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Declaration of Helsinki turns 60 – how this foundational document of medical ethics has stood the test of time

The declaration of Helsinki recently turned 60, but don’t feel bad if you missed the celebrations. It probably passed unnoticed by most people not working in the medical field – and possibly even a good few in the field. If you’re not familiar with the declaration – adopted by the World Medical Association on October… Read More »Declaration of Helsinki turns 60 – how this foundational document of medical ethics has stood the test of time

Why a US State Court Ruling on the Rights of Children Before Birth is Unjust

Dominic Wilkinson, University of Oxford. In 2020, in a medical facility in one of the southern states of the US, a patient wandered into an unsecured nursery for extremely premature children. Unfortunately, the patient managed to accidentally disconnect multiple babies from their life support. Worried that they would get in trouble, they fled the scene.… Read More »Why a US State Court Ruling on the Rights of Children Before Birth is Unjust

Objective Morality

What could be better to relaunch our new blog than a picture of my favourite socks? “Socks!?’, I hear you cry. But these are no ordinary socks. They are Soc. Soc. Socks, presented to me after not so long ago I was invited to participate in a debate at the Socratic Society in Oxford on… Read More »Objective Morality

Cross Post: What’s wrong with lying to a chatbot?

Written by Dominic Wilkinson, Consultant Neonatologist and Professor of Ethics, University of Oxford

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Imagine that you are on the waiting list for a non-urgent operation. You were seen in the clinic some months ago, but still don’t have a date for the procedure. It is extremely frustrating, but it seems that you will just have to wait.

However, the hospital surgical team has just got in contact via a chatbot. The chatbot asks some screening questions about whether your symptoms have worsened since you were last seen, and whether they are stopping you from sleeping, working, or doing your everyday activities.

Your symptoms are much the same, but part of you wonders if you should answer yes. After all, perhaps that will get you bumped up the list, or at least able to speak to someone. And anyway, it’s not as if this is a real person.Read More »Cross Post: What’s wrong with lying to a chatbot?

Cross Post: Should A Health Professional Be Disciplined For Reporting An Illegal Abortion?

Written by: Prof Dominic Wilkinson, University of Oxford

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Prostock-studio/Shutterstock 
There have been several high-profile cases in the last year of women in the UK being prosecuted for allegedly obtaining abortions illegally. In 2022, there were 29 cases of suspected unlawful abortions that were reported to police – almost a twofold rise on the number reported four years earlier.

In response to this, the Royal College of Obstetrics and Gynaecologists (RCOG) has issued guidance that seeks to clarify the legal obligations of healthcare professionals. The full guideline has not yet been released, but the RCOG insists that professionals “are under no legal obligation to contact the police following an abortion, pregnancy loss or unattended delivery”.Read More »Cross Post: Should A Health Professional Be Disciplined For Reporting An Illegal Abortion?

Cross Post: Brainpower: Use it or Lose it?

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This is the first in a series of blogposts by the members of the Expanding Autonomy project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council

Written By: J Adam Carter, COGITO, University of Glasgow

E-mail: adam.carter@glasgow.ac.uk

 

What are things going to be like in 100 years? Here’s one possible future, described in Michael P. Lynch’s The Internet of Us. He invites us to imagine:

smartphones are miniaturized and hooked directly into a person’s brain. With a single mental command, those who have this technology – let’s call it neuromedia – can access information on any subject ….

That sounds pretty good. Just think how quickly you could gain information you need, and how easy and intellectually streamlined the process would be. But here is the rest of the story:

Now imagine that an environmental disaster strikes our invented society after several generations have enjoyed the fruits of neuromedia. The electronic communication grid that allows neuromedia to function is destroyed. Suddenly no one can access the shared cloud of information by thought alone. . . . [F]or the inhabitants of this society, losing neuromedia is an immensely unsettling experience; it’s like a normally sighted person going blind. They have lost a way of accessing information on which they’ve come to rely.Read More »Cross Post: Brainpower: Use it or Lose it?

Cross-post: Fairness and Freedom in Public Health Policy – On the need for a Humanities-based approach to public health policy

by Alberto Giubilini

Originally posted on the Oxford Medical Humanities website

Multidisciplinary Conference, Oxford, 23 and 24 Oct 2023

 

This conference explored two distinct but related issues in public health. One is the extent to which individual freedom could be restricted in the pursuit of public health goals. The other is whose freedom could be restricted. That is, freedom and fairness in public health policy.

The tension between freedom and public goods pervades our lives. Public goods such as functioning healthcare systems or environmental resources depend on actions we collectively take. Collective actions raise issues about whether and how each of us ought to contribute to them by giving up some of our own personal interests. Pandemic policies simply made that tension more salient. However, our living together is a constant negotiation of the boundaries between us as individuals and us as members of communities, often (but not necessarily) through the mediation of Governmental restrictions.

Public goods cost freedom or, if you prefer, freedoms can erode public goods.Read More »Cross-post: Fairness and Freedom in Public Health Policy – On the need for a Humanities-based approach to public health policy

Cross Post: Why Government Budgets are Exercises in Distributing Life and Death as Much as Fiscal Calculations

Written by Hazem Zohny, University of Oxford

Sacrificial dilemmas are popular among philosophers. Should you divert a train from five people strapped to the tracks to a side-track with only one person strapped to it? What if that one person were a renowned cancer researcher? What if there were only a 70% chance the five people would die?

These questions sound like they have nothing to do with a government budget. These annual events are, after all, conveyed as an endeavour in accounting. They are a chance to show anticipated tax revenues and propose public spending. We are told the name of the game is “fiscal responsibility” and the goal is stimulating “economic growth”. Never do we talk of budgets in terms of sacrificing some lives to save others.

In reality, though, government budgets are a lot like those trains, in philosophical terms. Whether explicitly intended or not, some of us take those trains to better or similar destinations, and some of us will be left strapped to the tracks. That is because the real business of budgets is in distributing death and life. They are exercises in allocating misery and happiness.Read More »Cross Post: Why Government Budgets are Exercises in Distributing Life and Death as Much as Fiscal Calculations

Guest Cross Post: Extremism And The Sensible Centre

Written by Tony Coady , Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Melbourne and Honorary Professor at the Australian Catholic University, Honorary Fellow in the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics in Oxford.

There are a plethora of terms in widespread political and social use that often obfuscate more than they elucidate. One of those is “terrorism” and its derivatives such as “terrorist”, but I have had my say about this elsewhere, most recently in my 2021 book The Meaning of Terrorism and will simply commend it to readers. Here I want to address instead the cluster of expressions  around “extremist/extremism”, “radical/radicalism” and best of all “the sensible centre”.

Typical quotes about extremism show the standardly condemnatory nature of its widespread current usage. Examples are almost endless, but here are two examples from very different well-known people: “A people inspired by democracy, human rights and economic opportunity will turn their back decisively against extremism.” – Benazir Bhutto;[1] “Extremism means borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.” – Milan Kundera [2] Read More »Guest Cross Post: Extremism And The Sensible Centre