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Bennett Foddy

Announcement: Welcome to members of the International Neuroethics Society

We are pleased to welcome members of the International Ethics Society (INS), who are collaborating with us on the new Neuroethics blog. The new blog is co-located with our existing practical ethics blog, and all neuroethics articles will be automatically cross-posted between the two. You can access the neuroethics blog by clicking here. Martha Farah,… Read More »Announcement: Welcome to members of the International Neuroethics Society

Annoucement: Bio-ethics Bites

We are pleased to announce the launch of Bio-ethics Bites, a freely-available series of interviews with leading thinkers on issues in practical ethics. Already posted: an interview with Jeff McMahan (Rutgers) on the question of moral status, and an interview with Julian Savulescu (Oxford) on designer babies. In the pipeline: interviews with Peter Singer (Princeton),… Read More »Annoucement: Bio-ethics Bites

The Second Coming of the Placebo Treatment

The German Medical Association has recommended that doctors should sometimes make use of deceptive placebo treatments when those treatments may be more effective than pharmacologically active alternatives. This recommendation stands at odds with the position of nearly every other international medical association, including the British Medical Association and the American Medical Association, which ruled in 2007 that it would always be unethical for doctors to prescribe placebos without informing their patients.

There is a gathering controversy on the placebo issue; for a long time it has been assumed that placebo treatments are both unethical and/or ineffective, and that widespread use of placebo treatments would grievously undermine the trust between doctors and patients. But a series of recent studies has been undermining the orthodox opinion:

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In Brief: New Evidence Shows Expectations Influence Pain

In the current issue of Science Translational Medicine, Oxford neuroscientists in Irene Tracy’s lab have published a new study of the placebo effect with dramatic results. In their experiment, test subjects were subjected to pain in the form of heat, while inside an fMRI brain imaging machine, and asked to rate their subjective feelings of… Read More »In Brief: New Evidence Shows Expectations Influence Pain

The Ethics of Gamification: Little Rewards for Everything

[note: the original version of this post contained some interactive code, which has been removed from the archives]

Notice that the first word of this post is red. Point your mouse cursor at the words as you read them, and each subsequent word will turn red as you read. You are now being graded on how quickly you read these words. And there’s a little visual reward in store for anyone who reads the first paragraph quickly. Now look to the right of this post, where it says ‘Top Posts’. One of the reasons we have that is to help readers to find the most popular posts on the blog. But another reason we have it is so that our contributors will be motivated to write more interesting and thought-provoking commentaries for the site. It is a high score table, and the winner is the philosopher with the most interesting post.

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Addiction by design

A new report released by the US Surgeon General last month reminds us that cigarettes are designed with addiction in mind. Tobacco companies infuse tobacco with ammonia so that the nicotine crosses the membranes in the lungs faster, reducing the delay between inhalation and pharmacological effect. They add flavourings like chocolate and vanilla to the blend, knowing that smokers will be more likely to smell something in their food that they associate with smoking, and to feel like lighting up. These tricks are a source of moral outrage for many of us; it seems as though the tobacco companies are exploiting weaknesses in our biology to make us buy things we would not otherwise have bought, and to do things we would not otherwise have done (or would not have done so much). And tobacco executives have often denied engaging in these kinds of tactics.

All this makes for an interesting contrast with the case of video games, in which addictiveness is universally held to be one of the hallmarks of an excellent game, in which games can win awards for being addictive, and in which a developer can unabashedly boast of putting the most addictive systems into their games.

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Counterfeit Placebos

Last week it was reported that police in Bangladesh had made a major bust at a factory that was producing counterfeit homeopathic drugs. The counterfeiters were attaching the labels of other drug producers to the remedies they were producing in their own factory. Dhaka's Daily Star reported the bust with the rather ironic headline "Fake Medicine Factory Busted".

Of course, even homeopathic remedies need to be guaranteed safe if they are sold in stores, and counterfeiters are not bound by the same safety controls as other more reputable sources. There are also 'intellectual property' issues concerning the use of other company's labels and trademarks. So I am not here to tell you that this drug bust was unnecessary or ridiculous. In fact I want to challenge The Star's implicit suggestion that homeopathic remedies are by their nature counterfeit therapies.

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Synthetic biology: eroding the moral distinctions between animate and inanimate.

Sometimes science reveals distinctions to be false. Time and space were thought to be distinct, separate things, until Einstein showed that they were fundamentally intertwined. Graphite and diamond were thought to be made of distinct substances, until Tennant showed that they would release the same gas when burned. In a similar way, progress in the… Read More »Synthetic biology: eroding the moral distinctions between animate and inanimate.