Archive: Ethics
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Why There is No Ethical Reason Not to Vote (Unless You Come Down with COVID-19 on Election Day)
According to a recent study by the 100 Million Project, nonvoters are twice as likely as active voters to say they do not feel they have enough information about candidates and issues to decide how to vote. This group of nonvoters might believe that it is unethical to vote because they are uninformed. In The Ethics of Voting, political philosopher Jason Brennan argues that uninformed citizens have an ethical obligation not to cast votes, because their uninformed votes can produce results that damage our political system.
Category: In the News item
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Not Compensating Canadian Blood Plasma Donors Means Potentially Risky Reliance on Foreign Plasma
Peter Jaworski, associate teaching professor, sheds a light on Canadian plasma donations. He explains that most donors are not compensated and Canada does not collect nearly enough of the plasma necessary to meet the need for immune globulin.
Category: In the News item
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Private Member’s Bill to Reverse Ban on Paid Blood Donations to be Heard in Alberta Legislature
Alberta legislators will likely debate a private member’s bill that seeks to overturn a provincial ban on paying for blood and plasma donations. Peter Jaworski, a Georgetown University professor of business ethics who has studied global supply and demand of blood products, said no country can source all its needed plasma with voluntary donations.
Category: In the News item
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Why I’ll Be on Campus This Fall
An op-ed by John Hasnas, professor of ethics: “Georgetown University has given all its faculty, including me, the option to teach in the classroom or remotely via computer during the fall semester. Even though my age places me in the high-risk category, I’ve elected to teach in person. I feel I have an obligation to do so.”
Category: In the News item
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So You Want to be a Professor? Here are Some Inconvenient Truths
Jason Brennan, the Robert J. and Elizabeth Flanagan Family Professor of Strategy, Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, is one of the most productive scholars I know. He earned his Ph.D. in 2007, and since then he has written nineteen books that are either published or forthcoming as well as 46 journal articles. On top of that, he’s a guitar aficionado who plays in two bands.
Category: In the News item
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It’s Time to Think Seriously About Paying Blood Donors
This week, the Adam Smith Institute [ASI] in the United Kingdom released Professor Peter Jaworski’s Bloody Well Pay Them: The case for Voluntary Remunerated Plasma Collections. The report shows that, whatever the moral, ethical, or health case for prohibiting the compensation of New Zealand donors, New Zealand’s health system nevertheless relies on plasma provided by compensated plasma donors.
Category: In the News item
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Don’t Enroll in a Ph.D. Program Until You’ve Read this Book
Jason Brennan is a philosophy professor at Georgetown who has written some superb books on political-economy topics, particularly the dubious ethics of our higher-education system. One aspect of that is the way we lure lots of college grads into Ph.D. programs. In his new book Good Work If You Can Get It, he focuses on the realities of grad school and the academic marketplace. It’s a very cold shower.
Category: In the News item
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Opinion on COVID-19: Canada Needs to Pay Plasma Donors to Protect its Domestic Supply
An op-ed by Peter Jaworski, associate teaching professor: “As countries race to find effective treatments and methods of preventing COVID-19, some hope has come along in the form of blood plasma transfusions from people who have recovered from the coronavirus, to people who are critically ill.”
Category: In the News item
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CSL’s ESG Conundrum Could Mean Greater Cost of Growth
There is another way to frame the risk of exploitative participation, according to Peter Jaworski, a Georgetown academic. “While I’m not a medical doctor, I am an ethics doctor. And on this score I fairly strongly disagree with the descriptions of paid plasma as ‘exploitative.’ Being paid to donate plasma seems, in general, to be a benefit to, rather than a cost, borne by donors,” he says.
Category: In the News item
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Convalescent Plasma Treatment for Coronavirus
Peter Jaworski, ethics professor at Georgetown University, discusses possible convalescent plasma treatments for Coronavirus on TVN24’s Wstajesz i Wiesz (in Polish).
Category: In the News item