10-year-old gets a tattoo, mother gets arrested
By Brian Earp
See Brian’s most recent prior post on this blog here.
See a list of all of Brian’s previous posts here.
Inking arms, piercing ears, and removing foreskins: The inconsistency of parental consent laws in the State of Georgia
Gaquan Napier watched his older brother die in Acworth, Georgia after being hit by a speeding car. He was with him in those numbing final moments. And now Gaquan wants to keep his brother close to his own heart as he picks up the pieces and moves through life: in the form of a tattoo on his upper arm. Malik (that’s his brother’s name) plus the numbers from Malik’s old basketball jersey. Rest in peace. A memorial to his sibling and best friend, whose life was cut tragically short.
Gaquan is ten years old. So he asked his mother, Chuntera Napier, about the tattoo. She was moved by the request, by the sincerity and maturity of her son’s motivations. She consented. She took Gaquan to have the remembrance he wanted etched into his arm in ink.
Now stop the presses. Chuntera was arrested last week under child cruelty laws and for being party to a crime. Someone at Gaquan’s school had seen his tattoo and tattled to the authorities. But what was the offense?
The cost of living and the cost of dying
X, a patient with reliably diagnosed PVS, lies in a hospital bed for years, fed via a nasogastric tube. He has not, and by definition never will have, any capacity for pain, pleasure or any sort of sensation. Devoted family members come each day to sit by his bedside, but he has no idea that they are devoted, or that they exist.
It is expensive to keep him alive. He occupies a bed and consumes a good deal of nursing time.
The NHS Trust responsible for his care has a limited budget. It decides that the money spent on maintaining his merely biological life would be better spent on dialysis machines. It can, and does, justify its decision in purely utilitarian terms. It writes in the minutes of the relevant committee meeting: ‘For the money we spend keeping X alive, we can save the lives of 10 kidney patients, each of whom will have a good quality of life for many years. The QALY arithmetic makes X’s continued existence nonsensical.’ Continue reading
Are Dopers better Sports(wo-)men?
by Roman Gaehwiler
The crusade against artificial performance enhancement in sports is varicoloured and almost exhaustively debated. Nevertheless, there are still several approaches from the athlete’s perspective which are worth to consider. On the one hand, there is the noble and doubtlessly essential pedagogic approach fostering the educative aspect implying that the misapplication of pharmaceuticals and psychotropic drugs is medically and morally intolerable. In this respect, according to the World Anti-Doping Agency such behavior is also ment to represent a prohibitive action against the «ethos of sports». On the other hand, we probably have to reflect that ingesting specific pharmaceutical performance enhancers displays one possible interpretation of the «ethos of sports». Admittedly, this is a polarising thesis which may be highly challenging at first sight. However, the intrinsic motivation to do everything within your repertoire of opportunities in order to achieve your individual goals demonstrates a typical trait of the so-called ethos of sports. As a matter of fact, doing this during competition as a mean to improve your punctual ability to perform could be interpreted as a dubious performance enhancing practice. In contrast, it is believed that a significant part of athletes help themselves with banned substances exclusively in order to increase their amount of training. In this reference, sports(wo-)men inject peptidehormones such as erythropoietin (EPO) to extend their individual endurance training or ingest anabolic steroids to shorten the interval between the different training-sessions and improve recovery. Concerning this, it might be appropriate to re-evaluate the term «ethos of sports» within an anti-doping framework. On behalf of definition-oriented coherence athletes might meet this specific aspect of the ethos while taking performance enhancing substances for training purposes.
As a result : Indeed, athletes using performance enhancing substances may be (by definition) better sportsmen in the sense of the ethos of sports because they (are able to) train more in order to reach their goals compared to «clean» combatants.
However, another serious ethical issue emerges some steps further in the process. As a matter of fact, unphysiologically elevated training quantities result in musculo-skeletal detrition at least in the long-term perspective. Consequently, athletes get treated with non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) in order to fight the pain caused by chronic tissue-overstress. Unfortunately, NSAIDs do not imply any preventive characteristics. Hence, as long as the individual athlete is obliged to continue regular competitions tissue damage is going to aggravate silently. To come to a conclusion, in short notice official bodies engage intensively to keep up the athlete’s capacity in order to participate for the benefit of an entertaining sport event. As a consequence, while adhering to such kind of inconsistent anti-doping practice governing bodies indirectly encourage professional athletes to undergoe illegal artificial performance enhancement. Hence, solely fighting the symptoms is not equal to disease-eradication. Thus, merely antagonizing the outcome (-> pain due to overstress) is somehow close to diplomatic ignorance of a basic complex of problems (-> doping).
