Thomas H Murray
Biographic Data
| ID | 318412 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Thomas H Murray |
| GIVEN NAMES | Thomas H |
| FAMILY NAME | Murray |
| SIGNATURE | MURRAY T H |
| AFFILIATIONS | Case Western Reserve University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 49 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 6 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 49 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1980 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
On the Human Body as Property
For as long as I can recall, newspapers have published brief items in which someone has calculated what the human body is "worth" on the open market. The value of the body-as reduced to its chemical components-was never more than a few dollars. A more accurate accounting, though, would include the market value of transplantable organs and tissues, as well as the potential bonanza to be had should a cell line cultured from that body prove valuable…
Gender and Sport
Sport faces many challenges in creating fair, interesting, and meaningful competitions that highlight and reward the qualities widely valued in sport, such as natural talents, dedication, and competitive savvy. The Paralympic Games illuminate both the challenge and a thoughtful way of responding by organizing events that group athletes with comparable levels of impairment so that raw physical discrepancies don't overwhelm differences in talent or…
Ripples
Cloning was the issue that put the National Bioethics Advisory Commission on the map, but the first clue that NBAC would address cloning was a terse fax from the White House to each of us who served on the Commission. The fax noted that with the birth of the sheep named Dolly, mammalian cloning was now a reality, and it tasked NBAC with providing advice on the ethics of human cloning and how the nation should respond to it. We were given ninety d…
Field Notes
I met John Arras under unpromising circumstances. Awaiting my ride to The Hastings Center from the Ardsley Acres motel (rooms by the hour), I discovered that, contrary to what I'd been told, a competitor for the Center's coveted National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship was also there—a philosopher from California with wild hair and a ready smile. A grueling day of interviews followed. Eventually, we learned that we'd both have the opportu…
How Can We Best Think about an Emerging Technology
How should we think about synthetic biology—about the potential benefits and risks of these applications as well as the very idea of designed, extensively genetically modified organisms? The lead article in this report sets out our thinking, but the article is rounded out with nine commentaries that sometimes expand on and sometimes argue with our perspective. Jonathan Wolff, a philosopher at the University College of London and a member of the …
The Ethics of Synthetic Biology
A majority opinion seems to have emerged in scholarly analysis of the assortment of technologies that have been given the label “synthetic biology.” According to this view, society should allow the technology to proceed and even provide it some financial support, while monitoring its progress and attempting to ensure that the development leads to good outcomes. The near‐consensus is captured by the U.S. Presidential Commission for the Study of B…
The Scholar at Work
My thirteen years as president of Hastings have been rich in solidarity. Now for some solitude, and a new adventure: Cynthia and I will relocate to Cape Cod, a place rich in family memories. I'll explore the roads and trails on my bicycle and, if I can become a competent kayaker, the waterways. Some of my best thinking has come while riding. I'll have a study there, a place to think and write. I will continue to support the initiatives we've begu…
Interests, Identities, and Synthetic Biology
It's too soon to know what the most important disagreements over synthetic biology will look like: how the disputes will be framed, what the stakes will be, and who will line up against whom. Some public policy disputes, even those with a great deal at stake, can be brought to apparent closure. Others continue to fester despite repeated efforts to reach a compromise. So far, synthetic biology has not ignited any raging policy conflagrations. The …
Enhancement
Understanding the ethics of enhancement begins with getting clear about the concept, as well as the factors likely to move people to pursue biomedical enhancement. This article first considers the usefulness of the distinction between therapy and enhancement for understanding the ethics of enhancement. Once the conceptual underbrush has been cleared away, we can move on to ethics. The next section examines critically a number of arguments that ha…
The Cultures of Caregiving
Green and Murray Respond
We thank Ross for suggesting a potential improvement in newborn screening (NBS) for cystic fibrosis (CF) by adding a second-tier enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay for pancreatic-associated protein for those samples screening positive by immunoreactive trypsinogen (IRT).1 The addition of pancreatic-associated protein may improve the specificity of screening, perhaps bypassing some of the difficulties that we note with secondary DNA-based CF screen…
Newborn Screening
Newborn screening (NBS)—in which each newborn infant is screened for up to 50 specific metabolic disorders for early detection and intervention—is the first program of populationwide genetic testing. As a public health intervention, NBS has greatly improved the lives of thousands of affected children. New technologies and new economic and social forces pose significant ethical and clinical challenges to NBS. Two primary challenges concern (1) acc…
