Robert Baker

Verified

Robert verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

Learn more

Verified

Robert verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

Learn more

• PhD
• Professor Emeritus at Union College

The central thesis of this article is that by anchoring bioethics' core conceptual armamentarium in a four‐principled theory emphasizing autonomy and treating justice as a principle of allocation, theorists inadvertently biased 20th‐century bioethical scholarship against addressing such subjects as ableism, anti‐Black racism, classism, and other fo...

This chapter provides a brief introductory history of biomedical practitioners’ efforts at self-regulation though oaths, codes, and statements of ethical principle, tracing them from ancient oaths through the nineteenth-century transition to codes of medical ethics. The more recent foundation for modern biomedical ethics was laid in post-World-War...

This brief introductory history traces the origins of Western clinical ethics from the Hippocratic Oath to the professionalization of clinical ethics consultation (CEC) in the 1970s. Modern CEC began in the early nineteenth century when English physician Thomas Percival’s developed professional rules for CEC in the newly emergent institution of the...

This paper reviews three competing ways of organizing health care delivery—professionalism, consumerism and statism—and explores how Germany’s exclusively statist model facilitated the ascendency of an alternative Nazi medical ethics predicated on eugenic conceptions of national “race hygiene.” The primary obligation of health care personnel became...

Tom Beauchamp and James Childress‘s revolutionary textbook, Principles of Biomedical Ethics, shaped the field of bioethics in America and around the world. Midway through the Principle’s eight editions, however, the authors jettisoned their attempt to justify the four principles of bioethics —autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, justice—in terms...

This article reassesses and recontextualizes findings of an independent writing group commissioned in 2005 by what was then known as the Institute for Ethics of the American Medical Association (AMA). The authors were members of this group, which uncovered a paradigm case of structural racism that has perpetuated health inequity since the issue of...

Educators naturally gravitate towards horror stories and scandals from the bad old days, to instill vigilance in their students, even as they silently underline the virtues of whatever is currently deemed acceptable. However, some of the deepest lessons that history can teach are revealed not by events so scandalous that they outraged people in the...

A theoretical account of moral revolutions, illustrated by historical cases that include the criminalization and decriminalization of abortion and the patient rebellion against medical paternalism. We live in an age of moral revolutions in which the once morally outrageous has become morally acceptable, and the formerly acceptable is now regarded a...

Union College’s Everyday Ethics Across the Curriculum project was initiated in 2006 and immediately became a vital presence on campus, funding over one hundred ethics course segments or stand-alone ethics courses in departments other than Philosophy, over one hundred lunchtime workshops, symposia and other events, and a program of outside speakers...

“Race” has been a four-letter word in the United States for almost four centuries. It earned that status in 1619 when Dutch traders sold the first African slaves in Jamestown, Virginia, and continued to have that status after the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, which officially ended slavery throughout the United States. By the mid-nin...

In 'New Threats to Academic Freedom' Francesca Minerva argues that anonymity for the authors of controversial articles is a prerequisite for academic freedom in the Internet age. This argument draws its intellectual and emotional power from the author's account of the reaction to the on-line publication of ' After-birth abortion: why should the bab...

This chapter introduces readers to a framework of international institutions created in the aftermath of the Second World War and to their major bioethics codes of conduct. Although these statements address a range of bioethical issues from cloning and stem cell research to xenotransplantation, most pronouncements deal with human subjects research....

GadamerHans-Georg, The enigma of health: the art of healing in a scientific age, transl. James Gaiger and Nicholas Walker, Oxford, Polity Press, 1996, pp. x, 180, £39.50 (hardback 0-7456-1367-5); £11.95 (paperback 0-7456-1594-5). - Volume 41 Issue 3 - Robert Baker

Full textFull text is available as a scanned copy of the original print version. Get a printable copy (PDF file) of the complete article (269K), or click on a page image below to browse page by page. 403 404

Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (Ruth Faden, Chair), The human radiation experiments: final report of the President's Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, New York, Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. xxi, 620, $39.95 (0-19-510792-6). - Volume 41 Issue 2 - Robert Baker

JonsenAlbert R., The new medicine and the old ethics, Cambridge, Mass., and London, Harvard University Press, 1990, pp. xv, 171, £15.25 (0-674-61725-8). - Volume 37 Issue 1 - Robert Baker

This is a beautiful book. From the page design to Eve Siegel's elegant jacket featuring Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson of Doctor Tulip, Oxford University Press has produced a volume that befits the luminary status of its authors, sociologist Renée C. Fox and historian Judith P. Swazey. This team of participant observers has documented, enlightened, and...

