In addition to his faculty appointment in the Center for Health Care Ethics, Griffin Trotter has a secondary appointment in the Department of Surgery, Emergency Medical Division. He is a board certified emergency physician, and retired after 15 years of practice. He received his PhD in philosophy in 1995 from Vanderbilt University and his MD in 1985 from Saint Louis University.
Dr. Trotter is CHCE Director of Clinical Consultation and co-Director of Plenary Mentoring for Graduate Students in Health Care Ethics. He teaches several courses in the PhD program in Health Care Ethics, including "Methods in Philosophical Ethics" (G601), "Introduction to Medicine for Ethicists" (G611), and "Ethics in Health Care Reform" (G634).
His research focuses on disaster ethics, clinical ethics, health policy reform, and on the relevance of American pragmatism to bioethics. Dr. Trotter is the author of The Loyal Physician (Vanderbilt University Press, 1997) On Royce (Wadsworth, 2001), and The Ethics of Coercion in Mass Casualty Medicine (Johns Hopkins University, 2007), as well as over 70 essays and articles in bioethics and emergency medicine.
"The Moral Basis for Healthcare Reform in the U.S." Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 20 (January 2011):: 102-107.
"Medicine without Pretense." Lancet 377 (February 19, 2011): 632-633.
"Evidence-Based Coercion in Disaster Medicine." In Liberty and Coercion in Health, ed. James Childress. (forthcoming)
"The Genesis of a Totalizing Ideology: Bioethics' Inner Hippie." In Bioethics in the Plural, ed. H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. (forthcoming 100th Issue of the Philosophy and Medicine Series, Springer).
"Why the West Spurns Medical Rituals." In Ritual, East and West: The Social Construction of Meaning, ed. David Solomon and P.C. Lo. (forthcoming from Notre Dame University Press).
"Sufficiency of Care in Disasters: Ventilation, Ventilator Triage, and the Misconception of Guideline-Driven Treatment." Journal of Clinical Ethics 21 (Winter 2010): 294-307.
"Abortion, Secular Dogma, and the Sacrament of Sex: Another Failed Attempt to Impose Moral Idiosyncrasies through the Ruse of Argument." American Journal of Bioethics 10 (December 2010): 51-52.
"Is 'Discursive Christian Bioethics' an Oxymoron?" In At the Roots of Christian Bioethics: Critical Essays on the Thought of H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., ed. Ana Iltis and Mark Cherry, pp. 2-3-227. Salem, MA: Scrivener Publishing, 2010.
"What You Need to Know about Disasters." In Surviving Health Care: A Manual for Patients and their Families, ed. Thomasine Kushner. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
"The UNESCO Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights: A Canon for the Ages?" Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 34 (June 2009): 195-203.
"Case Commentary: Commitment to Improving Quality of Care." In Professionalism in Medicine, ed. John Spandorfer, Charles A. Pohl, Susan L. Rattner, and Thomas J. Nasca, pp. 342-344. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
"The Illusion of Legitimacy: Two Assumptions that Corrupt Health Policy Deliberation." Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 33 (October 2008): 445-460.
"Preferred Allocation for Registered Organ Donors." Transplantation Reviews 22 (July 2008): 158-162.
"Royce's State of Nature." The Pluralist 2 (Summer 2007): 31-43.
"Enough About Rawls Already: Systems Theory and Bioethics in the 21st Century." [peer commentary] American Journal of Bioethics 7 (April 2007): 83-85.
"Left Bias in Bioethics: Three Dogmas." In The Ethics of Bioethics, ed. Felicia Cohn and Lisa Eckenwiler, pp. 108-117. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.
"Bioethics and Deliberative Democracy: Five Warnings from Hobbes." Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 31 (June, 2006): 235-250.
"Interpreting Scientific Data Ethically: A Frontier for Research Ethics." In Research Ethics, ed. Ana Iltis, pp. 165-177. New York: Routledge, 2006.
"Is There a Distinctive American Version of Natural Law?" In The Death of Metaphysics; The Death of Culture: Epistemology, Metaphysics, and Morality, ed. Mark Cherry, pp 151-165. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Springer, 2006.
"Bioethics, Christian Charity and the View from No Place." Christian Bioethics 11 (December 2005): 317-331.
"When the Trough Breaks." American Journal of Bioethics 5 (November-December 2005): W1 (online).
"What Jurisdiction, Whose Justice? A Response to Eckenwiler." Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 14 (Summer 2005): 316-321.
