The outline of a framework for assessing privacy risks in multi-omic research and databases provided by Dupras and Bunnik is a valuable contribution to the literature on the ethics of omics data. They provide an empirically informed list of privacy-relevant omic data properties that help us to better understand the variety of privacy risks involved and present three steps that one can follow in order to assess "data properties and interrelation effects between omic types for the detection of privacy risks in multi-omic research and databases" (Dupras and Bunnik 2021, 2). In our commentary, we take a step back to discuss their framework in light of the normativity of the concept of privacy. We start by scrutinizing the underlying premise of normative-neutrality in the authors' approach, subsequently show how a normative understanding of privacy would collapse the distinctions that they attempt to make between 'intrinsic' properties, 'extrinsic' factors & contextual factors and end by proposing a new and primary step to ethically ground their framework.
This paper addresses Joseph Heath's attempt to derive moral obligations from the conditions that are specified by the model of the perfectly competitive market. Through his market failures approach to business ethics he argues that firms should behave as if they are operating in a perfectly competitive market. However, I argue that this derivation of moral obligations runs counter to the metaethical principle that moral actions need to be voluntarily chosen from a set of alternatives. To the extent that Milton Friedman's derivation follows the same lines, my objection is also applicable to his approach to business ethics. I bring out the fact that the conditions required by the model of the perfectly competitive market cannot be realized in the actual world and argue that this causes problems for any moral obligations that might follow. My objection is illustrated by an intuitive example of someone set to an impossible task. I also bring in a way that Heath could work around this objection, but I argue that this would imply the collapse of his approach into another kind of theory that he wishes to distinguish himself from. More deeply, I show that my metaethical objection has epistemological consequences that undermine the very basis of the model of the perfectly competitive market. I conclude by stating that we need a different conception of competition, pointing to the facts that such a perspective would need to take into account, and suggesting that the concept of rivalry is up to the job.
In recent years, exposome research has been put forward as the next frontier for the study of human health and disease. Exposome research entails the analysis of the totality of environmental exposures and their corresponding biological responses within the human body. Increasingly, this is operationalized by big-data approaches to map the effects of internal as well as external exposures using smart sensors and multi-omics technologies. However, the ethical implications of exposome research are still only rarely discussed in the literature. Therefore, we conducted a systematic review of the academic literature regarding both the exposome and underlying research fields and approaches, to map the ethical aspects that are relevant to exposome research. We identify five ethical themes that are prominent in ethics discussions: the goals of exposome research, its standards, its tools, how it relates to study participants and the consequences of its products. Furthermore, we provide a number of general principles for how future ethics research can best make use of our comprehensive overview of the ethical aspects of exposome research. Lastly, we highlight three aspects of exposome research that are most in need of ethical reflection: the actionability of its findings, the epidemiological or clinical norms applicable to exposome research and the meaning and action-implications of bias.
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