The idea of resource scarcity permeates health ethics and health policy analysis in various contexts. However, health ethics inquiry seldom asks-as it should-why some settings are 'resource-scarce' and others not. In this article I describe interrogating scarcity as a strategy for inquiry into questions of resource allocation within a single political jurisdiction and, in particular, as an appr...

Environmental ethics has emerged during the early 1970s, when environmentalists started urging philosophers to consider the philosophical aspects of environmental problems. Environmental ethics considers the ethical relationships between humanity and non-human world. The Union of Concerned Scientists, a group of over two thousands scientists, has concluded that climatic change is beyond dispute...

In contemporary medical ethics health is rarely acknowledged to be an ethical obligation. This oversight is due to the preoccupation of most bioethicists with a rationalist, contract model for ethics in which moral obligation is limited to truth-telling and promise-keeping. Such an ethics is poorly suited to medicine because it fails to appreciate that medicine's basis as a moral enterprise is ...

Ethical aspects of medical research have had a high public profile in the UK lately. There has been concern, for example, about the level of information provided to participants when consenting to clinical trials; regarding the retention of organs removed at necropsy without the knowledge or permission of next of kin; and about the rights and wrongs of cloning human tissues. In general, occupat...

Training in public health ethics is not at the core of public health programmes in Europe. The fruitful progress of the United States could stimulate the European schools of public health and other academic institutions to develop specifically European teaching programmes for ethics that embrace both transatlantic innovations and some adaptations based on the evolution of moral values in Europe...

This article reviews the history and future good of acceptance ethics and helps frame the publication of papers presented at the workshop on Professional Promises: Hopes and Gaps in Access to Oral Health Care. Discovery and development of Universal Patient Acceptance (UPA), a practical application of acceptance ethics, is key to systematizing access to oral health; UPA expands partnerships amon...

In response to the need for a more structured approach toward the enhancement of and preparation for case consultation, the Portland Service Area (PSA) of the Providence Health System Oregon Region implemented a "special team" system. These teams--an extension of the ethics committees already in place--underwent training in areas such as an overview of ethics, patient decision making, professio...