Erik Malmqvist

University of Gothenburg | GU · Department of Philosophy, Linguistics and Theory of Science

A growing literature documents the existence of individuals who make a living by participating in phase I clinical trials for money. Several scholars have noted that the concerns about risks, consent, and exploitation raised by this phenomenon apply to many (other) jobs, too, and therefore proposed improving subject protections by regulating phase...

Biomedical research on human subjects involves exposing individuals to risks and burdens for the benefit of others, and therefore raises concerns about exploitation. While the concept of exploitation has received significant attention in recent research ethical literature, its relevance and implications in this area remain unclear and contested. Th...

Human consumption of pharmaceuticals often leads to environmental release of residues via urine and faeces, creating environmental and public health risks. Policy responses must consider the normative question how responsibilities for managing such risks, and costs and burdens associated with that management, should be distributed between actors. R...

Jules Salomone-Sehr argues that an activity is cooperative if and only if, roughly, it consists of several participants' actions that are (i) coordinated for a common purpose (ii) in ways that do not undermine any participant's agency. He argues that guidance by shared intention is neither necessary nor sufficient for cooperation. Thereby, he claim...

Presentation av en ny, komplett modell för värdering av insatser för att främja hållbar tillgång till effektiv antibiotika. Det kan gälla innovation av nya läkemedel, olika insatser för att hantera antibiotikaresistens, åtgärder för att skapa säkrare produktions- och leveranskedjor för antibiotika, samt utvecklingsinsatser för att mildra ekonomiska...

It is welcome to have concrete attempts to analyse the implications of environmental sustainability in clinical ethics. We discuss two interrelated weaknesses of Parker's article. These relate to the need in "green" bioethics to see beyond the normal healthcare ethical focus on health-related values related to individual patients, and to primarily...

It is welcome to have concrete attempts to analyse the implications of environmental sustainability in clinical ethics. We discuss two interrelated weaknesses of Parker's article. These relate to the need in "green" bioethics to see beyond the normal healthcare ethical focus on health-related values related to individual patients, and to primarily...

Human consumption of pharmaceuticals often leads to environmental release of residues via urine and faeces, creating environmental and public health risks. Policy responses must consider how responsibilities for managing such risks, and costs and burdens associated with that management, should be distributed between actors. Recently, the Polluter P...

Prior studies indicate prevalence of unregulated non-prescription use of antibiotics also in the northern European countries. The aim of this study is to investigate the extent to which antibiotics are acquired without prescription in Sweden, and people’s attitudes and motives linked to this practice. We use data from an online survey of a represen...

Background Antibiotic resistance is a complex phenomenon heavily influenced by social, cultural, behavioural, and economic factors that lead to the misuse, overuse and abuse of antibiotics. Recent research has highlighted the role that norms and values can play for behaviours that contribute to resistance development, and for addressing such behavi...

There is an increase of suggestions that healthcare policies should pay more attention to environmental impact. However, this raises a question of how to analyze and manage conflicts between environmental considerations and immediate health considerations. E.g., if drugs are prioritized not only on the basis of need, effect and cost-effectiveness,...

Biomedical research on human subjects involves exposing individuals to risks and burdens for the benefit of others, and therefore raises concerns about exploitation. While the concept of exploitation has received significant attention in recent research ethical literature, its relevance and implications in this area remain unclear and contested. Th...

Prior studies indicate prevalence of unregulated non-prescription use of antibiotics also in the northern European countries. The aim of this study is to investigate the extent to which antibiotics are acquired without prescription in Sweden, and people's attitudes and motives linked to this practice. We use data from an online survey of a represen...

The birth of the world’s first genetically edited babies in 2018 provoked considerable ethical outrage. Nonetheless, many scientists and bioethicists now advocate the pursuit of clinical uses of human germline gene editing. Progress towards this goal will require research, including clinical trials where genetically edited embryos are implanted int...

The birth of the world’s first genetically edited babies in 2018 provoked considerable ethical outrage. Nonetheless, many scientists and bioethicists now advocate the pursuit of clinical uses of human germline gene editing. Progress towards this goal will require research, including clinical trials where genetically edited embryos are implanted int...

TIDSKRIFT FÖR POLITISK FILOSOFI 24(3):3-17. I denna artikel diskuterar vi hur de svårigheter som finns med att hantera fenomenet antibiotikaresistens aktualiserar socialistiska lösningar på centrala samhällsutmaningar. Efter en kort inledning där vi förklarar vad vi avser med socialism i artikeln och beskriver socialismens plats i nutida politisk d...

We proposed adding a sustainability principle to the operational ethical principles guiding public healthcare resources allocation decisions. All our commentators acknowledge our core message: healthcare needs to pay (much better) attention to the future. They also strengthen our proposal by offering additional support by luck egalitarian and Rawls...

We proposed adding a sustainability principle to the operational ethical principles guiding public healthcare resources allocation decisions. All our commentators acknowledge our core message: healthcare needs to pay (much better) attention to the future. They also strengthen our proposal by offering additional support by luck egalitarian and Rawls...

We propose a principle of sustainability to complement established principles used for justifying healthcare resource allocation. We argue that the application of established principles of equal treatment, need, prognosis and cost-effectiveness give rise to what we call negative dynamics: a gradual depletion of the value possible to generate throug...

