Journal of Bioethical Inquiry最新文献

This article examines the limitations of principlism in addressing the ethical challenges posed by One Digital Health. While principlism remains influential in bioethics, digital health, and global health policy, we argue that it is insufficient to capture the relational, data infrastructural, and multispecies dynamics shaping the threats to One Health. Using antimicrobial resistance as a paradigmatic case, we show that One Digital Health governance is shaped not only by distributive ethical concerns but also by structural asymmetries in data visibility, digital infrastructure, and epistemic inclusion across human, animal, and environmental domains. These asymmetries reveal a key limitation of principlism: although it articulates abstract commitments to justice and equity, it lacks the conceptual and operational resources to explain how inequalities are produced and reproduced in digital systems. To address this gap, we propose an integrated framework that combines the ethics of care, cosmopolitanism, and a FAIRER-based account of data governance. Ethics of care foregrounds situated vulnerability and relational interdependence; cosmopolitanism extends moral responsibility across global and multispecies scales; and FAIRER operationalizes these commitments within digital infrastructures and data systems. The antimicrobial resistance case study shows that this approach provides a more comprehensive account of One Digital Health governance by linking lived practices, global responsibilities, and data infrastructures. We conclude that addressing One Health threats through digital transformation requires moving beyond principle-based reasoning toward relational frameworks that integrate global commitments with contextual sensitivity.

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into digital media and health information ecosystems-including large language model chatbots, AI-enabled mHealth applications, and algorithmically curated social media-is reshaping how adolescents encounter and interpret health-related content. While regulatory debates emphasize innovation and efficiency, insufficient attention has been paid to youth as stakeholders whose interests and perspectives are rarely represented in AI governance. This article offers a bioethical analysis of federal and state regulatory approaches to AI in the United States, arguing that frameworks insufficiently address adolescents' developmental interests and exposure to algorithmic risk. Adolescents navigate digital health ecosystems shaped by algorithmic curation and inconsistent credibility signals yet have little voice in governance decisions shaping these environments. Drawing on bioethical principles, including respect for developing autonomy, distributive justice, and nonmaleficence, this analysis demonstrates how disclosure-based models place interpretive burdens on users while carrying developmental stakes for adolescents, and how vulnerability emerges relationally from interactions among developmental, technological, and social factors rather than from deficits within young people. These limitations are compounded by gaps in transparency and accountability across AI-generated and commercially influenced health content. Addressing these challenges requires developmentally responsive, equity-oriented governance, including youth-specific AI impact assessments and mechanisms for youth participation.

The arrival of publicly-accessible generative-AI tools, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, has significantly disrupted standard practice in education, research, and publishing. Academic publishers and journals, in particular, have responded by adopting policies which reflect both how they perceive the problems that generative-AI tools pose, and what kinds of solutions address these issues while remaining consistent with key scholarly values: integrity, transparency, and the primacy of human authorship. This article surveys the current state of generative-AI in academic publishing-including relevant policies at the publisher and journal-level-in anticipation of the JBI's forthcoming policies concerning generative-AI disclosure in manuscript submission and peer-review. Mirroring the emerging policy consensus concerning generative-AI use in academic publishing, this paper proposes that 'AI-disclosure statements' constitute an adaptive 'middle path' between prohibition and unrestricted permissiveness. Beyond this, though, we argue that AI-disclosure statements are valuable for their potential to codify desirable norms governing generative-AI use in publishing, and so to subtly influence the underlying 'academic form of life' for the better. We conclude by discussing one possible outcome of this influence, suggesting that it may represent a solution to problems raised by recent criticism of AI-disclosure statements.

This article reconsiders the figure of the zombie in Junot Díaz's "Monstro" by shifting attention to its role as a biopolitical mechanism that determines who is protected, abandoned, and left to die. While existing scholarship has tended to read the zombie as an allegory of colonial trauma and racial violence, this study argues that zombification operates as a material technology of governance through which populations are classified, regulated, and exposed to varying degrees of precarity within neoliberal regimes. Drawing on Agamben's concept of homo sacer and Mbembe's necropolitics, the article shows how relocation camps function as spaces of exception in which bare life is produced through the suspension of legal and political protections. It further examines how racialized and gendered objectification operates across both micro and macro scales, revealing the logic of inclusive exclusion that structures these regimes of life management. Finally, through Derrida's theory of autoimmunity and Esposito's concept of immunity, the article argues that the violence in the narrative emerges from a system that destroys its own protective mechanisms in the pursuit of security. In doing so, "Monstro" exposes zombification as a site where neoliberal sovereignty, necropolitical governance, and autoimmune logic converge in the production of disposable life.