"Of Lotteries Lost and Partnerships Forged: The Perils and Promises of Patient Ethics." Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics Volume 14(Spring, 2005): 131-140.
"Pragmatism and Ethical Expertise." In Ethics Expertise: History, Contemporary Perspectives, and Applications, ed. Lisa M. Rasmussen, pp. 103-122. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Springer, 2005.
"Why Bioethics is Il Equipped to Contribute to the Debate About Prolonging Lifespans." HEC Forum 16 (September, 2004): 197-213.
"Loyalty in the Trenches: Practical Teleology for Office Clinicians Responding to Terrorism." Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 29 (August 2004): 389-416.
"Chemical Terrorism and the Ethics of Decontamination." Journal of Clinical Ethics 15 (Summer, 2004): 149-160.
"Buffalo Eyes: A Take on the Global HIV Epidemic." Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 12 (Fall 2003): 434-443.
"Pragmatic Bioethics and the Big Fat Moral Community." Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 28 (October 2003): 655-671.
"Holding Civic Medicine Accountable: Will Morreim's Liability Schemes Work in a Disaster?" Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 28 (June 2003): 339-357.
"Emergency Medicine, Terrorism and Universal Access to Healthcare: A Potent Mixture for Erstwhile Knights-Errant." In In the Wake of Terror: Medicine and Morality in a Time of Crisis, edited by Jonathan Moreno, pp. 133-146. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2003.
"Balancing Pluralism and the Common Good: A Look at Open-Air Experiments of Biowarfare Agents." Accountability in Research 10 (2003): 109-121.
"Is it Ethical for Physicians to Serve Ringside?" Journal of Clinical Ethics 13 (Winter 2002): 367-374.
"Virtue, Foible and Practice: Medicine's Arduous Moral Triad." Bioethics Forum 18 (Fall 2002): 30-36.
"Of Terrorism and Healthcare: Jolting the Old Habits." [Column: Bioethics and Defense], Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 11 (Fall, 2002): 411-414.
"Why were the Benefits of tPA Exaggerated? The Role of Interpretation Bias." Western Journal of Medicine 176 (May 2002): 194-197.
"Bioethics and Healthcare Reform: A Whig Critique of Weak Consensus." Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 11 (Winter 2002): 37-51.
"Consensus in Bioethics: Illusive or Just Elusive?" [Guest Editorial]. Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 11 (Winter, 2002): 1-3.
"Pragmatism, Bioethics and the Grand American Social Experiment." American Journal of Bioethics 1 (Fall 2001): In Focus article at http://bioethics.net.
"How Effective are Hiden Striking Techniques?" Black Belt December, 2000.
"Assisted Suicide and the Duty to Die." Journal of Clinical Ethics 11 (Fall 2000): 260-271.
"Culture, Ritual and Errors of Repudiation: Some Implications for the Assessment of Alternative Medical Traditions." Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine 6 (July 2000): 62-68.
"Mediating Disputes about Medical Futility." Cambridge Quarterly of Health Care Ethics 8 (Fall 1999): 527-37.
"The Medical Covenant: A Roycean Perspective." In Pragmatic Bioethics, edited by Glenn McGee, 84-96. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1999.
"Against Customer Service." The Journal of Emergency Medicine 15 (March/April 1998): 227-34.
"The Ten Most Common Questions About Karate Injuries." Black Belt, June 1997.
"Royce, Community and Ethnicity." Transactions of the Charles Sanders Peirce Society 30 (Spring, 1994): 231-69.
Member, National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements (NCRP) Scientific Committees SC-13 and SC-15 advising the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on radiation safety issues related to space travel.
Program Committee co-Chair (with Felicia Cohn). 7th Annual Meeting of the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities, Fall 2004.
Member, Bioterrorism Review Committee, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).
Ethics Program Advisory Committee. Eastern Division, American Philosophical Association. Appointed Spring 2001 for three-year term.
Column Editor: “Bioethics and Defense” for Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics.
Editorial Board member for Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, HEC Forum, American Journal of Disaster Medicine, and Christian Bioethics.
Editorial Board Member for Philosophical Studies in Contemporary Culture series, published by Kluwer Academic Publishers and edited by H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., Kevin Wm. Wildes, and Lisa M. Rasmussen.
Editorial Advisory Board Member for Practicing Bioethics Series, published by Rowman and Littlefield and edited by Mark Kuczewski.