Legalize heroin
Forget about “medical marijuana.” Isn’t it time to legalize heroin in the United States? Recreational cocaine? Ecstasy? LSD? How about the whole nefarious basketful of so-called ‘harder’ drugs?
Yes, it is, says Dr. Ron Paul, a fourteen-term libertarian congressman and obstetrician from the state of Texas. It’s a view shared by virtually none of his Republican colleagues, nor, for that matter, very many Democrats. Nor really anyone in the “mainstream” of American politics. But in this post, I’ll argue that he’s right.
Paul—who is currently making his third bid for President of the United States, and polling third among Republican contenders—offered his perspective to comedian and Daily Show host Jon Stewart in an interview earlier this week:
Is a child a blessing?
By Charles Foster
Three years ago Ana Mejia bore a son, Bryan Santana. To her surprise he had no arms and only one leg. I should have been warned about this, she recently told a Florida court. It was negligent not to warn me. Had I been warned, I would have had an abortion. She asked the court for $9 million compensation. The jury gave her $4.5 million.
The disability rights lobby is predictably outraged. Why, they say, should it be presumed (as it clearly is), that a disabled person’s life isn’t worth living?
If that is Ana Mejia’s presumption, then (at least in relation to a child as relatively mildly disabled as Bryan) it is plainly reprehensible. I don’t know her motivation, but I doubt that she saw it that way. Many parents in her situation (and this is a very common issue in medico-legal practice) don’t make their decisions on the basis of their child’s quality of life at all. A much commoner thought is: ‘A disabled child will disrupt my own life. One of the purposes of pre-natal screening is to enable me to decline to bring into the world a child who does not fit with my ideas about how I should be living my life.’ I will call this thought the ‘pre-natal screening default thought’ (PNSD). Continue reading
Why Pro-Life Counsellors Ought to Lie
Those who are pro-choice often get frustrated by anti-abortion advocates, who are seen as using underhanded and immoral tactics to decrease numbers of abortions. These include presenting misleading information about abortions at their advice centres.
For example, it is claimed that some abortion counsellors show pictures of late-stage abortions when discussing early-stage abortions, exaggerate the trauma felt by people who have had abortions and assert that foetuses feel pain earlier than scientists believe they do. A large part of the opposition to the amendment proposed by Nadine Dorries , which would have prevented bodies which carry out abortions from counselling women, was that this might mean that more women would be counselled by anti-abortion groups who cannot be trusted to provide accurate information about abortion. I’m going to suggest that it is a mistake to think that anti-abortion advisors are failing morally by providing misleading information about abortions. Indeed, they might be failing morally if they did not do so. Continue reading
Circumcision is immoral, should be banned
Seattle, 1985. I escaped the hospital with my penis intact. Lucky for me. Routine neonatal circumcision in boys is cruel and immoral, deeply unnecessary, and it should be made illegal in the United States. Or so I argue in this post.
Yet lawmakers in California, it is now being reported, have introduced a bill with the opposite end in mind. They wish to ban legislation that could forbid circumcision-without-consent. Read that sentence again. What could be going on?
“Focus Pocus” and Beyond: consumer brain computer interfaces for health, self-improvement and fun
In September 2011 ,the most advanced computer game to use a consumer brain computer interface (BCI) will go on sale. Its name is Focus Pocus (see video trailer here, its awesome) and it is aimed at children with ADHD so that they might use gamification to train their brains to improve focus and impulse control.
The game is based on neurofeedback enabled by the use of the Neurosky dry-electrode EEG (Electro-EncephaloGram) headset, which anyone can purchase for under $100 (or 100 Euros if in Europe) Earlier this week, BBC2 did a special on the headset. The basic Idea is that the single electrode on the Neurosky headset (placed on the forehead) is able to pick up a few simple and characteristic brainwaves (created by activity in populations of neurons), some that have been shown to be enriched when the subject is awake and attentive (ex. Beta-waves), and some when the subject is relaxed (ex. alpha waves). Neurosky has developed algorithms to funnel these and other brain waves into measures of “focus” and “meditation.” Look here for more details on how it works.
Considering the Instrumentalization and Exploitation of Elite Athletes
Why did Wladimir Klitschko and David Haye not wear helmets during their boxing fight a few weeks ago? Actually, they do tend to wear them during training, but obviously not when an official boxing match takes place. Why not? Presumably, it is because wearing helmets could foster tactical fights and finally turn them into unspectacular victories won on points.
