Commerce and medical ethics.

Commerce and medical ethics.

Several of the papers in this issue of the journal address issues of commerce in relation to medical ethics. Dr John Keown' argues in favour of the long-established British, and more recently also European Union, policy that blood for transfusion purposes should be donated, rather than sold. Even if-coun-terfactually-it were more expensive to use unpaid donors, he suggests, the promotion of alt...

Ethics, commerce, and kidneys.

As the number of patients waiting for cadaver renal transplants continues to rise the arguments against paying for live donated organs bear re-examination. One ethical argument is that such payment would lead to exploitation of vulnerable people.' 2The sort of people who would sell organs are the poor, who have few other options available for gaining monev (such as employment), and so are at ri...

Nursing ethics and medical ethics.

Confidentiality and the ethics of medical ethics.

In this paper we consider the use of cases in medical ethics research and teaching. To date, there has been little discussion about the consent or confidentiality requirements that ought to govern the use of cases in these areas. This is in marked contrast to the requirements for consent to publish cases in clinical journals, or to use personal information in research. There are a number of rea...

Justice and medical ethics.

Justice, in the sense of fair adjudication between conflicting claims, is held to be relevant to a wide range of issues in medical ethics. Several differing concepts of justice are briefly described, including Aristotle's formal principle of justice, libertarian theories, utilitarian theories, Marxist theories, the theory of John Rawls, and the view--held, for example, by W.D. Ross--that justi...