Since the birth of the first test-tube baby, Louise Brown, in 1977, we have seen truly remarkable advances in biotechnology. We can now screen the fetus for Down Syndrome, Spina Bifida, and a wide range of genetic disorders. We can rearrange genes in DNA chains and redirect the evolution of species. We can record an individual's genetic fingerprint. And we can potentially insert genes into human DNA that will produce physical warning signs of cancer, allowing early detection. In fact, biotechnology (...) has progressed to such a point that virtually any kind of genetic manipulation, if not already possible, is just around the corner. But these breakthroughs also raise serious ethical and moral dilemmas that we are only now beginning to confront. In Wonderwoman and Superman, noted medical ethicist John Harris offers the first thorough analysis of the moral dilemmas created by the revolution in molecular biology. Covering a wide array of recent innovations, Harris discusses, for example, the moral decisions involved and the consequences of creating egg and embryo banks. Who should be allowed to use such resources? Should recipients be screened? Should such banks be open for public or private use? And does it cheapen life to make embryos available for sale? In another chapter, Harris examines the question of conceiving children chiefly for organ donation, focusing on the recent case of a woman who wanted to have a second child to provide a bone marrow donor for her first child sick with leukemia (she intended to abort the fetus if its bone marrow did not genetically match that of her living child). In this case, the medical staff had to decide whether they should perform in-vitro fertilization, knowing that the mother did not satisfy the clinic's criteria (there was no father), and also knowing the potential for abortion. Discussing the ethics of the mother's choice and the clinic's choice, Harris asks whether it is morally correct to create a child as an organ donor, whether the future child would suffer, whether it is worth any suffering to be born, and who has the right to weigh the various factors (both moral and physiological) involved in making these decisions. Delving into a multitude of issues such as when life begins, when suffering is needless, and whether we should play God, Wonderwoman and Superman provides not only a thought-provoking inquiry into the potential and actual ethical dilemmas created by the many advances in biotechnology, but challenges us to learn to choose responsibly and to face the moral implications of the choices that confront us. (shrink)

In this book, Dr. Robert J. Levine reviews federal regulations, ethical analysis, and case studies in an attempt to answer these questions.

Increasingly in the modern world, incentives are becoming the tool we reach for when we wish to bring about change. In government, in education, in health care, between and within institutions of all sorts, incentives are offered to steer people's choices in certain directions. But despite the increasing interest in ethics and economics, the ethics of the use of incentives has raised very little concern. From a certain point of view, this is not surprising. When incentives are viewed from the (...) perspective of market economics, they appear to be entirely unproblematic. An incentive is an offer of something of value, sometimes with a cash equivalent and sometimes not, meant to influence the payoff structure of a utility calculation so as to alter a person's course of action. In other words, the person offering the incentive means to make one choice more attractive to the person responding to the incentive than any other alternative. Both parties stand to gain from the resulting choice. In effect, it is a form of trade, and as such, it meets certain ethical requirements by definition. A trade involves voluntary action by all parties concerned to bring about a result that is beneficial to all parties concerned. If these conditions were not met, the trade would simply not occur. And as inducements in a voluntary transaction, incentives certainly have the moral high ground over coercion as an alternative. (shrink)

This paper argues against paying people to participate in research. Volunteering to participate as a subject in a research program is not like taking a job. The main difference is to do with the risks inherent in research. Experimentation on human beings is, by definition, trying out something with an unknown consequence and exposes people to risks of harm which cannot be known in advance. This is the main reason for independent review by committee of research programs. It is based (...) on a recognition that researchers are not always capable of putting the interests of their subjects ahead of their research objectives. It is not simply a matter of individual autonomy. Society has an obligation, prior to the protection of individual freedom and autonomy, to establish basic safeguards that are equitable in their operation. Any inducement for participating in research would add to the difficulty subjects have in adequately assessing the risks of participating in research. An acceptance of inducement to participate in research would further increase the inequity of research conducted on the impecunious for the benefit of the well‐off. (shrink)

Opposition to inducement payments for research subjects is an international orthodoxy amongst writers of ethics committee guidelines. We offer an argument in favour of these payments. We also critically evaluate the best arguments we can find or devise against such payments, and except in one very limited range of circumstances, we find these unconvincing.

Despite its title, Alan Wertheimer’s new book is not another tiresome exploration of Marxist economic theories. Indeed, there is virtually no extended discussion of Marxism at all, since Wertheimer believes that what is unique to that perspective is highly problematic, given that when Marxists simply assert that capitalists do exploit wage laborers they are appealing to “the ordinary notion that one party exploits another when it gets unfair and undeserved benefits from its transactions or relationships with others”. His goal is (...) to analyze this ordinary sense of exploitation, to explore in detail some of the many forms it can take, and to begin some serious thinking about what he terms its moral weight and its moral force. This groundbreaking work, the first book-length treatment of its subject from a broadly analytic standpoint, should do much to disabuse non-Marxist philosophers of the notion that exploitation is largely peripheral to the central questions of moral and political philosophy. (shrink)

This paper argues against paying people to participate in research. Volunteering to participate as a subject in a research program is not like taking a job. The main difference is to do with the risks inherent in research. Experimentation on human beings is, by definition, trying out something with an unknown consequence and exposes people to risks of harm which cannot be known in advance. This is the main reason for independent review by committee of research programs. It is based (...) on a recognition that researchers are not always capable of putting the interests of their subjects ahead of their research objectives. It is not simply a matter of individual autonomy. Society has an obligation, prior to the protection of individual freedom and autonomy, to establish basic safeguards that are equitable in their operation. Any inducement for participating in research would add to the difficulty subjects have in adequately assessing the risks of participating in research. An acceptance of inducement to participate in research would further increase the inequity of research conducted on the impecunious for the benefit of the well‐off. (shrink)