Works by Davies, Ben (exact spelling)

21 found
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  1. The right not to know and the obligation to know.Ben Davies - 2020 - Journal of Medical Ethics 46 (5):300-303.
    There is significant controversy over whether patients have a ‘right not to know’ information relevant to their health. Some arguments for limiting such a right appeal to potential burdens on others that a patient’s avoidable ignorance might generate. This paper develops this argument by extending it to cases where refusal of relevant information may generate greater demands on a publicly funded healthcare system. In such cases, patients may have an ‘obligation to know’. However, we cannot infer from the fact that (...)
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  2. Medical need and health need.Ben Davies - 2023 - Clinical Ethics 18 (3):287-291.
    I introduce a distinction between health need and medical need, and raise several questions about their interaction. Health needs are needs that relate directly to our health condition. Medical needs are needs which bear some relation to medical institutions or processes. I suggest that the question of whether medical insurance or public care should cover medical needs, health needs, or only needs which fit both categories is a political question that cannot be resolved definitionally. I also argue against an overly (...)
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  3. Rationing, Responsibility, and Vaccination During COVID-19: A Conceptual Map.Jin K. Park & Ben Davies - forthcoming - American Journal of Bioethics:1-14.
    Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, shortages of scarce healthcare resources consistently presented significant moral and practical challenges. While the importance of vaccines as a key pharmaceutical intervention to stem pandemic scarcity was widely publicized, a sizable proportion of the population chose not to vaccinate. In response, some have defended the use of vaccination status as a criterion for the allocation of scarce medical resources. In this paper, we critically interpret this burgeoning literature, and describe a framework for thinking about vaccine-sensitive resource (...)
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  4. ‘Personal Health Surveillance’: The Use of mHealth in Healthcare Responsibilisation.Ben Davies - 2021 - Public Health Ethics 14 (3):268-280.
    There is an ongoing increase in the use of mobile health technologies that patients can use to monitor health-related outcomes and behaviours. While the dominant narrative around mHealth focuses on patient empowerment, there is potential for mHealth to fit into a growing push for patients to take personal responsibility for their health. I call the first of these uses ‘medical monitoring’, and the second ‘personal health surveillance’. After outlining two problems which the use of mHealth might seem to enable us (...)
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  5. From Sufficient Health to Sufficient Responsibility.Ben Davies & Julian Savulescu - 2020 - Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 17 (3):423-433.
    The idea of using responsibility in the allocation of healthcare resources has been criticized for, among other things, too readily abandoning people who are responsible for being very badly off. One response to this problem is that while responsibility can play a role in resource allocation, it cannot do so if it will leave those who are responsible below a “sufficiency” threshold. This paper considers first whether a view can be both distinctively sufficientarian and allow responsibility to play a role (...)
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  6. Responsibility and the recursion problem.Ben Davies - 2021 - Ratio 35 (2):112-122.
    A considerable literature has emerged around the idea of using ‘personal responsibility’ as an allocation criterion in healthcare distribution, where a person's being suitably responsible for their health needs may justify additional conditions on receiving healthcare, and perhaps even limiting access entirely, sometimes known as ‘responsibilisation’. This discussion focuses most prominently, but not exclusively, on ‘luck egalitarianism’, the view that deviations from equality are justified only by suitably free choices. A superficially separate issue in distributive justice concerns the two–way relationship (...)
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  7. Utilitarianism and animal cruelty: Further doubts.Ben Davies - 2016 - De Ethica 3 (3):5-19.
    Utilitarianism has an apparent pedigree when it comes to animal welfare. It supports the view that animal welfare matters just as much as human welfare. And many utilitarians support and oppose various practices in line with more mainstream concern over animal welfare, such as that we should not kill animals for food or other uses, and that we ought not to torture animals for fun. This relationship has come under tension from many directions. The aim of this article is to (...)
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  8.  94
    Deference or critical engagement: How should healthcare practitioners use Clinical Ethics Guidance?Ben Davies & Joshua Parker - forthcoming - Monash Bioethics Review:1-15.
    Healthcare practitioners have access to a range of ethical guidance. However, the normative role of this guidance in ethical decision-making is underexplored. This paper considers two ways that healthcare practitioners could approach ethics guidance. We first outline the idea of deference to ethics guidance, showing how an attitude of deference raises three key problems: moral value; moral understanding; and moral error. Drawing on philosophical literature, we then advocate an alternative framing of ethics guidance as a form of moral testimony by (...)
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  9. Fair Innings and Time-Relative Claims.Ben Davies - 2015 - Bioethics 30 (6):462-468.
    Greg Bognar has recently offered a prioritarian justification for ‘fair innings’ distributive principles that would ration access to healthcare on the basis of patients' age. In this article, I agree that Bognar's principle is among the strongest arguments for age-based rationing. However, I argue that this position is incomplete because of the possibility of ‘time-relative' egalitarian principles that could complement the kind of lifetime egalitarianism that Bognar adopts. After outlining Bognar's position, and explaining the attraction of time-relative egalitarianism, I suggest (...)
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  10. Ageing and Terminal Illness: Problems for Rawlsian Justice.Ben Davies - 2018 - Journal of Applied Philosophy:775-789.
    This article considers attempts to include the issues of ageing and ill health in a Rawlsian framework. It first considers Norman Daniels’ Prudential Lifespan Account, which reduces intergenerational questions to issues of intrapersonal prudence from behind a Rawslian veil of ignorance. This approach faces several problems of idealisation, including those raised by Hugh Lazenby, because it must assume that everyone will live to the same age, undermining its status as a prudential calculation. I then assess Lazenby's account, which applies Rawls’ (...)
