He was ethicist for the New York State Task Force on Life and the Law, where he played a central role in writing reports on physician-assisted suicide and health-care decision-making. Mackler is a member of the Conservative Rabbinical Assembly’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, for which he is chairman of the subcommittee on biomedical ethics, and he serves as an ethics committee member for Pittsburgh Mercy Health System. He authored Introduction to Jewish and Catholic Bioethics: A Comparative Analysis, edited Life and Death Responsibilities in Jewish Biomedical Ethics and has written many articles in scholarly and professional journals.