Schedule of Events

What can you give to a person risking their lives for the future of others? This paper addresses the bioethics of and need for proper compensation in COVID-19 challenge trials. A COVID-19 challenge trial gives participants vaccines or treatments and then directly exposes them to the SARS-CoV-2 pathogen in order to maximize the efficiency of clinical trial time and bring about a cure faster. I will look at stipends through the four bioethical principles, then provide my own solution. In a world where the global pandemic has raged on for over two years, it is vital to continue finding new ways to combat the virus while simultaneously ensuring every person involved participates for the right reasons with fully informed consent.

There stands a debate surrounding the government’s Moral Authority of a vaccine mandate for healthcare workers. If healthcare workers refuse to comply with the vaccine mandates, this will impose potentially negative consequences on rural healthcare settings. In order to maintain benevolent social welfare, it becomes a moral agent’s duty to obey societal moral imperatives. A societal moral imperative ought to be that patients and other healthcare workers are afforded the “freedom from” being forced into compromised medical settings. The argument for this societal moral imperative comes through advocating that healthcare workers have an obligation to respect other people’s negative freedoms, which promotes dignity and protection of vulnerable populations. The “capacity to cause harm” becomes a focal point of the idiom "first, do no harm." The duty to “do no harm” is the foundation of being a healthcare worker.

The retributive theory of punishment generally holds that people who commit crimes deserve a punishment proportional to the gravity of their crime. Threads of this popular theory and its corresponding principles of desert and proportionality can be seen woven into the United States Criminal Justice System. In this paper, I offer a critique of retributivism specifically aimed at its principle of desert due to its failure to consider justifications or defenses based on the background of the convicted. These backgrounds include their socioeconomic status and their race whenever relevant, such as in those cases where deprivation and adversity are directly tied to the crime committed. This critique draws from and expands on Judge David Bazelon and Richard Delgado’s arguments in favor of the Rotten Social Background defense. This defense holds that severe economic deprivation ought to be recognized as a legitimate legal defense capable of justifying an acquittal or a lesser charge in relevant cases. By the end of this paper, readers will be left to decide whether they want to abandon retributivism for its problematic contextual blindspots, that is, the failure of retributivism to consider socioeconomic and/or racial backgrounds or whether they will continue to endorse retributivism with the knowledge that there is a connection between deprivation and crime, which would seemingly suggest that they believe people are deserving of their minoritized or oppressed backgrounds in the same way that they are deserving of their punishment. 

Keywords: Retributivism, Critical Legal Studies, Theories of Punishment

Economics and politics are systems of power that are inherently related, with money often having a major influence on policy and policy makers, as well as legislation that is centered around the economy. This paper is an internal critique of Adam Smith’s economic theory, outlined in his book The Wealth of Nations, specifically in the United States, as the U.S. is an international powerhouse and one of the largest influences in global politics. Many argue, including myself, that contemporary capitalism is vastly different from the capitalist system described by Smith, and that Smith would likely disapprove of the contemporary system. One of the many angles this argument can be made from is by referencing the apparent tension between our contemporary economic system, the economic theory that was used to implement the current system, and the political theory and structure that was voiced by Jean-Jacque Rousseau. Economics and politics are inherently intertwined and the argument can be made that these two systems in the United States are conceptually at odds with one another. The purpose of this paper is not to provide a description of the best economic system for a nation, but rather to point out the flaws in the current system and to identify the root of these flaws.