Chris Bobier
Biographic Data
| ID | 4600172 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Chris Bobier |
| GIVEN NAMES | Chris |
| FAMILY NAME | Bobier |
| SIGNATURE | BOBIER C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Central Michigan University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4194-4721 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 35 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 35 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2019 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Artificial intelligence in medical ethics education
INTRODUCTION: Integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into medical education poses barriers and opportunities for medical educators. One of those opportunities is content creation for medical ethics assessment. Assessing the performance of AI in generating multiple choice questions (MCQs) in ethics that aligns with United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) is important. The present study evaluates the performance of eight AI models-GPT…
Post-trial obligations and participant enrollment in brain pioneering research
Therapeutic Misconception as a Problem of Nonmaleficence by Way of False Hope
Relational ethics and the justification of parental permission in pediatrics
Clinical kidney xenotransplantation
By introducing proprietary, patent-protected, genetically engineered porcine organs into an organ transplant system, kidney xenotransplantation has the potential to alter many aspects of the system. While it is too soon to know for sure what the impact will be, we are cautious: patent-protected kidneys, like patent-protected pharmaceuticals, may be prohibitively expensive; some patients may not want to receive a pig organ; barriers to equitable a…
Artificial intelligence, pharmaceutical development and dual-use research of concern
Fervent attention was paid to what is coined dual-use research (DUR), or research that can both benefit and harm humanity, and dual-use research of concern (DURC), a particular subset of DUR that is reasonably anticipated to be a safety and security concern if misapplied. The aim of this paper is not to reiterate the challenges of DURC governance but to look at a new turn in DURC, namely the challenges posed by the use of artificial intelligence …
Dual Use Research of Concern—The Necessity of Global Bioethics Engagement
Dual use research of concern (DURC) refers to research conducted for legitimate scientific purposes that could also be misused to pose a significant threat to public health and safety, agricultural crops and other plants, animals, the environment, or national security. Scant discussion of bioethics in relation to DURC has taken place, with even less attention to DURC within a global bioethics framework. Herein, we demonstrate the connections of g…
Bodyoids and Moral Status
Bodyoids are human organisms engineered to lack consciousness and have been proposed as a potential solution to the shortage of bodies available for use as organ donors, cadavers in medical education, and as human research participants.In our bodyoids article (Rodger et al., 2025), we argued that creating bodyoids is ethically dubious.First, we explain that some accounts of moral status entail that bodyoids will possess full moral status, which i…
Bodyoids and Speculative Bioethics
Alexandre Erler’s commentary challenges our argument against creating human ‘bodyoids’. While he considers our concerns speculative, we briefly defend speculative bioethics as vital for anticipating ethical risks before technologies emerge. We maintain that historical practices such as organ procurement and embryo experimentation illustrate how instrumental uses of human bodies can erode moral boundaries. Erler’s confidence in safeguards like the…
Ethical oversight in dual-use research of concern
Dual-use research of concern (DURC) is research that can benefit humanity but poses substantial potential risk as well. There is scholarly agreement that each stakeholder has ethical responsibilities vis-à-vis DURC, from researchers to the broader international community, and that ethical DURC requires each stakeholder fulfill their ethical responsibilities. In this paper, we argue that few if any stakeholders are presently fulfilling their ethic…
Implications for All Animal Research
This letter responds to the article "Xenotransplantation: Injustice, Harm, and Alternatives for Addressing the Organ Crisis," by Jasmine Gunkel and Franklin G. Miller in the September-October 2025 issue of the Hastings Center Report
Argument for allowing first-in-human cardiac xenotransplantation clinical trials in paediatric patients
The promise of xenotransplantation
According to many scholars, kidney xenotransplantation promises to mitigate the organ supply shortage. This claim has a certain obviousness to it: by flooding the market with a new source of kidneys, xenotransplantation promises to be a panacea. Our goal is to challenge this claim. We argue that xenotransplantation may increase rather than decrease demand for kidneys, may reduce kidney allotransplants, and may be inaccessible or otherwise unused.…
Ethical xenotransplant research on human brain‐dead decedents
Can it be ethical to conduct xenotransplant research on a human brain‐dead decedent (HB‐DD) whose organs could otherwise be given to persons in need? The ethical consensus is that it is better to save existing persons via organ donation than to devote a HB‐DD to research that will not directly benefit anyone. I argue otherwise. Given how rapidly xenotransplant research is progressing, and its clinical promise in the next couple of years or decade…