An independent panel of experts, convened by the American Medical Association (AMA) Institute for Ethics, analyzed the roots of the racial divide within American medical organizations. In this, the first of a 2-part report, we describe 2 watershed moments that helped institutionalize the racial divide. The first occurred in the 1870s, when 2 medica...

Between 1910 and 1968, the National Medical Association (NMA) repeatedly clashed with the American Medical Association (AMA) over the latter organization's racial bars to membership and other health policy issues. The NMA, founded in 1895 as a nonexclusionary medical society to provide a voice for disenfranchised black physicians and patients, stru...

Between 1910 and 1968, the National Medical Association (NMA) repeatedly clashed with the American Medical Association (AMA) over the latter organization’s racial bars to membership and other health policy issues. The NMA, founded in 1895 as a nonexclusionary medical society to provide a voice for disenfranchised black physicians and patients, stru...

Although bioethics societies are developing standards for clinical ethicists and a code of ethics, they have been castigated in this journal as "a moral, if not an ethics, disaster" for not having completed this task. Compared with the development of codes of ethics and educational standards in law and medicine, however, the pace of professionaliza...

There is a comforting certitude about this chapter's title. It indicates the intersection of two fields, philosophy and medical ethics, suggesting to readers that they will find within it an account of philosophical discourses on medical ethics in various cultures over the course of time. This veneer of titular certitude is misleading. Undoubtedly,...

Introduction: This chapter's title is an interrogative: “What is the history of medical ethics?” Readers perusing the table of contents might be prompted to ask precisely this question. The expected chronological account seems hidden behind a façade of unfamiliar rhetoric about discourses, life cycles, and society. Our approach reflects a new era o...

Life cycles are constructed when the seemingly natural, foreordained, biological, or social changes of an organism's life are segmented into a series of linked sequential stages, for example: conception, birth, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, old age, dying and death; or, toddler, preschooler, grade schooler, high-schooler, college student, grad...

CONCEIVING MODERN MEDICAL ETHICS: THE EDINBURGH REFORMERS: Six reformers collectively conceived of modern medical ethics in the English-speaking world. Five were physicians and Dissenters, that is, people who would not sign the Church of England's thirty-nine Articles of Faith. These Dissenters were a persecuted minority in England, officially excl...

The Cambridge World History of Medical Ethics is the first comprehensive scholarly account of the global history of medical ethics. Offering original interpretations of the field by leading bioethicists and historians of medicine, it will serve as the essential point of departure for future scholarship in the field. The book reconceptualises the hi...

Like the nation as a whole, organized medicine in the United States carries a legacy of racial bias and segregation that should be understood and acknowledged. For more than 100 years, many state and local medical societies openly discriminated against black physicians, barring them from membership and from professional support and advancement. The...

B Y THE END OF THE 19TH CENTURY, US physicians had formed 2 na-tional associations: the National Medical Association (NMA) and the American Medical Association (AMA). This peculiar duplication re-flected a profession segregated by race. The AMA was almost entirely white; the NMA predominantly black—founded in reaction to the exclusion of black phy-...

Medical ethics often is treated as applied ethics, that is, the application of moral philosophy to ethical issues in medicine. In an earlier paper, we examined instances of moral philosophy's influence on medical ethics. We found the applied ethics model inadequate and sketched an alternative model. On this model, practitioners seeking to change mo...

Philosophy textbooks typically treat bioethics as a form of "applied ethics"-i.e., an attempt to apply a moral theory, like utilitarianism, to controversial ethical issues in biology and medicine. Historians, however, can find virtually no cases in which applied philosophical moral theory influenced ethical practice in biology or medicine. In light...

Bioethicists1 function in an environment in which most of their peers embrace codes of professional ethics.2 Some bioethicists challenge this claim on the grounds that bioethics is really an academic discipline and such disciplines do not usually subscribe to codes of ethics (Lantos 2005). Although it is true that such humanities fields as English...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: As one of the founders of bioethics, Robert Veatch has participated in an “intense conversation . . . between humanists and physicians interested in ethics” (p. vii). This dialogue began in the 1960s, gained momentum after 1971 (when the neologism “bioethics” first found its way into...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: This compact volume offers a comprehensive distillation of the history of euthanasia, contextualized in terms of the struggle between organized religion and secular advocacy groups. Unfortunately, when Ian Dowbiggin (an expert on American euthanasia-advocacy groups) treats subjects be...

Karl Marx could only pen the memorable line, “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” because he was heir to the sanitary and public health reforms of the nineteenth century (Marx [1848] 1972, p. 335). The Black Death, which had wiped out much of fourteenth-century Florence and which had regularly decimated s...

