A study published in the Journal of Neuroscience (behind a paywall here, but see also a media report here a a few days ago suggests that cocaine addicts may have impairments in the neural circuits that are responsible for the prediction of emotional loss. In this post, I shall consider the implications that this finding might have for our understanding of addiction and the autonomy of addicted individuals.
A placebo can be understood as a medical intervention that lacks direct specific therapeutic effects on the condition for which it has been prescribed, but which can nonetheless help to ameliorate a patient’s condition. In March 2013, a study by Howick et al. suggested that the vast majority of UK general practitioners (GPs) have prescribed a placebo at some point in their career. This finding was somewhat controversial and received national media coverage in the UK (here and here). Part of the reason for this controversy is that the use of placebos in clinical practice is often deemed to be morally problematic, in so far as it often involves the intentional deception of the patient.Read More »“Ravines and Sugar Pills: Defending Deceptive Placebo Use” – New Open Access Publication
This week, The Court of Appeal in the UK ruled that bus companies are not legally required to force parents with buggies to make way for wheelchair users in designated bays on vehicles.
This ruling overturned a 2013 County Court judgement in favour of a Mr. Doug Paulley. Mr Paulley was awarded £5’500 damages after he was prevented from boarding a bus because a woman with a buggie had refused to move from the bay designated for wheelchairs and buggies on the bus, claiming that doing so would wake her sleeping baby. Since the bus company had a policy of requesting but not requiring that people vacate the disabled bay, the bus company was originally found to have been in breach of the Equality Act 2010. The BBC report suggests that Paulley’s lawyers are already planning to appeal to the Supreme Court in response to the overturning of this ruling.Read More »Disability and Minimally Decent Samaritanism
The Samaritans have launched a controversial new app that alerts Twitter users when someone they ‘follow’ on the site tweets something that may indicate suicidal thoughts.
To use the app, named ‘Samaritan Radar’, Twitter members must visit the Samaritans’ website, and choose to activate the app on their device. Having entered one’s twitter details on to the site to authorize the app, Samaritan Radar then scans the Twitter users that one ‘follows’, and uses an algorithm to identify phrases in tweets that suggest that the tweeter may be distressed. For example, the algorithm might identify tweets that involve phrases like “help me”, “I feel so alone” or “nobody cares about me”. If such a tweet is identified, an email will be sent to the user who signed up to Samaritan Radar asking whether the tweet should be a cause for concern; if so, the app will then offer advice on what to do next.Read More »Twitter, Apps, and Depression
Something of a twitter storm erupted last week over a poster placed in a supermarket window. The poster, placed in a branch of Sainsbury’s, issued a “50p Challenge”, urging employees to encourage every customer to “spend an additional 50p during each shopping trip between now and the year’s-end”. After a passer-by named Chris Dodd took a photo of the poster and posted it on twitter, a Sainsbury’s representative confirmed that the poster was intended only for employees and that it was not intended for public display. See a news report here.Read More »Supermarkets, Spending, and Influences on Choice
At some point, most people will have questioned the necessity of the existence of mosquitoes. In the UK at least, the things that might prompt us into such reflection are probably trivial; in my own case, the mild irritation of an itchy and unsightly swelling caused by a mosquito bite will normally lead me to rue the existence of these blood-sucking pests. Elsewhere though, mosquitoes lead to problems that are far from trivial; in Africa the Anopheles gambiae mosquito is the major vector of malaria, a disease that is estimated to kill more than 1 million people each year, most of whom are African children.Read More »Genetically Modifying Mosquitoes to ‘Bite the Dust’? Ethical Considerations
At lunch-time, I will often venture out of the office for lunch to a sandwich shop with a friend. In my sandwich shop of choice, the staff have placed a small jar labelled ‘tips’ on the counter. Now, in the UK at least, sandwich shop staff seem to fall into something of a ‘grey area’ with regards to tipping convention. Whilst we normally tip waiters and waitresses in restaurants, and bartenders (amongst others), we don’t tend to tip people who serve us in other ways. For example, I don’t feel it incumbent upon me to tip my butcher, who arguably does a lot more work in an individual transaction than someone serving me a sandwich. However, this discrepancy is perhaps not surprising; a great deal of research suggests that tipping decisions are influenced by various social norms;[1] tipping waiters and waitresses is simply ‘the done thing’, whilst tipping butchers is not. Perhaps we just lack a clear social norm in the case of sandwich shops.Read More »On the Ethics of Tipping
The parents of a young woman named Vickie Harvey, who tragically died at the age of 24 from acute myeloid leukaemia, have launched a campaign to give patients the right not to know that they are terminally ill. Eric and Lyn Harvey claim that their daughter lost the will to live when, after her leukaemia returned following a period of remission, doctors told her ‘in graphic detail’ how she would now succumb to her disease. Eric Harvey told the Daily Mail:
After [Vickie was about her prognosis] she changed – and never really got out of bed again. We knew she was dying, but we feel that, if she hadn’t been told that day, she would have lasted longer’.Read More »Terminal Illness and The Right Not to Know
The Daily Mail has caused something of a furore by posting an online petition calling for the UK government to use foreign aid money to help British people whose homes have been devastated by the recent floods. Whilst 143’000 have signed the petition, charities such as Action Aid have condemned the motion.Read More »Floods, Foreign Aid and Moral Distance
It has been reported that the co-ordinator of the Sex Education Forum in the UK has advocated that parents ought to refrain from forcing their child to kiss a grandparent against their will, since this could lead to confusion over sexual consent. Kate Emmerson claims that children should be taught that their bodies are their own from “age zero”, and that the practice of forcing children to kiss a relative against their will is in tension with this message.Read More »Kissing Grandparents and Consent
