A Decent Proposal: Ethical Review of Clinical Research Donald Evans and Martyn Evans Centre for Philosophy and Health Care University of Wales Swansea, UK The investigation and development of modern medicines and medical technology can create numerous ethical dilemmas both for clinical researchers and research ethics committees. A Decent Proposal: Ethical Review of Clinical Research seeks to facilitate and encourage good clinical research by exploring the concerns, responsibilities, general issues and particular pitfalls associated with ethical aspects of research. It provides (...) practical guidelines for researchers on how to improve the quality of research design, while for those appointed to scrutinise research proposals it offers advice on how to apply consistent, careful and critical reasoning to the process of assessing ethical standards. As such, it will provide invaluable assistance to clinical researchers and ethics committees alike in understanding the moral challenges posed by modern health care. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Principles of Biomedical Ethics. By Tom L. Beauchamp and James F. Childress.

Two centuries after they were published, Kant's ethical writings are as much admired and imitated as they have ever been, yet serious and long-standing accusations of internal incoherence remain unresolved. Onora O'Neill traces the alleged incoherences to attempt to assimilate Kant's ethical writings to modern conceptions of rationality, action and rights. When the temptation to assimilate is resisted, a strikingly different and more cohesive account of reason and morality emerges. Kant offers a `constructivist' vindication of reason and a moral vision (...) in which obligations are prior to rights and in which justice and virtue are linked. O'Neill begins by reconsidering Kant's conceptions of philosophical method, reason, freedom, automony and action. She then moves on to the more familiar terrain of interpretation of the Categorical Imperative, while in the last section she emphasises differences between Kant's ethics and recent 'Kantian' ethics, including the work of John Rawls and other contemporary liberal political philosophers. This reassessment will add significantly to the understanding of Kantian practical philosophy. (shrink)

The paper seeks to show that underlying Bentham's concept of utility is a commitment to a criterion or principle of moral status distinguishing morally relevant beings from the morally irrelevant. Further, that the notion of moral status is ultimately inconsistent with Bentham's utility; that it implies something like a Kantian ethic barring the use of morally relevant beings as mere means to some other's satisfaction, an ethic which suitably interpreted may be more useful in defence of some concerns for which (...) Bentham has traditionally been cited, animal rights for example. The paper concludes by noting the history and politics of moral status and argues that the concept involves a fusion of fact and value, the empirical and the evaluative, undermining assumptions of a rigid separation of the two and the consequent essential subjectivity of the latter. (shrink)