Israel's Post‐War Healthcare Obligations
Since the beginning of the Israel–Hamas war in 2023, the healthcare infrastructure within Gaza has been dismantled. While international humanitarian law mandates distinction between lawful targets (combatants and military objectives) and non‐lawful targets (civilians and civilian objects), and acknowledging the inherent complexities of applying this principle in conflicts involving non‐state actors like Hamas operating within civilian areas, nume…
Xenotransplantation as a business solution to the organ shortage
Xenotransplantation has the potential to alter the U.S. transplant system in profound ways. However, this emerging “spare parts” solution spearheaded by biotechnology companies raises concerns about its impact on the organ shortage, healthcare systems, population health, and health inequalities. We contend that xenotransplantation may have limited benefits in improving health, could prove prohibitively expensive for many, and may divert resources…
Dual use research and artificial intelligence
The US healthcare system facilitates medical conspiracy theories
No Brain, No Pain, No Problem? The Case Against Creating Human ‘Bodyoids’
Risky first-in-human clinical trials on medically fragile persons
Xenotransplantation Clinical Trials and Equitable Patient Selection
Xenotransplant patient selection recommendations restrict clinical trial participation to seriously ill patients for whom alternative therapies are unavailable or who will likely die while waiting for an allotransplant. Despite a scholarly consensus that this is advisable, we propose to examine this restriction. We offer three lines of criticism: (1) The risk–benefit calculation may well be unfavorable for seriously ill patients and society; (2) …
Genetic disenhancement and xenotransplantation
One objection to xenotransplantation is that it will require the large-scale breeding, raising and killing of genetically modified pigs. The pigs will need to be raised in designated pathogen-free facilities and undergo a range of medical tests before having their organs removed and being euthanised. As a result, they will have significantly shortened life expectancies, will experience pain and suffering and be subject to a degree of social and e…
Defending genetic disenhancement in xenotransplantation
Xenograft recipients and the right to withdraw from a clinical trial
Preclinical xenotransplantation research using genetically engineered pigs has begun to show some promising results and could one day offer a scalable means of addressing organ shortage. While it is a fundamental tenet of ethical human subject research that participants have a right to withdraw from research once enrolled, several scholars have argued that the right to withdraw from xenotransplant research should be suspended because of the publi…
Clarifying Dual Use Research of Concern
Varieties of the Cruelty-Based Objection to Factory Farming
Rethinking Thomas Hobbes on the Passions
There is widespread scholarly disagreement whether Hobbesian passions are or involve a type of cognition (i.e., imagination). This largely overlooked disagreement has implications for our understanding of Hobbesian deliberation. If passions are intrinsically cognitive, then, because Hobbesian deliberation is a series of alternating passions, deliberation would appear to be intrinsically cognitive as well. In this paper, I bring to light this over…
Dilemma for appeals to the moral significance of birth
Giubilini and Minerva argue that the permissibility of abortion entails the permissibility of infanticide. Proponents of what we refer to as the Birth Strategy claim that there is a morally significant difference brought about at birth that accounts for our strong intuition that killing newborns is morally impermissible. We argue that strategy does not account for the moral intuition that late-term, non-therapeutic abortions are morally impermiss…
Orphans and the relational significance of birth
Prabhpal Singh has defended a relational account of the difference in moral status between fetuses and newborns. Newborns stand in the parent-child relation while fetuses do not, and standing in the parent-child relationship brings with it higher moral status for newborns. Orphans pose a problem for this account because they do not stand in a parent-child relationship. I argue that Singh has not satisfactorily responded to the problem
A critical examination of the false hope harms argument
Marleen Eijkholt presents a new argument in healthcare ethics, the false hope harms (FHH) argument. In brief, false hope promotes a host of individual harms (e.g., financial, physical, and psychological harms) and system‐level harms (e.g., distrust of medical practitioners, increased complexity of care and the associated costs), all of which provide reason for healthcare providers to stop promoting false hope in medicine. The goal of this paper i…
Revisiting Aquinas on the Passion of Despair
The passion of despair, according to Thomas Aquinas, is an appetitive movement away from a future arduous good that is impossible to attain. Criticism of his account of despair abounds. Nicholas Lombardo argues that despair cannot be proper passion because the appetite cannot move away from a good. Eric D'Arcy and Susan James argue that Aquinas's description of passions as movements casts doubt on his understanding of some passions, including des…
The Hopefull Leviathan
