Why Ethics Matter in Psychotherapy

The clinical practice of psychotherapy is saturated with ethics and moralities. Having an Oxford Handbook of Psychotherapy Ethics seems a necessity in a contemporary world where visions of the good seem up for grabs; subject to whomever shouts the loudest and the most often. The quiet exchanges behind (typically) closed doors, which consider what the good is for the patient, what it means, and how to secure it, seem more crucial than ever. The Oxford Handbook of Psychotherapy Ethics aims to provide the most comprehensive reference textbook of psychotherapy ethics; to offer benchmark chapters as go-to guides for a wide variety of practitioners, scholars, policymakers, and patients; to address conceptual, philosophical, cultural, and religious perspectives while also addressing everyday practice concerns; and to identify areas of ethical consensus and convention, while identifying unresolved issues as well as identifying new, problematic areas needing further analysis and research.

Paediatric xenotransplantation clinical trials and the right to withdraw

Clinical trials of xenotransplantation (XTx) may begin early in the next decade, with kidneys from genetically modified pigs transplanted into adult humans. If successful, transplanting pig hearts into children with advanced heart failure may be the next step. Typically, clinical trials have a specified end date, and participants are aware of the amount of time they will be in the study. This is not so with XTx. The current ethical consensus is that XTx recipients must consent to lifelong monitoring. While this presents challenges to the right to withdraw in the adult population, additional and unanswered questions also linger in the paediatric population. In paediatric XTx, parents or guardians consent not only to the initial treatment of the child but also to lifelong monitoring, thus making a decision whose consequences will remain present as the child develops the capacity for assent, and finally the capacity for informed consent or refusal. This article presents and evaluates unanswered paediatric ethical questions in regard to the right to withdraw from XTx follow-up in the paediatric population.

Withdrawing life-sustaining treatment: a stock-take of the legal and ethical position

This article, prompted by an extended essay published in the Journal of Medical Ethics by Charles Foster, and the current controversy surrounding the case of Vincent Lambert, analyses the legal and ethical arguments in relation to the withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment from patients with prolonged disorders of consciousness. The article analyses the legal framework through the prism of domestic law, case-law of the European Court of Human Rights and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and examines the challenge to the ethical consensus made by Foster. It concludes that the right approach remains a version of the approach that has prevailed for the last 25 years since the decision in Airedale NHS Trust v Bland[1993] AC 789, refined to reflect that that there is now, and rightly, a much more limited place for judgments made about the ‘burden’ of treatment or the quality of life enjoyed by the person made on the basis of assumptions about that person as a category as opposed to investigation of that person as an individual human being.

Race, Gender, Giants

This article reconnoiters a set of repeating images of “cubanness” in state-sponsored art, particularly seen in works created by and appropriated under the patronage of the dictator Gerardo Machado y Morales, in power 1925–33. The primary object of study is Havana’s Statue of the Republic, a colossal gold and bronze woman nearly fifty feet tall and weighing forty-nine tons. Telescoping back to the colonial plantation and forecasting ahead to Cuba’s revolutionary future in 2018, the article argues that La República embodied a tension between ethical consensus and political dissensus in a much broader history of cultural politics, race, and gender in Cuba. With the face of a white Cuban aristocrat and a body based on a mixed-race mulata model, the statue activated—and still galvanizes—a range of memories, myths, and meanings related to aesthetic constructs of the nation. Those repeating images, born from the plantation and projecting forward to the Revolution, give shape to a relationship between politics, ethics, and aesthetics that is particular to Cuba and its history.

Just & Unjust War, Uses of Force & Coercion: An Ethical Inquiry with Cyber Illustrations

The emergence of cyber means and methods of war, force, and coercion raises ethical questions under just war theory different from those historically generated by the development of ever more destructive instruments of war. Whether in armed conflict or contexts not considered war, cyber technologies create political and ethical incentives for their use. However, this attractiveness poses potential risks and dangers that, at present, are largely speculative but invite more ethical deliberation. Unfortunately, the convergence of political and ethical incentives on cyber in a context of increasing geopolitical competition and conflict make the prospects for ethical consensus on just and unjust cyber coercion, force, and war unlikely.