Francesca Minerva, University of Melbourne

Last Saturday  I attended an interesting conference about "Reason, Theology and the Genome " organized by the McDonald centre for theology, Ethics and Public Life in Oxford.

I noticed that there was a general agreement, among speakers, about the intrinsic moral value of unconditional love of parents toward their children. Apparently parental unconditional love is a quite relevant argument against human enhancement. The argument goes, more or less, like this “we have to unconditionally love our children but  enhancing them would mean we don’t accept them for what they are”. As Sandel writes “To appreciate children as gifts is to accept them as they come, not as objects of our design, or products of our will, or instruments of our ambition. Parental love is not contingent on the talents and attributes the child happens to have … [W]e do not choose our children”

Such a claim raises interesting questions. First of all, do parents really love their children unconditionally? And if so, is that a good thing in a moral perspective? And if it is good, are we sure it is better than “conditional” love?

Read More »Should I love you as you are?

The  article recently published by J. McMahan on The New York Times  provoked, quite unsurprisingly, both enthusiastic and polemic reactions. Alexandre Erler  wrote an interesting post discussing some of the questions arose by the article and illuminating comments to the post helped to develop some relevant arguments.

McMahan proposal is not entirely new to the ones who are familiar with the debate about vegetarianism, as for instance David Pearce brilliantly discussed the same topic in his on-line book “the abolitionist project”. Pearce, as McMahan, starts from the idea that we should consider the suffering that happens in the natural world, as in the wild many animals are killed by  predators in horrible and painful ways.

One possible solution is to reprogram those predators in order to turn them into “vegetarians”. The idea of “vegetarian” lions or tigers (Vions and Vigers, as Alexandre calls them) sounds a bit odd at the beginning, but then, when one thinks carefully about the issue, it makes much more sense. If pain is a bad thing, and we have a way to avoid it, why shouldn’t we? Leaving aside other problems, my intention is to focus on the question if we should reprogram not just predators, but also humans.

Read More »Why aren’t you a vegetarian?

A study recently
published on the Journal of Neurophysiology investigated
a group of 15 people recently abandoned by their partners to understand the
process of unreciprocated love and romantic rejection. The researchers “used
functional magnetic resonance imaging to study 10 women and 5 men who had
recently been rejected by a partner but reported they were still intensely
"in love." Participants alternately viewed a photograph of their
rejecting beloved and a photograph of a familiar, individual, interspersed with
a distraction-attention task. Their responses while looking at their rejecter
included love, despair, good, and bad memories, and wondering why this
happened”.

Read More »Broken hearts and obsession, why giving up on your ex mate is so hard as overcoming drug addiction

A few days ago, during the Rome meeting of the  European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology, a group of Iranian researchers leaded by Professor Ramezani Tehrani said that in a short time we will be able to predict when a woman will hit menopause many years before it actually happens.

Read More »Motherhood and the ticking clock

The very sad news of the day is the death
of Portuguese writer José Saramago. Saramago was a true genius and one of my
favourite authors ever, so I thought it could be a good idea  to show how this great man was able not
only to write books where every single sentence is so beautiful to take the breathe away, but also to stimulate interesting  thoughts about moral 
issues.

Novels and bioethics don’t usually mingle
but when I first read “Death with interruptions”
(published in 2005) I couldn’t help but think about the debate about
euthanasia.

Read More »Goodbye to Josè Saramago, genius, novelist and (sometimes) a bioethicist

Two abortion bills passed by the Oklahoma legislature made the headlines recently. The first of these bills requires a doctor to force a patient seeking for an abortion to first undergo an ultrasound and listen to a detailed description of the foetus while having the ultrasound monitor in front of her.  The second bill prevents women who gave birth to a handicapped child to sue the doctor who purposely refused to provide her information about the foetus defects, fearing that this information would induce the pregnant woman to terminate the pregnancy.

Read More »Oklahoma pro-life measures: preventing abortions and promoting sadism

A group of Dutch researchers has announced
a few days ago that they have produced the first in vitro meat. Attempts to
create in vitro meat started in 2001 and the Dutch government put $2 to support
research in this field, while PETA offered a $1 prize to the first team of
researchers that could produce edible in vitro meat by 2012. Researchers in
Norway (In vitro meat consortium) and in the United States (New Harvest) are
working on this issue as well, so we can reasonably expect that results will
come soon.

Read More »News from the future: you will have in vitro meat hamburgers within five years