Our dear Alphonso Lingis taught us to embrace objects as sacred; he reminded us how to challenge modernity's pernicious indoctrination-the temporal and spiritual flattening of our capacity to fully inhabit real life. This sacred imagines a paradigm shift, an invitation to difference in contrast with the conversion implied in capitalist-persuasion technologies and behavioural engineering. Con-spiring with Lingis through my photographic performances, I explore the fertility of such precarious manifestations to generate new life through unexpected alliances-a polytopia of creative collaborations with synergistically non-human ecosystems. Fluctuations of improvisation, a mutual commitment to enter unfamiliar territory, give us permission to be acutely vulnerable-a willingness to collectively step into the unknown. Such promiscuous crossings underscore the interlocking mechanisms among multiple infrastructures that enable both collusion (perpetuating apathy and its concomitant loss of agency) and emancipation (allowing creativity and connectivity to flourish).

Colombia's Constitutional Court ruling T-057 of 2025 addresses one of the most morally demanding questions in contemporary bioethics: whether surrogate-requested euthanasia can ever be justified for a patient who has never possessed decisional and communicational capacity. The case concerned Mateo, a sixteen-year-old adolescent with refractory epilepsy, severe dystonia, and profound cognitive disability, whose mother requested euthanasia on his behalf. The Court denied the specific request while disapplying as unconstitutional the blanket exclusion of minors with intellectual disabilities from euthanasia access and ordered comprehensive palliative care and regulatory reform. This article examines the case within Colombia's unique judge-made assisted death framework-one of the few systems globally constructed entirely through judicial decisions without enabling legislation-and surveys the comparative international landscape through six ethical lenses: principlism, care ethics, disability rights, Catholic bioethics, secular liberalism, and human rights law. The paper also briefly reviews the new Resolution 813 of 2026 that has since excluded never-competent patients from euthanasia despite the Constitutional Court orders. It concludes with a nuanced assessment: a legal order committed to human dignity cannot indefinitely condemn a minor to immense observable suffering without therapeutic prospects, yet such a position demands extraordinary procedural protection for human rights and patients' rights.

This article examines a recent Russian surrogacy case through a bioethical and socio-legal lens to assess the regulation of commercial surrogacy, the public response it generated, and the role of bioethics in contemporary Russian debate. Focusing on a criminal case involving medical professionals accused of child trafficking in connection with cross-border surrogacy, the article argues that the controversy exposed deep tensions among law, medicine, religion, public policy, and child protection. It shows that public discussion centred largely on legal control, national security, and reproductive market regulation, while key bioethical questions concerning the commodification of women's reproductive labour, the objectification of children, and the vulnerability of surrogate mothers remained largely absent. The article further demonstrates that the Russian regulatory framework is fragmented and paternalistic, insufficiently protecting the interests of surrogate mothers, intended parents, and children alike. By analysing both the case and the surrounding debates, the study concludes that Russian bioethics remains weakly institutionalized as an interdisciplinary forum capable of mediating between medical, legal, and moral perspectives. The article ultimately calls for broader, more inclusive ethical deliberation that meaningfully incorporates medical professionals, legal experts, civil society, and religious communities in the governance of surrogacy.

This paper examines the ethical challenges posed by the application of emotional AI in Chinese healthcare, characterizing it as a "benevolent deception machine." The article argues that emotional AI's "optimism bias" and "simulated empathy" render it an efficient tool for executing "benevolent deception," giving rise to two primary ethical concerns: erosion of patient autonomy and the potential to trigger deep-seated crises of trust. Nevertheless, the paper contends that emotional AI can be justified within the Chinese sociocultural context-Confucian familism grants the family a central role in decision-making, current laws reserve discretion for "withholding information," and the ethical framework of "jingquan" (constant and variable) provides philosophical grounds for flexibility. The unique value of emotional AI lies in its ability to transform unstable, ad hoc responses by family members into a controlled communicative practice, finding justification within the ethical logic that "since autonomy is sacrificed, maximum protection must be pursued." The article concludes that the design and application of emotional AI must always maintain "human-in-the-loop" oversight, ensuring that physician authority remains non-transferable and ethical auditing is non-negotiable.

Responding to conscientious objection and participation declarations to various morally contentious medical services requires a careful, inclusive, and comprehensive approach in reconciling the right of conscience of involved parties. In this paper, we make a case that the traditional discourse of whether or not to accommodate conscience-based requests does not adequately support complex, team-based healthcare systems in addressing emerging areas of moral controversy in medicine, particularly in this era of polarization. We describe how key parties in our organization developed an inclusive and comprehensive approach to reconciling rights of conscience in the context of the introduction of a morally contentious and divisive medical practice. This approach prioritized the building of a moral community, a recognition of moral diversity, a values-based approach, and the development of resources and infrastructure in managing conscience-based requests, to enable healthcare professionals uphold their fiduciary duties and promote positive patient experiences. This model of managing conscientious based situations may be applicable to other healthcare organizations that provide various morally controversial services.

Here, we draw on an ambiguous case from the COVID-19 pandemic and use a normative philosophical argument from virtue ethics to argue that it is prudent to disclose all kinds of financial relationships in biomedical publishing that may be perceived as a conflict of interest.