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What If Stones Have Souls?

By Charles Foster

Over the 40,000 years or so of the history of behaviourally modern humans, the overwhelming majority of generations have been, so far as we can see, animist. They have, that is, believed that all or most things, human and otherwise, have some sort of soul.

We can argue about the meaning of ‘soul’, and about the relationship of ‘soul’ to consciousness, but most would agree that whatever ‘soul’ and ‘consciousness’ mean, and however they are related, there is some intimate and necessary connection between them – even if they are not identical.

Consciousness is plainly not a characteristic unique to humans. Indeed the better we get at looking for consciousness, the more we find it. The universe seems to be a garden in which consciousness springs up very readily.Read More »What If Stones Have Souls?

No jab, no job? Vaccination requirements for care home staff

Written by Lisa Forsberg and Isra Black

Last night the Guardian was first to report that staff working in older adult care homes will be required to get vaccinated against Covid-19. According to BBC News, ‘Care staff are expected to be given 16 weeks to have the jab—or face being redeployed away from frontline care or losing their jobs’. This announcement follows news reports over the last few months that the government have been considering making Covid-19 vaccination mandatory for staff working in older adult care homes in England. As part of this process, an open consultation on vaccination for older adult care home staff was held in April and May of this year, to which we responded.

While we think a vaccination requirement for older adult care home staff may be a necessary and proportionate measure, we nevertheless have concerns about the government’s proposed policy.

Read More »No jab, no job? Vaccination requirements for care home staff

Is Life-Sustaining Treatment Being Lawfully Withdrawn From Patients In Prolonged Disorders Of Consciousness? Nobody Seems To Know

By Charles Foster

From the time of the decision of the House of Lords in Airedale NHS Trust v Bland (1993) until the decision of the Supreme Court in An NHS Trust v Y (2018) (which I will refer to here as ‘Y”) it had been understood that the withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment (typically clinically assisted nutrition and hydration – ‘CANH’) from patients in a vegetative state should be endorsed by the court. Over the years, this practice had been extended to cover such withdrawals in Minimally Conscious States too.

In Y, the Supreme Court held that there was no requirement for court review or endorsement. Why?Read More »Is Life-Sustaining Treatment Being Lawfully Withdrawn From Patients In Prolonged Disorders Of Consciousness? Nobody Seems To Know

Lockdown Erodes Agency

By Charles Foster

A couple of lockdown conversations:

  1. The other day I met a friend in the street. We hadn’t seen one another for over a year. We mimed the hugs that we would have given in a saner age, and started to talk. ‘There’s nothing to tell you’, she said. ‘Nothing’s happened since we last saw you. And that’s just as well, because, as you’ll find, I’ve forgotten how to talk, how to relate, and how to read ordinary cues. We’ve not been out. We’ve not changed anything. I wonder if we’ve been changed?’
  1. Another friend. ‘Zoom’s great, isn’t it? You switch off your camera and your microphone, and the meeting just goes on perfectly happily without you. Everyone thinks you’re there. Your name’s up on their screen. But you are just getting on with your own business.’

And a lockdown fact: Lockdown has been great for book sales. 2020 saw an estimated rise of 5.2% in volume sales of print books in the UK compared with 2019 sales. This was the biggest annual rise since 2007: Read More »Lockdown Erodes Agency

Cross Post: End-of-Life Care: People Should Have the Option of General Anaesthesia as They Die

Written by Dominic Wilkinson and Julian Savulescu

KieferPix/Shutterstock
Dying patients who are in pain are usually given an analgesic, such as morphine, to ease their final hours and days. And if an analgesic isn’t enough, they can be given a sedative – something to make them more relaxed and less distressed at the end of life. We have recently written about a third approach: using a general anaesthetic to ensure that the dying patient is completely unconscious. This has been described previously, but largely overlooked.

There are two situations when a general anaesthetic might be used in dying patients. The first is when other drugs have not worked and the patient is still distressed or in pain. The second is when a patient has only a short time to live and expresses a clear wish to be unconscious. Some dying patients just want to sleep.Read More »Cross Post: End-of-Life Care: People Should Have the Option of General Anaesthesia as They Die

Cross-Post: The Moral Status of Human-Monkey Chimeras

Written by Julian Savulescu and Julian Koplin 

This article was first published on Pursuit. Read the original article.

The 1968 classic Planet of the Apes tells the story of the Earth after a nuclear war destroys human civilisation. When three astronauts return to our planet after a long space voyage, they discover that humans have lost the power of verbal communication and live much like apes currently do.

