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Biomedical subjects

James Lindemann Nelson

Publications and source records attributed to James Lindemann Nelson.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2005

The Baroness's Comittee and the President's Council: ambition and alienation in public bioethics.

The President's Council on Bioethics has tried to make a distinctive contribution to the methodology of such public bodies in developing what it has styled a "richer bioethics." The Council's procedure contrasts with more modest methods of public bioethical deliberation employed by the United Kingdom's Warnock Committee. The practices of both bodies are held up against the backdrop of concerns about moral and political alienation, prompted by the limitations of moral reasoning and by moral dissent from state policy under even the most democratic of governments. Although the President's Council's rhetoric is often scrupulously conciliatory, recurring features of its argumentative practice are regrettably divisive. They order these things better in Britain.

Advisory Committees↗
PubMed2003

Living donors: options and meanings.

Both the phenomenologic study by Lennerling and colleagues and the case study by Dwyer raise interesting moral issues. Lennerling et al.'s finding that prospective kidney donors understood their decisions as "the only option" invites further examination into how donors understand this phrase, because, as ordinarily construed, it seems false; other options do exist for patients undergoing renal failure. Dwyer's case challenges our moral understanding of transplantation at an even deeper level, presenting us with a possible example of an instance of organ provision, not as a "gift" to the recipient, but as a "shield" for a third party. There is no existing moral consensus that surgeons or other health professionals may gravely worsen the health and threaten the lives of healthy people on the grounds that someone other than their patients may be benefited.

Ethics, Medical↗
PubMed2000

Prenatal diagnosis, personal identity, and disability.

A fascinating criticism of abortion occasioned by prenatal diagnosis of potentially disabling traits is that the complex test-and-abortion sends a morally disparaging message to people living with disabilities. I have argued that available versions of this "expressivist" argument are inadequate on two grounds. The most fundamental is that, considered as a practice, abortions prompted by prenatal testing are not semantically well-behaved enough to send any particular message; they do not function as signs in a rule-governed symbol system. Further, even granting, for the sake of argument, the expressive power of testing and aborting, it would not be possible, contra the argument's proponents, to distinguish between abortions undertaken because of beliefs about the disabling conditions the fetus might face as a child and abortions undertaken for many other possible reasons -- e.g., because of the poverty the fetus would face or the increase in family size that the birth of a new child would occasion. Here, I respond to criticisms of those arguments, and propose and defend another: the expressivist argument cannot, in general, distinguish successfully between abortion and therapy as modalities for responding to disabilities.

Abortion, Eugenic↗
PubMed1998

The meaning of the act: reflections on the expressive force of reproductive decision making and policies.

Prenatal and preconceptual testing and screening programs provide information on the basis of which people can choose to avoid the birth of children likely to face disabilities. Some disabilities advocates have objected to such programs and to the decisions made within them, on the grounds that measures taken to avoid the birth of children with disabilities have an "expressive force" that conveys messages disrespectful to people with disabilities. Assessing such a claim requires careful attention to general considerations relating meaning, intention, and social practices; it has only begun to receive such attention. Building on work by Allen Buchanan, who has challenged this claim, I further consider the disabilities advocates' objection, ultimately concluding that it is misplaced; neither individual actions nor general practices of this type necessarily express disrespectful messages.

Abortion, Eugenic↗
PubMed1993

Moral sensibilities and moral standing: Caplan on xenograft "donors".

[I]nterest in animals as a source of organs and tissues for human beings remains strong. New developments in immunosuppression technology promise to lower the technical barriers to a routine use of nonhumans as organ donors, and the image of colonies of animals kept at the ready for supplying the growing human need for new organs seems a much more plausible scenario now than it did when broached by transplantation specialists in the Sixties. As Arthur Caplan has powerfully argued, the prospects that other sources of organs may resolve the supply problem are grim.... In the face of these "pro-xenograft" pressures, it becomes all the more signficant to assess arguments against the practice that rest on considerations of the moral status of the nonhumans from whom the organs are taken. To be sure, xenograft faces other moral difficulties -- for example, concerns about the quality of informed consent obtained for recipients, worries about the possibility that xenografting will serve as a vector by which new and possibly virulent viruses become established in humans, and problems about whether such spending is equitable in the light of other unresolved human needs. Yet whether we morally wrong animals in taking their organs and their lives remains a decidedly central issue here, one that cannot be finessed away by developing better informed consent procedures, better anti-viral strategies, or by situating transplantation medicine in a just health care system.

Anencephaly↗