According to a common reading of Thomas Hobbes, fear is the most philosophically important passion, responsible for the founding and sustaining of the commonwealth. I argue that this common reading is incorrect by focusing on the necessary and important role of hope in human action as well as in the founding and sustaining of the commonwealth. Life in the Hobbesian commonwealth, on the reading defended in this paper, is less fearful and more hope…
What Would the Virtuous Person Eat? The Case for Virtuous Omnivorism
Why appeals to the moral significance of birth are saddled with a dilemma
In ‘Dilemma for Appeals to the Moral Significance of Birth’, we argued that a dilemma is faced by those who believe that birth is the event at which infanticide is ruled out. Those who reject the moral permissibility of infanticide by appeal to the moral significance of birth must either accept the moral permissibility of a late-term abortion for a non-therapeutic reason or not. If they accept it, they need to account for the strong intuition tha…
Risky first-in-human clinical trials on medically fragile persons
Xenotransplantation Clinical Trials and Equitable Patient Selection
Xenotransplant patient selection recommendations restrict clinical trial participation to seriously ill patients for whom alternative therapies are unavailable or who will likely die while waiting for an allotransplant. Despite a scholarly consensus that this is advisable, we propose to examine this restriction. We offer three lines of criticism: (1) The risk–benefit calculation may well be unfavorable for seriously ill patients and society; (2) …
Genetic disenhancement and xenotransplantation
One objection to xenotransplantation is that it will require the large-scale breeding, raising and killing of genetically modified pigs. The pigs will need to be raised in designated pathogen-free facilities and undergo a range of medical tests before having their organs removed and being euthanised. As a result, they will have significantly shortened life expectancies, will experience pain and suffering and be subject to a degree of social and e…
Defending genetic disenhancement in xenotransplantation
Xenograft recipients and the right to withdraw from a clinical trial
Preclinical xenotransplantation research using genetically engineered pigs has begun to show some promising results and could one day offer a scalable means of addressing organ shortage. While it is a fundamental tenet of ethical human subject research that participants have a right to withdraw from research once enrolled, several scholars have argued that the right to withdraw from xenotransplant research should be suspended because of the publi…
Clarifying Dual Use Research of Concern
The focus account of false hope
Argument for allowing first-in-human cardiac xenotransplantation clinical trials in paediatric patients
The promise of xenotransplantation
According to many scholars, kidney xenotransplantation promises to mitigate the organ supply shortage. This claim has a certain obviousness to it: by flooding the market with a new source of kidneys, xenotransplantation promises to be a panacea. Our goal is to challenge this claim. We argue that xenotransplantation may increase rather than decrease demand for kidneys, may reduce kidney allotransplants, and may be inaccessible or otherwise unused.…
Ethical xenotransplant research on human brain‐dead decedents
Can it be ethical to conduct xenotransplant research on a human brain‐dead decedent (HB‐DD) whose organs could otherwise be given to persons in need? The ethical consensus is that it is better to save existing persons via organ donation than to devote a HB‐DD to research that will not directly benefit anyone. I argue otherwise. Given how rapidly xenotransplant research is progressing, and its clinical promise in the next couple of years or decade…
Israel's Post‐War Healthcare Obligations
Since the beginning of the Israel–Hamas war in 2023, the healthcare infrastructure within Gaza has been dismantled. While international humanitarian law mandates distinction between lawful targets (combatants and military objectives) and non‐lawful targets (civilians and civilian objects), and acknowledging the inherent complexities of applying this principle in conflicts involving non‐state actors like Hamas operating within civilian areas, nume…
Xenotransplantation as a business solution to the organ shortage
Xenotransplantation has the potential to alter the U.S. transplant system in profound ways. However, this emerging “spare parts” solution spearheaded by biotechnology companies raises concerns about its impact on the organ shortage, healthcare systems, population health, and health inequalities. We contend that xenotransplantation may have limited benefits in improving health, could prove prohibitively expensive for many, and may divert resources…
Dual use research and artificial intelligence
The US healthcare system facilitates medical conspiracy theories
No Brain, No Pain, No Problem? The Case Against Creating Human ‘Bodyoids’
Artificial intelligence in medical ethics education
INTRODUCTION: Integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into medical education poses barriers and opportunities for medical educators. One of those opportunities is content creation for medical ethics assessment. Assessing the performance of AI in generating multiple choice questions (MCQs) in ethics that aligns with United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) is important. The present study evaluates the performance of eight AI models-GPT…
Psychology (14 works) · Medicine (12 works) · Law (11 works) · Political science (11 works) · Transplantation (10 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Xenotransplantation and immune response (9 works) · Neuroethics, Human Enhancement, Biomedical Innovations (8 works) · Social Psychology (8 works)