Bioethicists function in an environment in which their peers--healthcare executives, lawyers, nurses, physicians--assert the integrity of their fields through codes of professional ethics. Is it time for bioethics to assert its integrity by developing a code of ethics? Answering in the affirmative, this paper lays out a case by reviewing the histor...

The American Journal of Bioethics 4.1 (2004) 15-16 On its face William P. Cheshire's (2004) empirical analysis of nonneutral language in journalistic accounts of the ethics of human embryo research would seem incontrovertible. The analysis of 53 articles published by the Associated Press, Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, the LA and New York...

The American Journal of Bioethics 3.2 (2003) 13-14 Catherine Myser's arresting polemic, "Differences from Somewhere: The Normativity of Whiteness in Bioethics in the United States" (2003), aims at laudable goals, such as "engag[ing] equal collaborators from a broader range of voices." However, the analysis is methodologically flawed, and the propos...

Standard bioethics textbooks present the field to students and non-experts as a form of “applied ethics.” This ahistoric and rationalistic presentation is similar to that used in philosophy of science textbooks until three decades ago. Thomas Kuhn famously critiqued this self-conception of the philosophy of science, persuading the field that it wou...

I was the graduate student that Albert Jonsen so aptly describes. Bronx born and educated at the City College of New York, I emigrated to the Midwest to study at the Minnesota Center for the Philosophy of Science, where May Brodbeck, Herbert Feigl and other “logical positivists” were engaging in an ongoing dialogue with postpositivists like Paul Fe...

The American Journal of Bioethics 2.1 (2002) 52-53 Union College The title of Jane Maienschein's (2002) perceptive article "What's in a Name" alludes to Juliet Capulet's well-known reflections on naming. Juliet was tragically aware that names are more than just names, "Romeo, Romeo," she protests, "wherefore art thou 'Romeo!' Deny thy father and re...

It was on a dreary night in November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet … by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature ope...

The American Journal of Bioethics 1.1 (2001) 53-56 Tod Chambers's narrative, "The Fiction of Bioethics: A Précis" (2001), follows a form made famous in a letter by Émile Zola, "J'accuse." Chambers accuses Rita Charon of being a faint-hearted champion of narrative theory. Narrative theory is not "a mere helpmate to philosophy," Chambers proclaims. I...

Bioethics and human rights were conceived in the aftermath of the Holocaust, when moral outrage reenergized the outmoded concepts of “medical ethics” and “natural rights,” renaming them “bioethics,” and “human rights” to give them new purpose. Originally, the principles of bioethics were a means for protecting human rights, but through a historical...

Recent philosophical work has disclosed a host of problems in our apparently natural ways of classifying things. The contemporary classification of certain groups as "minorities" exemplifies some of these problems. I argue that these classifications are arbitrary and misleading. Through examining several of the most significant ethical moments in t...

Can the bioethical theories that have served American bioethics so well, serve international bioethics as well? In two papers in the previous issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, I contend that the form of principlist fundamentalism endorsed by American bioethicists like Tom Beauchamp and Ruth Macklin will not play on an international...

The first of two articles analyzing the justifiability of international bioethical codes and of cross-cultural moral judgments reviews "moral fundamentalism," the theory that cross-cultural moral judgments and international bioethical codes are justified by certain "basic" or "fundamental" moral priniciples that are universally accepted in all cult...

The preceding article in this issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal presents the argument that "moral fundamentalism," the position that international bioethics rests on "basic" or "fundamental" moral principles that are universally accepted in all eras and cultures, collapses under a variety of multicultural and postmodern critiques. Th...

Dr Emanuel is surely correct to observe that American medicine must "use its influence to promote a universal health care system" in the United States. Since this nation has decided to rely on free-market approaches in the provision of services, we maintain that free-market medicine is not moral medicine until universal access is secured. Exactly h...

American medicine in 1997: the core values of the medical profession are being decided, not by physicians and surgeons acting through medical societies, but by lawyers and judges taking action in courtrooms and by managed care administrators overriding the decisions of trained medical professionals in response to the imperatives of commodified medi...

Decisions to place limitations on the care of patients are complex, and they often involve physicians, other medical professionals, patients, or a surrogate decision-maker, family members, and others. In 1988, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Health Care Organizations (JCAHO) and the New York State government adopted two different approache...

On the morning of May 7th, 1847, the national medical convention — soon to rename itself the American Medical Association - enacted a Code of Ethics. In the brief span of three years the frustration of a few New York physicians had led to the first national medical convention, to the first national medical association, and to the first national cod...