Transplanting organs from emotionally related donors has become a fairly routine procedure in many countries. However, donors have to be chosen carefully in order to avoid not just medically, but also morally, questionable outcomes. This paper draws attention to vulnerabilities that may affect the voluntariness of the donor's decision. Suggestions are made as to how to approach the evaluation and selection of potential donors.

Matters of hospital management do not figure prominently on the medical ethics agenda. However, management decisions that have to be taken in the area of hospital care are in fact riddled with ethical questions and do have significant impact on patients, staff members, and the community being served. In this decision making process evidence based medicine plays an increasingly important role as a tool for rationalising as well as rationing health care resources. In this article, ethical issues of hospital management (...) and the role of EBM will be explored, with particular reference to disease management programs, diagnosis related groups, and clinical pathways as recent developments in the German health care system. (shrink)

Further discussion of the ongoing human cloning debate.In the late 1990s cloning was still the subject of passionate debate. While philosophers were crossing swords about the implications of the “Dolly technique” for the meaning of human identity, sweeping declarations were made by major international bodies such as the World Medical Association, UNESCO, and the World Health Organization that unanimously condemned human reproductive cloning as ethically unacceptable and/or contrary to human dignity. By now, the topic elicits a mere frown, sneer, sigh, (...) or yawn from most bioethicists, depending on their temperament or mood. The same may hold true for those delegates at the United Nations who sat through many sessions that included the ominous agenda item entitled “international convention against reproductive cloning of human beings”.Human cloning became an issue at the United Nations when the item was introduced at the request of France and Germany in 2001. The two countries limited their proposal to reproductive cloning. This move, although aiming quite reasonably at the formulation of a minimal consensus among member states, got at least Germany into some trouble at home, as critical voices from different parts of the political spectrum argued that Germany should rather pursue a comprehensive ban on human cloning for any purpose, which would be more in accordance with its own national …. (shrink)

As a matter of justice, what do we owe each other to promote and protect health in a population and to assist people when they are ill and disabled? This is the fundamental question of Norman Daniels’ new book on justice and health. Just health is in many ways a successor to Daniels’ seminal classic Just health care. As foreshadowed by a 2001 target article in the American Journal of Bioethics, Just health integrates Daniels’ account of the special moral importance (...) of health and healthcare with his interim work on the social determinants of health4 and the fairness of health sector reform and limit-setting in healthcare. The change of title already indicates that Just health no longer focuses solely on the provision of healthcare, but spans all socially controllable factors of health. The book’s ambitious aim is to provide an integrated theory of justice and health. (shrink)