Recent calls to address racism in bioethics reflect a sense of urgency to mitigate the lethal effects of a lack of action. While the field was catalyzed largely in response to pivotal events deeply rooted in racism and other structures of oppression embedded in research and health care, it has failed to center racial justice in its scholarship, pedagogy, advocacy, and practice, and neglected to integrate anti-racism as a central consideration. Academic bioethics programs play a key role in determining the (...) field’s norms and practices, including methodologies, funding priorities, and professional networks that bear on equity, inclusion, and epistemic justice. This article describes recommendations from the Racial Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (REDI) Task Force commissioned by the Association of Bioethics Program Directors to prioritize and strengthen anti-racist practices in bioethics programmatic endeavors and to evaluate and develop specific goals to advance REDI. (shrink)

As early-career neuroethicists, we come to the field of neuroethics at a unique moment: we are well-situated to consider nearly two decades of neuroethics scholarship and identify challenges that have persisted across time. But we are also looking squarely ahead, embarking on the next generation of exciting and productive neuroethics scholarship. In this article, we both reflect backwards and turn our gaze forward. First, we highlight criticisms of neuroethics, both from scholars within the field and outside it, that have focused (...) on speculation and lack of skepticism; the dearth of consideration of broader social issues such as justice and equality, both with regard to who speaks for neuroethics as a field and who benefits from its recommendations and findings; and the insufficient focus on the practical impact of our ethical work. Second, we embrace the concept of “translational neuroethics” to outline a vision for neuroethics that is integrated, inclusive, and impactful. Integration can help us identify more pertinent, real-world issues, and move away from speculation; inclusivity can help ensure that the questions we attend to are not merely relevant to a single subgroup but aim toward just distribution of benefits; and impact can help us think beyond guidelines and recommendations to focus on implementation. Our goal is for this call to action to help shape neuroethics into a discipline that develops rigorous research agendas through relationships with interdisciplinary partners, that is broadly inclusive and attends to issues beyond novel neurotechnologies, and that is devoted to the translation of scholarship into practice. (shrink)

Human enhancement is one of the leading research topics in contemporary applied ethics. Interestingly, the widespread attention to the ethical aspects of future enhancement applications has generated misgivings. Are researchers who spend their time investigating the ethics of futuristic human enhancement scenarios acting in an ethically suboptimal manner? Are the methods they use to analyze future technological developments appropriate? Are institutions wasting resources by funding such research? In this article, I address the ethics of doing human enhancement ethics focusing on (...) two main concerns. The Methodological Problem refers to the question of how we should methodologically address the moral aspects of future enhancement applications. The Normative Problem refers to what is the normative justification for investigating and funding the research on the ethical aspects of future human enhancement. This article aims to give a satisfactory response to both meta-questions in order to ethically justify the inquiry into the ethical aspects of emerging enhancement technologies. (shrink)

Fabi and Goldberg have helpfully shed some light on the wrongs perpetuated by the current funding architecture on research, sponsorship, and career development in the field of bioethics. The...

The organizations that fund bioethics research receive many more eligible grant applications than they can support. Academic positions that support bioethics research are likewise scarce. As a resu...

As members of a neuroethics research group funded by the NIH, we echo the call from Fabi and Goldberg for greater funding parity between the ethics of specialized medical technologies and br...

Empirical bioethics research has become an established field of study, with its own unique goals, vocabulary, and methods, and wi...

Fabi and Goldberg have made an important contribution to the understanding of how bioethicists do bioethics, or more precisely, how bioethics research funding mechanisms reflect the values o...

Fabi and Goldberg investigate how funding availability influences the landscape of bioethics as a field, and perpetuates forms of social and epistemic injustice while limitin...

In their article, Fabi and Goldberg discuss concerns of racial injustice and the continued exclusion of people—based on race—in ethics research funding allocation, and how that impacts knowl...

As physicians, the supreme importance of health and its integral role in any individual’s pursuit of life, liberty and happiness is exhibited on a daily basis. It is abundantly clear that without h...

Fabi and Goldberg raised important considerations regarding both research and funding priorities in the field of bioethics and, in particular, the field’s misalignment with social justice. W...

Fabi and Goldberg make the important observation that skewed funding priorities in bioethics contribute to the perpetuation of injustice. Through a lens of structural racism, the authors dem...

The article by Rachel Fabi and Daniel Goldberg contends that current priorities in the field of bioethics perpetuate injustices and inequities. This is because funding is one of the main drivers of...