The last few weeks have seen an explosion of reports concerning the status of the worldwide fight against tuberculosis, largely precipitated by World TB Day last month on March 24. Tuberculosis was once considered a disease of the past, an illness, like diphtheria, thought to have faded away with the Victorian era as a serious… Read More »Tuberculosis: the return of the white plague?
In Australia, Norrie is understood to be the world’s first person to have ‘Sex Not Specified’ on their birth certificate. The NSW government has legally recognised that Norrie is neither male nor female. “Norrie, 48, was born in Scotland and registered as male at birth. At age 23 Norrie commenced sex and gender conversion to… Read More »Choose Your Sex: Male, Female or Neither … or Both
When doing something is worse than doing nothing
By: Julian Savulescu
According to a study reported in the Guardian, when people feel they have been morally virtuous by saving the planet through their purchases of organic baby food, for example, it leads to the "licensing [of] selfish and morally questionable behaviour", otherwise known as "moral balancing" or "compensatory ethics". The article came under the wonderful heading, “How going green may make you mean.”
How should an ethicist respond to yet another psychological study of human limitations? Some would no doubt argue that personal ethics should global, not local. Living ethically is a way of life, not an individual choice. That ethics should infuse all our choices, etc, etc
By: Julian Savulescu
Imagine someone offered you £1 000 000 to cross a busy road. There is a small chance you might lose your life or a limb. But most people would accept the chance. I certainly would. We do that kind of thing every day for trivial reasons, such as to buy a packet of cigarettes or a pint of beer that might also kill us.
Would you be exploited if you crossed the road for a million dollars? Hardly. You were lucky to get such an offer that you judged made it worth crossing the busy road. After all, you could have stayed put or even crossed the road for nothing.
Read More »The Great Egg Raffle – Why Everyone’s a Winner If We Price Life and Body Parts
By: Julian Savulescu
In an article in the New York Times, Lisa Belkin relates the story of Laurie Strongin Allen Goldberg who tried to use PGD to create a sibling to provide bone marrow to treat their son, Henry, suffering from Fanconi anemia. Congress, however, shut down the lab that was working on P.G.D., calling it illegal stem-cell research. “That led to an 18-month delay that may well have cost Henry his life. Laurie went through nine in vitro fertilization cycles before and after that pause, and each time the embryos transferred were not only free of the genetic flaw that threatened Henry but were also his bone-marrow match. Nine attempts failed to take, and Henry had to settle for an imperfectly matched unrelated donor. He died in 2002 at the age of 7.”
Read More »Our Lethal Moral Ideals: Having a Child to Save Another
By: Francesca Minerva
Reading this news about a couple that donated two embryos to another sterile couple, I started to ask myself if embryo donation is really the most moral way to use embryos. Some people, indeed, suggest that this choice is the one that people who take into account human life should take. We read “The concept of donating embryos to other couples got a push eight years ago under President George W. Bush, who dedicated federal funding to promote, in his terms, “embryo adoption.” The federal funding has since increased to $4.2 million. Now, Georgia has passed the nation's first state law symbolically recognizing embryo adoption”. I am especially skeptical about two issues connected to embryo donation.
By: David Edmonds
The Equality Bill is currently making its way through the two unequal chambers of the British parliament. It’s radical and wide-ranging and the debate about it has been heated, but the most interesting contribution has come from the upper chamber, the House of Lords. In a thoughtful speech, Bhikhu Parekh, a political theorist, advanced an argument in support of positive action. He said that in some circumstances one’s sex could in itself be a qualification for a post.
Take a hospital whose obstetrics and gynaecology department is all-male. Many women would like to be seen by a female gynaecologist, but there is none. A vacancy occurs. We have two candidates, a male and a female, with equal medical or academic qualifications and equal professional experience. The woman doctor could be appointed, either as a form of positive action, or by simply saying that the needs of the organisation require that her gender is an important part of the qualification itself. In other words, what is called positive action here is not simply an add-on in a situation where there is equality of qualification or experience, rather it is built into the structure of the assessment criteria themselves, so that she is appointed because she has an additional qualification, by virtue of her gender, which others do not have.
By: David Edmonds
The
current British inquiry into the Iraq war – led by Sir John Chilcot – is a
cathartic exercise. No issue since New
Labour was elected in 1997 has been so divisive. The war split friends, families and
political parties. While the
catastrophic impact of the war is still being felt in Iraq, in Britain the
inquiry – it is hoped – will bring some closure.
Many
critics of the war are looking for one finding.
They don’t want to hear that the former Prime Minister Tony Blair
miscalculated. They want to have
confirmed their belief that he intentionally misled – even that he lied. Oddly, a verdict of ‘lie’ would be regarded
as incomparably more serious than a verdict of ‘miscalculation’. The ‘Liar’ headline would curdle the
nation’s blood.
Nick BostromProfessor of Applied Ethics, Director, Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford Steve ClarkeJames Martin Research Fellow, Program on the Ethics of the New Biosciences, University of Oxford; Principal Researcher, AHRC funded project ‘Science and Religious Conflict’, University of Oxford Roger CrispProfessor of Moral Philosophy, Uehiro Fellow, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, University… Read More »AUTHORS
By: David Edmonds
As so often, I’m with
King Wangchuck. The former King of
Bhutan, the fourth ‘Dragon King’, coined the term, Gross National Happiness
(GNH). Governments, he thought, should
aim to boost the nation’s well-being, rather than target Gross National Product
(GNP). He used the phrase after his
coronation, an event which, unfortunately, his citizens couldn’t follow on the
box – because, until a decade ago, Bhutan didn’t have TV. The erstwhile King appears a happy man
himself – which may, or may not, be connected to his being married to four
queens.
