Moral and Mood" conference held at the University of Belgrade in Serbia. Topics discussed include morality's ability to keep up with scientific change and if not, whether it should be compulsory, Harris' skepticism about moral enhancement's value and methodologies, and how to bridge the gap between what people see to be right and how people act.

This article explores the consequences of interventions to secure moral enhancement that are at once compulsory and inescapable and of which the subject will be totally unaware. These are encapsulated in an arresting example used by Ingmar Perrson and Julian Savulescu concerning a “God machine” capable of achieving at least three of these four objectives. This article demonstrates that the first objective—namely, moral enhancement—is impossible to achieve by these means and that the remaining three are neither moral nor enhancements nor remotely desirable. Along the way the nature of morality properly so called is further explored.

The article discusses the prospect of human reproductive cloning. The responses of members of the European Parliament and former U.S. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush on human cloning following the birth of Dolly the sheep, the first cloned animal, in 1997 are cited. The alleged threat of cloning to individuality, the right to know a person's genetic origins and the role of human reproductive cloning in eliminating disease and disability are explored.

In this issue of CQ we introduce a new feature, “By Invitation,” in which noted bioethicists are invited to reflect on vital current issues. Our first invitee, John Harris, will subsequently assume editorship of this section. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Animals, in the age of biotechnology, are the subjects of a myriad of scientific procedures, interventions, and modifications. They are created, altered, and experimented upon—often with highly beneficial outcomes for humans in terms of knowledge gained and applied, yet not without concern also for the effects upon the experimental subjects themselves: consideration of the use of animals in research remains an intensely debated topic. Concerns for animal welfare in scientific research have, however, been primarily directed at harm to and suffering of animal subjects and their prevention. Little attention has been paid to the benefits research might potentially produce for animals themselves and the interests that some animals may therefore have in the furtherance of particular avenues of science. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Matti Häyry’s new book is deliberately challenging; it tells six contemporary bioethicists, and all who share their methodologies or even their general approach, that they have got it badly wrong. From the striking photograph of Häyry himself on the front cover to the very last line, the genetic challenge is issued and elaborated. Häyry has divided his protagonists into three pairs, of which I find myself a member, and this makes responding a duty as well as a pleasure. Although I cannot speak for my partner in crime, Jonathan Glover, I am at least in the very best of all possible company. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article highlights the arguments of Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu in relation to the ethics of embryo research and the moral relevance of various kinds of potentiality in the U.S. It states that the creation of lotteries offer the only possible chance of life to all participants equally. It emphasizes that individuals who are committed to creation lotteries cannot object to embryo research.