Skip to Content
Miriam Bentwich
Miriam Bentwich

Visiting Scholar
2019-2020

Profile Page

Miriam Bentwich is a Tenured Senior Lecturer of bioethics on the Faculty of Medicine at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, where she is the founding head of the medical ethics and medical humanities program. She is also the Chair of the Ethics Committee in the Faculty of Medicine and a member of the University Ethics Committee at Bar-Ilan University.

Miriam's expertise includes political philosophy, empirical ethics, and normative philosophically-based ethics. She is engaged with a broad range of innovative issues in biomedical ethics as well as medical humanities and medical ethics education. Her research topics include: new eugenics in the age of CRISPR; cultural underpinnings of medical students’ attitudes toward genetic screening; vulnerability, integrity, and undermining the justification for funding of IVF; perceptions of multicultural caregivers on human dignity and autonomy of patients with dementia; multicultural healthcare provider’s attitudes to end-of-life patients; physicians’ perspectives on enemy patients; coping and evasive strategies in small group learning of medical ethics; and the use of debates in medical ethics education. Her academic publications include the book Reclaiming Liberty: From Crisis to Empowerment (Palgrave, 2012) and articles in leading academic journals such as Nature Biotechnology, the American Journal of Bioethics, the American Journal of Public Health, Ethnicity and Health, the Journal of Medical Ethics, Nursing Ethics, and BMC Medical Education.

Miriam holds a PhD in Political Philosophy from The Hebrew University. Prior to joining the faculty at Bar-Ilan University, she held post-doctoral fellowships at the University of Notre Dame (Fulbright fellow), University of Toronto, and The Hebrew University. In addition she has been a research associate at the University of Tel Aviv and Ben-Gurion University

During her time at the Petrie-Flom Center, Miriam’s research will focus on devising an enhanced nudging model specifically oriented to the clinical research context as well as the overall clinical domain. By creating an enhanced nudging model, Miriam will: 

  • explore and explain why and how nudging may occur in the clinical research domain and in what respect(s) it may pose an ethical challenge to autonomy;
  • explain how the enhanced nudging model (‘nudgability’ model) may contribute to illuminating a possibly less disputable critique about nudging in the clinical domain;
  • explain how the ‘nudgability’ model may better address at least some of the illuminated ethical challenges entailed in nudging within both the clinical and clinical research domain; and
  • explain why the ‘nudgability’ model may have further positive implications for clinical research ethics, particularly with respect to the application of social justice from a legal perspective (i.e., the “Common Rule” regarding research in human subjects).

Learn more about Miriam's work.