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Recent Online Articles

Book Reviews

Embryo: A Defense of Human Life by Robert P. George and Christopher Tollefsen

Advancing the Culture of Death: Euthanasia and Physician-Assisted Suicide by Peter Hung Manh Tran.

Opinion

Neuroethics: The Law and The Person.

The Ethics of Caring: Expressing Humanity Towards Babies Born at the Borderline of Viability.

Recommended Resources

Give Women Choice: Australia Speaks on Abortion

JI Fleming & S Ewing

Living Wills: An Ethical Analysis

Z Alstin

Human Embryos: A Limitless Scientific Resource?

JI Fleming, GK Pike & S Ewing

Common Ground? Seeking an Australian Consensus on Abortion and Sex Education

Editors JI Fleming and N Tonti-Filippini

Welcome

Welcome to the New Southern Cross Bioethics Institute Web Site! This site will be regularly updated with resources and information on current bioethical issues available for your research. We recommend you visit our newly formatted resources page. There you will find up-to-date information on bioethical issues, Australian Federal and State bioethics legislation, submissions produced by the Institute, online articles, useful links and much more.

Please make use of this free community resource.

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The SCBI team.

Recent News and Research at SCBI

Organ Transplantation

Organs available for transplantation from deceased donors in Australia are failing to meet the needs of the individuals on organ transplant waiting lists each year. It is plain to see that an increase in supply of donated organs will improve this disparity and benefit greater numbers of transplant recipients, however some solutions suggested recently in Australia and abroad are intertwined with undesirable ethical costs. Two solutions that have received attention recently include; implementation of an opt-out organ donation system and a change to the dead donor rule.

Neuroethics: Neuroscience, Technology and Moral Agency

What distinguishes humans from other animals is that we use reason and reflect on our beliefs, values, expectations and experiences, to make important judgments and decisions - we are rational. In the absence of such capacities we cannot be held as being responsible for our decisions and actions - we would no longer be moral agents. It would force us to revise our attributions of responsibility on individuals whose actions turn out not to be a product of rational agency. This clearly has profound implications for our concept of moral/legal responsibility and criminal liability. The legal principle of Mens rae states that a defendant should only be held criminally liable for events or consequences which he/she intended or knowingly risked. Therefore any form of neurological dysfunction, which relates to a defendant’s responsibility for his/her actions, i.e. capacities that are necessary for establishing Mens rae, can form the basis for establishing diminished responsibility (“neuro-mitigation”).