Single Review on past events

Noelia Martinez Doallo (Postdoctoral Fellow / Law) gave a talk entitled "No general moral duty to participate in biomedical research".

Abstract:

Although international law documents on the topic make it plain that participation in biomedical research goes above and beyond the call of duty and its lawfulness depends upon participants’ informed consent, some authors have dared to posit a moral duty to participate in biomedical research. Such proposals became especially appealing in the framework of the COVID-19 pandemic, since public health security was urgently at stake and some of the protecting measures adopted at that time—namely, mandatory confinement, quasi-mandatory vaccination, etc.—reinforced the idea of that individual and public interests are often found in an apparently insoluble conflict, which seems to presuppose a corporate conception of the common good. In my last talk at the Jour Fixe, I will present the results of my postdoctoral inquiry, making the case that the prosperity of society is reliant on the promotion of a subset of basic interests common to all community members, which leads not only to assume a generic or basic interests conception of the common good, but also to conclude that the structural injustice displayed by our current societal cooperative schemes impedes the endorsement of a general moral duty to participate in biomedical research. Still, such moral duty could arise in very concrete situations depending on subjects’ personal circumstances, and thus confined to certainly exceptional cases.