Reciprocity and Resources

Reciprocity has been deployed as the moral concept underpinning an obligation to ensure that health care workers (HCW) who work during a pandemic have access to essential goods, such as personal protective equipment (PPE), and as a principle for giving priority to HCW for scarce resources, such as intensive care beds or ventilators. In this paper I examine the concept of reciprocity, arguing that it is best understood as a form of fairness, or “fair return for services rendered.” This interpretation works well in explaining our obligation to provide HCW with PPE and other risk-mitigation resources, but I give reasons to suggest that it does not support an obligation to prioritize HCW for scarce medical interventions.

How AI Can Aid Bioethics

This paper explores some ways in which artificial intelligence (AI) could be used to improve human moral judgments in bioethics by avoiding some of the most common sources of error in moral judgment, including ignorance, confusion, and bias. It surveys three existing proposals for building human morality into AI: Top-down, bottom-up, and hybrid approaches. Then it proposes a multi-step, hybrid method, using the example of kidney allocations for transplants as a test case. The paper concludes with brief remarks about how to handle several complications, respond to some objections, and extend this novel method to other important moral issues in bioethics and beyond.

Prioritizing Parents

Should parents or other primary caregivers of dependent children receive some priority when health care resources are scarce? This paper argues they should. The COVID-19 pandemic has given new urgency to discussions about resource allocation and yet there has been little to no discussion of the important role parents play in protecting and promoting the health of their dependent children. Historically, priority for parents was justified on questionable grounds of social value and this may have led bioethicists and policy makers to overlook more plausible justifications for prioritizing parents. After discussing and criticizing several such justifications for their violation of principles of pluralism and neutrality, a new justification is offered and defended from objections. The reason we should grant some priority to primary caregivers of dependent children is that research shows that doing so would protect and promote the health and lives of children.