Antibiotic resistance is widely recognized as a major threat to public health and healthcare systems worldwide. Recent research suggests that pollution from antibiotics manufacturing is an important driver of resistance development. Using Sweden as an example, this paper considers how industrial antibiotic pollution might be addressed by public act...

THERE IS NOW A PUBLISHED VERSION OF THIS ARTICLE AVAILABLE OPEN ACCESS, PLEASE USE THE LINK ABOVE! We propose a principle of sustainability to complement established principles used for justifying healthcare resource allocation. We argue that the application of established principles of equal treatment, need, prognosis and cost-effectiveness give...

Antibiotic resistance is widely recognized as a major threat to public health and healthcare systems worldwide. Recent research suggests that pollution from antibiotics manufacturing is an important driver of resistance development. Using Sweden as an example, this paper considers how industrial antibiotic pollution might be addressed by public act...

The concept of exploitation and potentially exploitative real‐world practices are the subject of increasing philosophical attention. However, while philosophers have extensively debated what exploitation is and what makes it wrong, they have said surprisingly little about what might be required to remediate it. By asking how the consequences of exp...

The concept of exploitation and potentially exploitative real-world practices are the subject of increasing philosophical attention. However, while philosophers have extensively debated what exploitation is and what makes it wrong, they have said surprisingly little about what might be required to remediate it. By asking how the consequences of exp...

According to European regulations and the legislations of individual member states, children who seek asylum have a different set of rights than adults in a similar position. To protect these rights and ensure rule of law, migration authorities are commonly required to assess the age of asylum seekers who lack reliable documentation, including thro...

The idea of paying donors in order to make more human bodily material available for therapy, assisted reproduction, and biomedical research is notoriously controversial. However, while national and international donation policies largely oppose financial incentives they do not treat all parts of the body equally: incentives are allowed in connectio...

Medical therapy, research and technology enable us to make our bodies, or parts of them, available to others in an increasing number of ways. This is the case in organ, tissue, egg and sperm donation as well as in surrogate motherhood and clinical research. Bringing together leading scholars working on the ethical, social and cultural aspects of su...

Clinical research is increasingly ‘offshored’ to developing countries, a practice that has generated considerable controversy. It has recently been argued that the prevailing ethical norms governing such research are deeply puzzling. On the one hand, sponsors are not required to offshore trials, even when participants in developing countries would...

The target article challenges the increasingly popular portrayal of living kidney sale as potentially a mutually beneficial arrangement, capable not only of saving or improving the lives of patients in need of transplants but also of significantly benefiting poor vendors. Carefully reviewing the literature on harms to vendors in illegal kidney mark...

Proponents of permitting living kidney sales often argue as follows. Many jobs involve significant risks; people are and should be free to take these risks in exchange for money; the risks involved in giving up a kidney are no greater than the risks involved in acceptable hazardous jobs; so people should be free to give up a kidney for money, too....

It is often argued that it does not matter morally whether biomedical interventions treat or prevent diseases or enhance nondisease traits; what matters is whether and how much they promote well-being. Therapy and enhancement both promote well-being, the argument goes, so they are not morally distinct but instead continuous. I provide three reasons...

What, if anything, is wrong with taking advantage of people’s unjust circumstances when they both benefit from and consent to the exchange? The answer, some believe, is that such exchanges are wrongfully exploitative. I argue that this answer is incomplete at best, and I elaborate a different one: to take advantage of injustice is to become complic...

This paper challenges the view that bans on kidney sales are unjustifiably paternalistic, that is, that they unduly deny people the freedom to make decisions about their own bodies in order to protect them from harm. I argue that not even principled anti-paternalists need to reject such bans. This is because their rationale is not hard paternalism,...

Many countries are now implementing human papillomavirus vaccination. There is disagreement about who should receive the vaccine. Some propose vaccinating both boys and girls in order to achieve the largest possible public health impact. Others regard this approach as too costly and claim that only girls should be vaccinated. We question the assump...

The decision to terminate a clinical trial earlier than planned is often described as ethically problematic, but it is rarely systematically analyzed as an ethical issue in its own right. This paper provides an overview of the main ethical considerations at stake in such decisions and of the main tensions between these considerations. Arguments abo...

Human papillomavirus (HPV) infection is the world's most common sexually transmitted infection. It is a prerequisite for cervical cancer, the second most common cause of death in cancer among women worldwide, and is also believed to cause other anogenital and head and neck cancers. Vaccines that protect against the most common cancer-causing HPV ty...

A common argument in favor of using reprogenetic technologies to enhance children goes like this: parents have always aimed at enhancing their children through upbringing and education, so why not use new tools to accomplish the same goal? But reprogenetics differs significantly from good childrearing and education, in its means, if not its ends.

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This study is a contribution to the bioethical debate about new and possibly emerging reproductive technologies. Its point of departure is the intuition, which many people seem to share, that using such technologies to select non-disease traits – like sex and emotional stability - in yet unborn children is morally problematic, at least more so than...

Actually possible and conceivable future uses of preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) and germ-line genetic intervention in assisted reproduction seem to offer increasing possibilities of choosing the kind of persons that will be brought to existence. Many are troubled by the idea of these technologies being used for enhancement purposes. How ca...

In the present paper it is argued that genetic interventions on human embryos are in principle permissible if they promote the health of the persons that these embryos will one day become and impermissible if they compromise their health. This so called health-intervention principle is reached by, inter alia, rejecting alternative approaches to the...