Meanwhile, non-human primates have evolved speech and other human-like abilities, and are now running the earth with little regard for human life.

The astronaut George Taylor, played by Charlton Heston, is rendered temporarily mute when he is shot in the throat and captured. In one scene he is brought before the Apes, as he appears more intelligent than other humans.

He regains the power of speech, and his first words are: “Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape.”

Planet of the Apes may be fiction, but this month the world’s first human-monkey lifeforms were created by Juan Carlos Belmonte at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in the US, using private funding. Professor Belmonte and his group injected stem cells from the skin of a human foetus into a monkey embryo.

This part-human lifeform is called a chimera.

If implanted into a monkey uterus, the chimera could theoretically develop into a live-born animal that has cells from both a monkey and a human.

While it has been possible to make chimeras for more than 20 years using a different technique that involves fusing the embryos of two animals together, this technique has not been used in humans. It has been used to create novel animals like the geep – a fusion of a sheep and goat embryo.

Professor Belmonte used a different technique– called “blastocyst complementation” – which is more refined. It enables greater control over the number of human cells in the chimera.

But why is this research being done?

Read More »Cross-Post: The Moral Status of Human-Monkey Chimeras

Crosspost: Learning to live with COVID – the tough choices ahead

By Jonathan Pugh, Dominic Wilkinson and Julian Savulescu

This work was supported by the UKRI/ AHRC funded UK Ethics Accelerator project, grant number AH/V013947/1. The UK Ethics Accelerator project can be found at https://ukpandemicethics.org/

 

As mass vaccination continues to be rolled out, the UK is beginning to see encouraging signs that the number of COVID deaths is reducing, and that the vaccines may be reducing the transmission of coronavirus.

While this is very welcome news, a mass vaccination programme is unlikely to be enough to eliminate the virus, so we need to turn our thoughts towards the ethics of the long-term management of COVID-19.

One strategy would be to aim for the elimination of the virus within the UK. New Zealand successfully implemented an elimination strategy earlier in the pandemic and is now in a post-elimination stage.

An elimination strategy in the UK would require combining the mass vaccination programme with severe restrictions on international travel to stop new cases and variants of the virus being imported. However, the government has been reluctant to endorse an elimination strategy, given the importance of international trade to the UK economy.

One of the main alternatives to the elimination strategy is to treat coronavirus as endemic to the UK and to aim for long-term suppression of the virus to acceptable levels. But adopting a suppression strategy for the long term will require us to make a societal decision about the harms we are and are not willing to accept.

 

Read More »Crosspost: Learning to live with COVID – the tough choices ahead

Daunte Wright: Policing and Accountability

Written by Jake Wojtowicz and Ben Davies 

On April 11th, Daunte Wright was pulled over by police in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota. Shortly afterwards, he was shot and killed by police officer Kim Potter. Police Chief Tim Gannon described this as an ‘accidental discharge’. But framing events like this as accidents can be misleading and is just one way the police may insulate themselves from appropriate accountability.

The word ‘accident’ can bring to mind what we might call ‘sheer accidents’: bad fortune, acts of god, cars hitting the ice and veering off of the road. Even the language of an ‘accidental discharge’ can sound like Potter had the gun in her hand and it just somehow went off. But that isn’t what happened. Potter pointed the gun at Wright and pulled the trigger. She claims she meant to fire her taser.

Read More »Daunte Wright: Policing and Accountability

Mandating COVID-19 Vaccination for Children

Written by Lisa Forsberg and Anthony Skelton

In many countries vaccine rollouts are now well underway. Vaccine programmes in Israel, the United Kingdom, Chile, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and the United States have been particularly successful. Mass vaccination is vital to ending the pandemic. However, at present, vaccines are typically not approved for children under the age of 16. Full protection from COVID-19 at a population level will not be achieved until most children and adolescents are inoculated against the deadly disease. A number of pharmaceutical companies have started or will soon start clinical trials to test the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccinations in children and adolescents. Initial results of clinical trials seem promising (see also here and here).

There are strong reasons to inoculate children. COVID-19 may harm or kill them. It disproportionately affects already disadvantaged populations. For example, a CDC study published in August 2020 found the hospitalisation rate to be five times higher for Black children and eight times higher for Latino children than it is for white children. In addition, inoculating children is necessary for establishing herd immunity and (perhaps more importantly), as Jeremy Samuel Faust and Angela L. Rasmussen explained in the New York Times, preventing the virus from spreading and mutating ‘into more dangerous variants, including ones that could harm both children and adults’. Read More »Mandating COVID-19 Vaccination for Children