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  11. Feeding Infants: Choice-Specific Considerations, Parental Obligation, and Pragmatic Satisficing.Clare Marie Moriarty & Ben Davies - 2024 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 27 (2):167-183.
    Health institutions recommend that young infants be exclusively breastfed on demand, and it is widely held that parents who can breastfeed have an obligation to do so. This has been challenged in recent philosophical work, especially by Fiona Woollard. Woollard’s work critically engages with two distinct views of parental obligation that might ground such an obligation—based on maximal benefit and avoidance of significant harm—to reject an obligation to breastfeed. While agreeing with Woollard’s substantive conclusion, this paper (drawing on philosophical discussion (...)
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  12. Healthcare Priorities: The “Young” and the “Old”.Ben Davies - 2023 - Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 32 (2):174-185.
    Some philosophers and segments of the public think age is relevant to healthcare priority-setting. One argument for this is based in equity: “Old” patients have had either more of a relevant good than “young” patients or enough of that good and so have weaker claims to treatment. This article first notes that some discussions of age-based priority that focus in this way on old and young patients exhibit an ambiguity between two claims: that patients classified as old should have a (...)
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  13. Paternalism and evaluative shift.Ben Davies - 2017 - Moral Philosophy and Politics 4 (2):325-346.
    Many people feel that respecting a person’s autonomy is not sufficiently important to obligate us to stay out of their affairs in all cases; but the ground for interference may often turn out to be a hunch that the agent cannot really be competent, or cannot really know what her decision implies; for if she were both of these things, surely she would not make such a foolish decision. This paper suggests a justification of paternalism that does not rely on (...)
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  14. No Blame No Gain? From a No Blame Culture to a Responsibility Culture in Medicine.Joshua Parker & Ben Davies - 2020 - Journal of Applied Philosophy 37 (4):646-660.
    Healthcare systems need to consider not only how to prevent error, but how to respond to errors when they occur. In the United Kingdom’s National Health Service, one strand of this latter response is the ‘No Blame Culture’, which draws attention from individuals and towards systems in the process of understanding an error. Defences of the No Blame Culture typically fail to distinguish between blaming someone and holding them responsible. This article argues for a ‘responsibility culture’, where healthcare professionals are (...)
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  15. A new paradox for well-being subjectivism.Ben Davies - 2023 - Analysis 83 (4):673-682.
    Subjectivists think that our well-being is grounded in our subjective attitudes. Many such views are vulnerable to variations on the ‘paradox of desire’, where theories cannot make determinate judgements about the well-being of agents who take a positive valuing attitude towards their life going badly. However, this paradox does not affect all subjectivist theories; theories grounded on agents’ prudential values can avoid it.This paper suggests a new paradox for subjectivist theories which has a wider scope, and includes such prudential judgement (...)
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  16. Health(care) and the temporal subject.Ben Davies - 2018 - Les Ateliers de l'Éthique / the Ethics Forum 13 (3):38-64.
    Many assume that theories of distributive justice must obviously take people’s lifetimes, and only their lifetimes, as the relevant period across which we distribute. Although the question of the temporal subject has risen in prominence, it is still relatively underdeveloped, particularly in the sphere of health and healthcare. This paper defends a particular view, “momentary sufficientarianism,” as being an important element of healthcare justice. At the heart of the argument is a commitment to pluralism about justice, where theorizing about just (...)
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  17. Institutional Responsibility is Prior to Personal Responsibility in a Pandemic.Ben Davies & Julian Savulescu - 2024 - Journal of Value Inquiry 58 (2):215-234.
    On 26 January 2021, while announcing that the country had reached the mark of 100,000 deaths within 28 days of COVID-19, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that he took “full responsibility for everything that the Government has done” as part of British efforts to tackle the pandemic. The force of this statement was undermined, however, by what followed: -/- What I can tell you is that we truly did everything we could, and continue to do everything that we can, (...)
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  18. The Prospects for ‘Prospect Utilitarianism’.Ben Davies - 2022 - Utilitas 34 (3):335-343.
    Hun Chung argues for a theory of distributive justice – ‘prospect utilitarianism’ – that overcomes two central problems purportedly faced by sufficientarianism: giving implausible answers in ‘lifeboat cases’, where we can save the lives of some but not all of a group, and failing to respect the axiom of continuity. Chung claims that prospect utilitarianism overcomes these problems, and receives empirical support from work in economics on prospect theory. This article responds to Chung's criticisms of sufficientarianism, showing that they are (...)
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  19. Bursting Bubbles? QALYs and Discrimination.Ben Davies - 2019 - Utilitas 31 (2):191-202.
    The use of Quality-Adjusted Life Years (QALYs) in healthcare allocation has been criticized as discriminatory against people with disabilities. This article considers a response to this criticism from Nick Beckstead and Toby Ord. They say that even if QALYs are discriminatory, attempting to avoid discrimination – when coupled with other central principles that an allocation system should favour – sometimes leads to irrationality in the form of cyclic preferences. I suggest that while Beckstead and Ord have identified a problem, it (...)
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  20. ‘The right not to know and the obligation to know’, response to commentaries.Ben Davies - 2020 - Journal of Medical Ethics 46 (5):309-310.
    Response to commentaries on 'The right not to know and the obligation to know'.
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  21. Enhancement and the Conservative Bias.Ben Davies - 2017 - Philosophy and Technology 30 (3):339-356.
    Nicholas Agar argues that we should avoid certain ‘radical’ enhancement technologies. One reason for this is that they will alienate us from current sources of value by altering our evaluative outlooks. We should avoid this, even if enhancing will provide us with novel, objectively better sources of value. After noting the parallel between Agar’s views and G. A. Cohen’s work on the ‘conservative bias’, I explore Agar’s suggestion in relation to two kinds of radical enhancement: cognitive and anti-ageing. With regard (...)
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