Would a “medicalization” of love be a “good” or “bad” form of medicalization? In discussing this question, Earp, Sandberg, and Savulescu primarily focus on the potential positive and negative consequences of turning love into a medical issue. But it can also be asked whether there is something intrinsically regrettable about medicalizing love. It is argued here that the medicalization of love can be seen as an “evaluative category mistake”: it treats a core human value (love) as if it were mainly a means to other ends (viz. physical health and hedonic well-being). It is also argued that Earp et al’s closing argument (that a scientific perspective on love actually adds more value to love) can be seen as involving another evaluative category mistake: it treats an object of desire and practical interest (namely, love) as if it mainly were an object of scientific contemplation and theoretical interest. It is concluded that, to relate love to health and well-being in a more satisfying way, we should construe the latter two in broader ways, whereby love is itself a component or element of human flourishing.

In Wallace’s short story “Luckily the Account Representative Knew CPR,” a vice president (VP) suffers cardiac arrest. As an account representative (AR) administers CPR, he discovers his own impersonality mirrored back to him by the VP—a disturbing vision of himself that the AR wishes to escape. Because modern moral theories would have the AR respond impersonally to the VP, those theories would only exacerbate his existential predicament. In contrast, by regarding the AR’s act as one that he, in particular, should perform, narrative ethics can discern a resolution for his predicament: because the AR still values his diminished capacities for care and spontaneity, this situation offers him an opportunity to revive those former traits. Doing so would give him greater authentic integrity, or narrative continuity with the most important aspects of his past. Authentic integrity can serve narrative ethics as a helpful starting point for understanding how the life stories of patients, clinicians, and others might appropriately unfold.

This article discusses the notion of social responsibility for personal health and well-being in bioethics. Although social responsibility is an intrinsic aspect of bioethics, and its role is increasingly recognized in certain areas, it can still be claimed that bioethics in general is committed to an individualistic theoretical framework that disregards the social context in which decisions, health, and well-being are situated. The philosophical premises of this framework regard individuals as rational decisionmakers who can be held accountable for their health conditions and who should be the primary objects of intervention in attempts to reduce lifestyle-associated chronic diseases. There are, however, social determinants of health that challenge this conclusion. Because their impact can be controlled, to a certain extent, by social and public policy decisions, their existence shows the inadequacy of the purely individualistic approach. I suggest, accordingly, that bioethics would benefit, both academically and societally, from a more social perspective. Bioethical studies that acknowledge, from the start, the social determinants of health would be more amenable to constructive multi- and interdisciplinarity, and a more balanced account of responsibility would further the contribution of sound bioethical work to sensible public policies.

Recently the scope of protections afforded those healthcare professionals and institutions that refuse to provide certain interventions on the grounds of conscience have expanded, in some instances insulating providers (institutional and individual) from any liability or sanction for harms that patients experience as a result. With the exponential increase in the penetration of Catholic-affiliated healthcare across the country, physicians and nurses who are not practicing Catholics are nevertheless required to execute documents pledging to conform their patient care to the Ethical and Religious Directives for Health Care Services as a condition of employment or medical staff privileges. In some instances, doing so may result in patient morbidity or mortality or violate professional standards for respecting advance directives or surrogate decisionmaking. This article challenges the ethical propriety of such institutional mandates and argues that legal protections for conscientious refusal must provide redress for patients who are harmed by care that falls below the prevailing clinical standards.

