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In his paper “The challenge of brain death for the sanctity of life ethic”, Peter Singer advocates two options for dealing with death criteria in a way that is compatible with efficient organ transplantation policy. He suggests that we should either (a) redefine death as cortical death or (b) go back to the old cardiopulmonary criterion and scrap the Dead Donor Rule. We welcome Singer’s line of argument but raise some concerns about the practicability of the two alternatives advocated by him. We propose adding a third alternative that also – as the two previous alternatives – preserves and extends the possibility of organ transplantation without using anyone without their consent. Namely, we would like to draw readers’ attention to a proposal by Robert Veatch, formulated 42 years ago in his 1976 book “Death, dying, and the biological revolution” and developed further in his later publications. Veatch argues for a conscience clause for the definition of death that would permit people to pick from a reasonable range of definitional options. This autonomy-based option, we believe, is more likely to be practicable than the two options advocated by Singer. Furthermore, we present data from a study with Lithuanian participants that suggest that there is quite pronounced variation of preferences concerning death determination.

In this article, we report a cross‐cultural study on how different types of social transgressions are moralised by Chinese, Americans, and Lithuanians. We hypothesised that given the continuing influences of Confucian worldview on contemporary Chinese societies, the Chinese will not make a distinction between moral (daode 道德) and conventional cultural norms (wenming 文明). Following Turiel's moral/conventional task, we characterised moral transgressions in terms of two dimensions: Their wrongness is perceived to be independent of any authorities' opinion and general in scope. The results indicate that Chinese participants were slightly more "moralising" than Americans and Lithuanians in the typical (Haidtean) moral domains. More importantly, unlike Americans and Lithuanians, the Chinese strongly moralised uncultured (wenming 文明) behaviour. Results also indicate that explicit considerations about purity were quite important across all three cultural groups. These mixed results are discussed in the light of recent debates about the scope of morality and the moral/conventional distinction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article comments on reasons for genome editing and the metaphysical essentialism about human identity. It argues that the distinction between identity-affecting and person-affecting interventions is based on material-origin essentialism and not about human reproduction biology. A summary of a study on counterfactual possibilities about an individual's biological identity is presented.

There is a rich tradition in bioethics of gathering empirical data to inform, supplement, or test the implications of normative ethical analysis. More recently, philosophers from outside the field of bioethics have similarly employed empirical methods - drawn primarily from psychology, the cognitive sciences, economics, and related disciplines - to advance theoretical debates. In simplest terms, bioxphi is experimental moral philosophy as applied to topics in bioethics. It is also a species of empirical bioethics: one which relies primarily on controlled experiments rather than descriptive studies to make sense of normatively charged phenomena of interest to bioethicists, with the aim of contributing to associated substantive debates. [Extracted from the article]

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In this paper we report a study conducted in Mongolia on the scope of morality, that is, the extent to which people moralize different social domains. Following Turiel's moral-conventional task, we characterized moral transgressions (in contrast to conventional transgressions) in terms of two dimensions: authority independence and generality of scope. Different moral domains are then defined by grouping such moral transgressions in terms of their content (following Haidt's classification of morally relevant domains). There are four main results of the study. First, since all five Haidtian domains were moralized by the Mongolian participants, the study provides evidence in favour of pluralism about moral domains. However, the study also suggests that the domain of harm can be reduced to the fairness domain. Furthermore, although the strong claim about reduction of all moral domains to the domain of fairness does not seem to hold a significant number of participants did indicate considerations of fairness across domains. Finally, a significant amount of participants moralized conventional transgressions a la Turiel, but it did not reach a statistical significance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Problems / Problemos is the property of Vilnius University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article focuses on three scenarios in which residual biological materials are turned into research collections during the procedure of procuring these materials for diagnostic, therapeutic or other non-research purposes. These three scenarios differ from each other primarily because they employ different models of consent: (a) precautionary consent, which may be secured during the collecting procedure; (b) the presumed consent model, which may be applied during the collection of materials; and (c) consent for research use of identifiable human biological materials, which may be skipped entirely. These scenarios offer additional sources of biological samples for research purposes and at the same time seem to offer even more flexibility in terms of stringency of consent as compared with the more traditional models of broad consent in prospective research collections and the waiver of consent in retrospective research. Our discussion leads us to think that precautionary consent is preferable to presumed consent and no consent when handling issues of consent in the use of residual human biological materials for research. However, such precautionary consent should not be construed as blanket, unrestricted consent for any future use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]