Will New Ways of Creating Stem Cells Dodge the Objections
What Are Families for? Getting to an Ethics of Reproductive Technology
The standard approach to the ethics of reproductive technologies starts and ends with the parents' procreative liberty. There's much more to think about. We should start with the relationship between parents and children
Making Informed Consent Meaningful
From the Department of Veterans Affairs Research and Development Office, and the Department of Veterans Affairs Cooperative Studies Program, Washington, DC. †From the Hastings Center, Garrison, New York. Address correspondence and reprint requests to: John R. Feussner, MD, MPH, Chief Research and Development Officer (12), Department of Veterans Affairs, 810 Vermont Ave NW, Washington, DC 20420. E-Mail: [email protected]
Closing Reflections
Facilitating Participatory Decision-Making
BACKGROUND: Participatory decision-making (PDM), a widely held ideal, depends on physician facilitation of patient participation. However, little is known about how PDM facilitation is actualized in outpatient primary care. OBJECTIVES: The objective of this study was to describe the prevalence of physician facilitation of PDM in community family practices and associated physician, patient, and visit characteristics. RESEARCH DESIGN: This was a cr…
The Bonds of Family
Enhancing Cognition in the Intellectually Intact
As science learns more about how the brain works, and fails to work, the possibility for developing "cognition enhancers" becomes more plausible. And the demand for drugs that can help us think faster, remember more, and focus more keenly has already been demonstrated by the market success of drugs like Ritalin, which tames the attention span, and Prozac, which ups the competitive edge. The new drug Aricept, which improves memory, most likely wil…
Case Study
Attending to Particulars
abortions before legalization-the stories and cases are now familiar-but also how many of them were coerced by men. We now hear many stories about women who have trouble getting legal abortions because of threats against clinics-but practically nothing about that most interesting statistic which shows that over 40 percent of abortions are now repeat abortions, and many for the third or fourth time. Stories and cases must be selected, and too ofte…
Communities Need More Than Autonomy
The past twenty-five years have witnessed the transmutation of autonomy from a battle cry of the oppressed to a rallying cry for those who elevate certain kinds of moral commitments--those chosen voluntarily and competently--over all other moral concerns and values. The business contract becomes the supreme model of a sound moral relationship; informed consent, the esseential moral content of the physician-patient relationship. Loyalty, integrity…
Moral Reasoning in Social Context
Scholarly thinking about morality has been deeply affected by the confrontation with practical moral problems epitomized by bioethics. Attention to social context is increasingly seen as vital to sound moral reasoning. The dominant model in bioethics assumes that moral reasoning proceeds downward, from fundamental principles to specific cases. This top‐down model, deductivism, is flawed both as a description of moral reasoning, and as a prescript…
Genetics and the Moral Mission of Health Insurance
Deciding whether genetic differences among individuals are morally relevant to health insurance requires us to ask, What kind of good is health care? and, What principles should govern its distribution? There are good reasons to doubt that "actuarial fairness" is an adequate description of genuine fairness in health insurance
Prenatal Drug Exposure
Increased understanding of how the well-being of the fetus is affected by prenatal behavior has focused attention on the ethical issues surrounding fetuses. In this article the sources of societal disapproval of drug-abusing, pregnant women are explored, and the relationship between our moral judgments and public policies is discussed. In examining the nature of a pregnant woman's obligation to avoid harming a fetus she intends to bring to birth,…
The medical industrial complex
Newborn Screening
Newborn screening (NBS)—in which each newborn infant is screened for up to 50 specific metabolic disorders for early detection and intervention—is the first program of populationwide genetic testing. As a public health intervention, NBS has greatly improved the lives of thousands of affected children. New technologies and new economic and social forces pose significant ethical and clinical challenges to NBS. Two primary challenges concern (1) acc…
Divided loyalties for physicians
Learning to Deceive
The history of social psychology offers some clues as to how it reached its stance on laboratory work. The widely acknowledged founder of experimental social psychology was Kurt Lewin, whose career spanned the twenties to the fifties. His famous adage, There is nothing so practical as a good theory, soon came to be translated into something more like Take care of theory and practical matters will take care of themselves. The deception researcher'…
Sustaining the Myths of Social Science
Book reviewed in this article: Ethical Dilemmas and Social Science Research. By Paul Davidson Reynolds
Commentary
Teaching Values in College . Richard L. Morrill
Should Physicians Prepare for War