Instead of impressive knock outs, swaying hulks and eye-rolling fighting-machines, an audience would have to content itself with scampering human rocks and rare surprise effects. From another perspective, boosting knock outs (or not wearing helmets) could even be seen as a degrading or even a humiliating act against an athlete’s integrity. Nevertheless, professional boxers accept this system because they also get their salary after being vanquished and humbled. Still, a slightly unpleasant taste of something between modern slavery and exploitation cannot be denied.
Furthermore, participating at an excellent level automatically implies taking on a kind of role model responisibility. Often, still adolescent athletes are meant to be ambassadors of virtues such as fairness, consideration and respect. But unfortunately, within a Darwinistic framework like sports you cannot reach the top of the pyramid while considering the needs of your competitor. Moreover, the regular monitoring of athletes actually undermines their status as role models, since it stigmatizes athletes as people who, without surveillance, will behave improperly. [1] Hence, to put an athlete in charge of being an ambassador of moral traits may be utopian. Rather it should be the other way round. Elite sportsperson represent qualities and insufficiencies of the specific society they were born and raised in and therefore, tend to be seen as a mirror of society. In fact, they’re not. Sports, including athletes as its protagonists, are rather boosters of human traits because performing at limits confesses which values we actually stand for. Expecting athletes to exhibit superior moral traits because they occasionally appear on a screen responding to questions, is not unfair, but naïve. Therefore, enforcing a sportsperson to bear the burden of being a centre of moral competence while gasping for breath might be a deportation of this specific « educational » responsibility.
A further aspect of instrumentalization is going to be obvious while conceding that the system of modern sports industry actually promotes doping. To substantiate this provocative thesis, I would like to make the connection to the Tour de France 2011 or similar intense competitions requiring weeks of top performance. The main reason why cyclists began abusing performance enhancing methods in such an excessive manner is certainly not because they were poorly prepared for the race. It is because the setting of the competition itself (in this case the TdF) demands inhuman physical capacities. To cycle 3’430.5 kilometres within 23 days and only 2 days of recovery cannot be healthy at all. Despite the fact elite sport does not much concern health these numbers imply a daily distance of 149.15 km on average, of course under contest conditions. Additionally, all of the six high mountain stages take place in the second half of the Tour (superfluous to mention that every of them is above 152 km with exception of the last one). Notably, not the length of each single stage, which is questionable, it is more about the short interval between the stages and the repetition for more than three weeks. Due to the fact that the human body depends on regular nutrition, hydration and recovery to keep a natural level of performance such a race-calendar, at least indirectly, suggests the intake of performance enhancing substances . In fact, during the Tour, cyclists get infusions for nutrition and hydration [2] because the human body is physiologically not able to restore its stock this fast (until next competition starts, normally on the subsequent day). Finally, we have to keep in mind that the Tour de France is only one of several long-distance events in the race-calendar.
To conclude, doping is just an inevitable corollary. Especially, if we as spectateurs insist on the current aesthetic and entertaining standard of sports which actually involves boxers not wearing helmets or cyclists trying to make up with inhuman competition-settings. Even on that account, it might be inconsistent, maybe even hypocritical, to justify a ban by appealing on athletes’ well-being [3] like various anti-doping defenders do. As a result, sports governing bodies may ask themselves what they intent to provide to the ticket payers. Is it about sports, a fair competition or solely an entertaining show to celebrate the potential of modern biochemistry? Simultaneously, society, as a consumer of elite-sports, may re-evaluate its interpretation of the extraordinary skilled athlete who is regarded to represent idealistic moral traits.
[1] Current anti-doping policy: a critical appraisal. Kayser B, Mauron A and Miah A, published 29 march 2007, BMC Medical Ethics 2007, 8:2
[2] Dopium fürs Volk? Werte des Sports in Gefahr, Denkperlen 06, Hans Lenk, 2007 by merus verlag Hamburg.
[3] Constructing Winners: The Science and Ethics of Genetically Manipulating Athletes. A. J. Schneider and J. L. Rupert, Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, 2009, 36, 182-206.
What is the point of being a doctor when conscience overrules professional duties?
A new study recently published on the Journal of Medical Ethics and reported by the newspapers explored the attitude towards conscientious objection of 733 medical students from four different UK medical schools (Cardiff University, King’s college London, Leeds University and St George’s University of London).The results of this survey are interesting and deserve to be introduced in details.When the students were asked if doctors should be entitled to object to any procedure for which they have a moral, cultural or religious disagreement, the 45.2% agreed doctors should be entitled to make conscientious objection, the 40.6% disagreed and the 14.2% was unsure.
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