Although informed consent models for prescribing hormone replacement therapy are becoming increasingly prevalent, many physicians continue to require an assessment and referral letter from a mental ...

In clinical ethics consultations, clinical ethicists bring moral reasoning to bear on concrete and complex clinical ethical problems by undertaking ethical deliberation in collaboration with others.

In 2025, an Australian couple asked to have their remaining embryos moved to another clinic, only to discover that the child ...

Correspondence to Dr Angela Ballantyne, Department of Primary Health Care and General Practice and the Bioethics Center, Otago University, Wellington, New Zealand; angela.ballantyne{at}otago.ac.nz The ...

Following the influential Gifford and Reith lectures by Onora O’Neill, this paper explores further the paradigm of individual autonomy which has been so dominant in bioethics until recently and ...

Gyngell et al argue that no intrinsic differences exist between embryos derived from fertilisation and stem cell-derived embryo models (SCEMs) that would justify attributing a higher moral status to ...

We agree with Smith and Mackie1 that voluntariness is a necessary condition of informed consent in medicine, including instances when people undergo vaccination. However, we disagree with the authors’ ...

Philip Reed has offered several interesting objections to my recent JME paper, ‘Expressivist concerns for assisted dying on request.’ In this brief reply, I address those objections.

In recent years, ‘nudge’ theory has gained increasing attention for the design of population-wide health interventions. The concept of nudge puts a label on efficacious influences that preserve ...

On 16 April 2025, the Supreme Court of the UK ruled that when interpreting the UK’s Equality Act (2010)—the Act of the UK Parliament that details protections against unlawful discrimination—the terms ...

In their paper arguing that vaccine mandates do not impair the voluntariness of informed consent, Smith and Mackie draw on Kiener’s recent work on the ethics of third-party coercion.1 2 Kiener’s work ...

Smith and Mackie’s feature article addresses the worry that vaccine mandates—for example, requiring employees to get the COVID-19 vaccine—constitute coercive threats that undermine the voluntariness ...