Joyce Bermel, Jay C. Bisgard, James T. Doherty, H. Jack Geiger, James T. Johnson, Thomas H. Murray, Should Physicians Prepare for War?, The Hastings Center Report, Vol. 12, No. 2 (Apr., 1982), pp. 15-21
Ethics Committees for Infants Doe
Hospital ethics committees are advocated as the best available\nalternative to review nontreatment decisions for seriously ill newborns. \nOther options entail such problems as an inability of physicians and parents\nto be dispassionate decision makers, the intrusive and inefficient nature of\ngovernment response, and the disruption of hospital unit operation. Ethics\ncommittee functions could include policy development and prospective and\nretro…
The Coercive Power of Drugs in Sports
O ur images of the nonmedical drug user normally include the heroin addict nodding in the doorway, the spacedout marijuana smoker, and maybe, if we know that alcohol is a drug, the wino sprawled on the curb. We probably do not think of the Olympic gold medalist, the professional baseball player who is a shoo-in for the Hall of Fame, or the National Football League lineman. Yet these athletes and hundreds, perhaps thousands of others regularly use…
Morality and the Mundane
Warning
Infant Bioethics Committees
Right-to-life groups and groups representing the disabled are criticizing the "Guidelines for Infant Bioethics Committees" released by the American Academy of Pediatrics on 27 April 1984. Opponents charge that the guidelines fail to back unequivocally a "best interests of the infant" standard for decision making, that no one is authorized to act as a "special advocate for the infant," and that a "quality of life" criterion for treatment decisions…
The Social Context of Workplace Screening
http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3561092
On the Care of Imperiled Newborns
Murray briefly introduces a set of three papers by John Arras\n("Toward an ethic of ambiguity"), Joseph F. Kett ("The search for a science of\ninfancy"), and Leslie A. Fiedler ("The tyranny of the normal"). The papers\nwere originally presented at a conference, cosponsored by the Hastings Center\nand the Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, which was held at the Cardozo\nSchool of Law in New York City on 6 April 1983. A full conference report …
Guidelines for Confidentiality in Research on Aids
The Final, Anticlimactic Rule on Baby Doe
Murray discusses the gist of the Department of Health and Human\nServices' final rule on the care of handicapped infants, what its impact will\nbe on medical decision making, and what it signifies to the three groups most\nconcerned with its formulation--physicians, members of right-to-life groups,\nand the disabled and their advocates. He describes the changes that the rule\nwent through before it was acceptable to all three groups, explains why…
Why solutions continue to elude us
The medical industrial complex
Who Owns the Body? On the Ethics of Using Human Tissue for Commercial Purposes
and look at our current practices for what they can tell us about the moral dimension of our relationship with our physical bodies. First, I will look at three ways of thinking about our tissues, organs, and bodily products. Second, I will try to understand where the current controversy fits within those three models. And third, I will explore the implications of this, and other ethical co cerns, for making public policy on human biologicals. Alo…
Feeling Good and Doing Better
Regulating Asbestos
Science itself, the nature of scientific knowledge, and the habitual ways in which scientists couch their judgments-e.g., the language of uncertainty, probability, tentativeness-have become powerful tools in the political fights over health and safety regulation. One of the more dramatic examples of such use occurred in the debate over regulating asbestos. In the 1960s and 1970s, asbestos came to be defined as a health problem severe enough to wa…
Divided loyalties for physicians
Gifts of the Body and the Needs of Strangers
Relationships governed by markets keep moral and social dimensions to a bare minimum. Gifts, by their open-endedness, defy such minimalization. Impersonal gifts such as blood or body parts or charity may not regulate relationships between specific individuals, but they serve other functions by regulating larger relationships and honoring important human values, precisely those threatened by massive and impersonal bureaucracies
Medical ethics, moral philosophy and moral tradition
Where Are the Ethics in Ethics Committees
Where Are the Ethics in Ethics Committees? Where are the in committees? Even a little reflection on the notion of ethics committees, or a cursory experience with their deliberations, suggests that the answer to that question is neither trivial nor obvious. Conflict is the essential element in issues brought before committees. At times, they are asked to advise or comment on specific cases, before or after the fact. At other times they attempt to …
Abortion Rights
Prenatal Drug Exposure
Increased understanding of how the well-being of the fetus is affected by prenatal behavior has focused attention on the ethical issues surrounding fetuses. In this article the sources of societal disapproval of drug-abusing, pregnant women are explored, and the relationship between our moral judgments and public policies is discussed. In examining the nature of a pregnant woman's obligation to avoid harming a fetus she intends to bring to birth,…
Psychology (27 works) · Political science (23 works) · Sociology (23 works) · Law (22 works) · Philosophy (13 works) · Social Psychology (12 works) · Medicine (11 works) · Ethics in medical practice (10 works) · Biology (9 works) · Business (9 works)