According to human enhancement advocates, it is morally permissible (and sometimes obligatory) to use biomedical means to modulate or select certain biological traits in order to increase people’s welfare, even when there is no pathology to be treated or prevented. Some authors have recently proposed to extend the use of biomedical means to modulate lust, attraction, and attachment. I focus on some conceptual implications of this proposal, particularly with regard to bioconservatives’ understanding of the notions of therapy and enhancement I first explain what makes the proposal of medicalizing love interesting and unique, compared to the other forms of bioenhancement usually advocated. I then discuss how the medicalization of love bears on the more general debate on human enhancement, particularly with regard to the key notion of “normality” that is commonly used to define the therapy–enhancement distinction. This analysis suggests that the medicalization of love, in virtue of its peculiarity, requires bioconservatives to reconsider their way of understanding and applying the notions of “therapy” and “enhancement.” More in particular, I show that, because a non-arbitrary and value-free notion of “therapy” cannot be applied to the case of love, bioconservatives have the burden of either providing some new criterion that could be used for drawing a line between permissible and impermissible medicalization, or demonstrating that under no circumstances—including the cases in which love is already acknowledged to require medical intervention—can love fall within the domain of medicine.

Philosophers should express their ideas clearly. They should do this in any field of specialization, but especially when they address issues of practical consequence, as they do in bioethics. This article dissects a recent and much-debated contribution to philosophical bioethics by Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva, examines how exactly it fails to meet the requirement of clarity, and maps a way forward by outlining the ways in which philosophical argumentation could validly and soundly proceed in bioethics.

In 2012, Dartmouth College renamed its medical school, founded in 1797, the Audrey and Theodor Geisel School of Medicine. Using the renaming of the medical school of Dartmouth College as a foil, I offer in this article a vision of what it might mean to align Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, with doctors by examining Geisel’s You’re Only Old Once! A Book for Obsolete Children. In this article, I derive four critiques of modern medicine from the book and offer four strategies as to how these critiques could be explored in medical education. If You’re Only Old Once! is read as a pathography, I argue that it can be used as a resource for medical education.

Therapeutic misconception (TM)—when clinical research participants fail to adequately grasp the difference between participating in a clinical trial and receiving ordinary clinical care—has long been recognized as a significant problem in consent to clinical trials. We suggest that TM does not primarily reflect inadequate disclosure or participants’ incompetence. Instead, TM arises from divergent primary cognitive frames. The researchers’ frame places the clinical trial in the context of scientific designs for assessing intervention efficacy. In contrast, most participants have a cognitive frame that is personal and focused primarily on their medical problems. To illustrate this, we draw on interview material from both clinical researchers and participants in clinical trials. We suggest that reducing TM requires encouraging subjects to adjust their frame, not just add information to their existing frame. What is necessary is a scientific reframing of participation in a clinical trial.

I raise several concerns with Earp and colleagues' analysis of enhancement through neurochemical modulation of love as a key issue in contemporary neuroethics. These include: (i) strengthening their deflation of medicalization concerns by showing how the objection that love should be left outside of the scope of medicine would directly undermine the goal of medicine; (ii) developing stronger analysis of the social and political concerns relevant to neurochemical modulation of love, by exploring and suggesting possible counters to ways in which 'wellbeing' may be used as a tool of oppression; (iii) providing reasons to support a broad need for ecological investigation of, and indeed ecological education concerning, neurotechnology; (iv) suggesting ways in which philosophy, and the humanities more broadly, remain directly relevant to responding effectively to issues in contemporary neuroethics.

This is a critique of Earp, Sandberg and Savulescu’s argument in support of a possible future neuromodulation of love and love-related relationships. I argue that, contrary to what is suggested by Earp, Sandberg and Savulescu, we do have good reason to be concerned about that possibility as well as about the medicalization of love that its pursuit would bring about.

Ethical considerations for the use of unregistered interventions for Ebola virus disease have sparked considerable debate among academic and clinical ethicists. In August 2014 the World Health Organization (WHO) convened a panel of experts to discuss approaches to the outbreak in West Africa, with the goal of determining "whether it is ethical to use unregistered interventions with unknown adverse effects for possible treatment or prophylaxis”.1 The panel concluded that there would be an ethical imperative to provide such unregistered interventions if specific criteria could be met. This paper evaluates the WHO conclusion and argues that although it may be reasonable to provide unregistered interventions considering the circumstance, there is no clear ethical imperative to do so.