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A commentary on the 2024 article "Reasons and Reproduction: Gene Editing and Genetic Selection," by J. McMahan and J. Savulescu is presented. Topics covered include how the authors rely on analytic metaethics to develop normative claims, how implementing novel interventions, including gene editing, should be situated within a translational justice framework and how the article is based on a fallacy of incomplete evidence.

One Health—a holistic approach to health that brings the moral status of animals and environments into consideration—is understood as a “professional imperative,” a value-laden obligation that flows from the scope and objectives of professional roles. In this article, antimicrobial resistance provides a case study to demonstrate the fruitfulness of public health and bioethics collaborations by applying One Health key concepts of interconnection and interdependence. Moving toward an ethics of One Health requires a more nuanced analysis of ecological relationships, including humans’ connections to other species as hosts, vectors, domestic companions, meat-eaters’ food, and farmers’ livelihood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the importance of public engagement in the translation of human gene editing and highlights the need to balance social and technical priorities. Topics include the need for end users' engagement, the injustice of the current translational process, and the selection and inclusion of diverse stakeholders in engagement efforts.

The precision health era is likely to reduce and respond to antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Our stewardship and precision efforts share terminology, seeking to deliver the "right drug, at the right dose, at the right time." Already, rapid diagnostic testing, phylogenetic surveillance, and real-time outbreak response provide just a few examples of molecular advances we dub "precision stewardship." However, the AMR causal factors range from the molecular to that of global health policy. Mirroring the cross-sectoral nature of AMR science, the research addressing the ethical, legal and social implications (ELSI) of AMR ranges across academic scholarship. As the rise of AMR is accompanied by an escalating sense of its moral and social significance, what is needed is a parallel field of study. In this paper, we offer a gap analysis of this terrain, or an agenda for "the ELSI of precision stewardship." In the first section, we discuss the accomplishments of a multi-decade U.S. national investment in ELSI research attending to the advances in human genetics. In the next section, we provide an overview of distinct ELSI topics pertinent to AMR. The distinctiveness of an ELSI agenda for precision stewardship suggests new opportunities for collaboration to build the stewardship teams of the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A personal narrative is presented which explores the author's experience of being whole-heartedly endorse Ismaili M'hmandi's (2021) efforts to move away from the narrowest of liberal justificatory grounds for public health policy.

The article proposes three approaches for bioethicists to encourage structural change, institutional moral ethos and practice, and national moral metrics at healthcare institutions in 2021. Topics discussed include the need for bioethics to expand its moral reach and identify overlooked ethical controversies, to focus on increasing local health equity, and to study current health systems' metrics of quality and performance. Also noted are these approaches' address of health inequity and racism.

Public health policy works best when grounded in firm public health standards of evidence and widely shared social values. In this article, we argue for incorporating a specific method of ethical deliberation--deliberative public bioethics--into public health. We describe how deliberative public bioethics is a method of engagement that can be helpful in public health. Although medical, research, and public health ethics can be considered some of what bioethics addresses, deliberative public bioethics offers both a how and where. Using the Human Genome Project Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications program as an example of effective incorporation of deliberative processes to integrate ethics into public health policy, we examine how deliberative public bioethics can integrate both public health and bioethics perspectives into three areas of public health practice: research, education, and health policy. We then offer recommendations for future collaborations that integrate deliberative methods into public health policy and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As bioethicists increasingly turn their attention to the profession of public health, many candidate frameworks have been proposed, often with an eye toward articulating the values and foundational concepts that distinguish this practice from curative clinical medicine. First, I will argue that while these suggestions for a distinct ethics of public health are promising, they arise from problems within contemporary bioethics that must be taken into account. Without such cognizance of the impetus for public health ethics, we risk developing a set of ethical resources meant exclusively for public health professionals, thereby neglecting implications for curative medical ethics and the practice of bioethics more broadly. Second, I will present reasons for thinking some of the critiques of dominant contemporary bioethics can be met by a virtue ethics approach. I present a virtue ethics response to criticisms that concern (1) increased rigor in bioethics discourse; (2) the ability of normative theory to accommodate context; and (3) explicit attention to the nature of ethical conflict. I conclude that a virtue ethics approach is a viable avenue for further inquiry, one that leads us away from developing ethics of public health in a vacuum and has the potential for overcoming certain pitfalls of contemporary bioethics discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]