Since November 2012, there have been more than 1,100 cases of measles in the Swansea area. To put these numbers into perspective, in 2011, there were 19 cases of cases of measles in the whole of Wales. Measles can result in pneumonia, loss of hearing, and death. There are concerns that there will be another measles epidemic in the future.Read More »The Permissibility of Refusing the MMR Vaccine and the Issue of Blame
A recent study has shown that a person’s implicit racial bias can be reduced if she spends some time experiencing her body as dark-skinned. Psychologists in Spain used an immersive virtual reality technique to allow participants to ‘see’ themselves with a different skin colour. They measured the participants’ implicit racial bias before and after the intervention, finding that the embodiment of light-skinned individuals in a dark-skinned virtual body at least temporarily reduced their implicit bias against people who are coded as ‘out-group’ on the basis of skin colour.
Implicit racial bias is an evolved, unconscious tendency to feel more positively towards members of one’s own race (one’s ‘in-group’) than towards members of a different race (members of an ‘out-group’). The bias can be (and was in this study) measured using a version of the implicit association test, which requires participants to quickly catagorise faces (black or white) and words (positive or negative) into groups. Implicit bias is calculated from the differences in speed and accuracy between categorising (white faces, positive words) and (black faces, negative words) compared to (black faces, positive words) and (white faces, negative words). Crucially, implicit racial bias has been shown to be uncorrelated with explicit racial bias – self-reports of negative racial stereotypes. This means that even those who are not consciously averse to people from other racial groups often demonstrate a deep-seated bias against them as an evolutionary hangover. Hearteningly, the authors of the study started from the idea that encoding people by race may be a reversible by-product of human evolution used to detect coalitional alliances. What their study confirmed is that immersive virtual reality provides a powerful tool for placing people into a different race ‘coalition’ by changing their body representation and consequently reducing their implicit aversion to the racial characteristics there represented.Read More »Skin switching, implicit racial bias and moral enhancement
Is it a White Man’s Court? I went to a talk recently in which the International Criminal Court, the ICC, was accused of racial bias. The evidence seems pretty damning. Virtually no non-African has been targeted by the Court. Yet nobody believes Africa is the only continent in the world to experience grave war crimes. The Chairman of the African Union, the Ethiopian Prime Minister, Hailemariam Desalegn, recently made a similar claim: he talked of the ICC “hunting” Africans. Read More »A WHITE MAN’S COURT
Stop killer robots now, UN asks: the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions Christof Heyns has delivered a report about Lethal Autonomous Robots arguing that there should be a moratorium on the development of autonomous killing machines, at least until we can figure out the ethical and legal issues. He notes that LARs raise far-reaching concerns about the protection of life during war and peace, including whether they can comply with humanitarian and human rights law, how to device legal accountability, and “because robots should not have the power of life and death over human beings.”
Many of these issues have been discussed on this blog and elsewhere, but it is a nice comprehensive review of a number of issues brought up by the new technology. And while the machines do not yet have fully autonomous capabilities the distance to them is chillingly short: dismissing the issue as science fiction is myopic, especially given the slowness of actually reaching legal agreements. However, does it make sense to say that robots should not have the power of life and death over human beings?
Professor David Nutt argues in this podcast of his lecture, that whilst the use of the law to control drug use is long established, it remains unproven in efficacy. Although seemingly obvious that legal interdictions should work there is little evidence to support this assertion. So for example cannabis though illegal is at some time used by nearly half of the population. Similarly drugs like ecstasy and amfetamine are widely used by up to a million young people each weekend. This use is underpinned by a demand for the pleasurable experiences that the drugs produce, and also by a paradoxical desire by some people to break the law.
As well as being ineffective for many users prohibition of drugs often leads to perverse magnification of harms and drug use. When the “English” approach to heroin use i.e. prescription to addicts was abolished in the 1970s on moral grounds heroin use increased tenfold in a few years as addicts were forced to become dealers so getting more people addicted to fuel their income. The banning of alcohol in the 1920s in the USA lead to huge criminal expansion of alcohol sales the perpetrators of which turned to other drugs once prohibition was repealed: a legacy that we still experience today.
Moreover the un-scientific and arbitrary distinct between legal drugs particularly alcohol and tobacco and “illegal” drugs also has perverse negative consequences. As well as bringing the scientific foundation of the drug laws into disrepute it also precludes the use of possibly life-changing drugs for those who might benefit from them as treatments: examples of these include cannabis for Multiple sclerosis, MDMA [ecstasy] for PTSD and psilocybin for cluster headaches.
For these reasons Nutt argues that there are serious ethical implications for a simplistic prohibitionist approach to drugs and suggest alternative strategies that might be used.
Parts of this blog are drawn from ‘Improving access to medicines: empowering patients in the quest to improve treatment for rare lethal diseases’, a forthcoming paper in the Journal of Medical Ethics
Jenn McNary witnesses the miracles that modern medicine can produce every day when she sees her son Max, once increasingly reliant on a wheelchair due to his Duchenne muscular dystrophy, now able to walk, run and jump, the progression of his deadly disease apparently halted due to his enrolment in a clinical trial of a new drug, Eteplirsen.
Tragically, she also witnesses the suffering of her son Austin, who has the same genetic condition, denied the drug as his disease progresses and left no longer able to leave his wheelchair unaided. Like most with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, he is expected to die in his early twenties.
Eteplirsen works by rewriting some of the genetic code that is linked to the disease. If Max’s improvement is repeated in other patients in the trial who are receiving the drug and not the placebo, it is likely that in a few years this treatment will be revolutionizing the prognosis for Duchenne sufferers and offering hope to many of the 1 in 3600 boys who are affected by the disease.
In the meantime, patients like Austin are denied treatment, on the grounds that the drugs have not been tested- in order to protect him from unknown side effects and complications, and to test its efficacy scientifically. Yet the alternative for Austin is continuing degenerative disease, and in a few years, death.
Les Halpin, founder of Access to Medicine, and himself a motor neuron disease sufferer has argued that for those with life threatening and rare illnesses, current drug approval procedures do not work. He argues in our forthcoming paper that “for such individuals, the “risk-return ratio” is different compared to patients with more benign conditions and drug regulations should be adapted to allow such people the opportunity to try out new combinations of drugs”. He has argued for greater use of new media to track patient progress, and cites the use of the website ‘Patients Like Me’ by MND patients to track their progress on lithium treatment.
In this special Enhancement seminar, visiting speakers Rob Sparrow and Chris Gyngell discussed two aspects of enhancement. You can hear the podcast here (mp3). Rob Sparrow on ‘Enhancement and Obsolescence: Avoiding An “Enhanced Rat Race”‘: A claim about continuing technological progress plays an essential, if unacknowledged, role in the philosophical literature on “human enhancement”. Advocates for… Read More »Enhancement: Rat Race or Supermarket? (Podcasts)
Do advances in neuroscience threaten the idea of free will, and if so, what practical implications does this have, for instance when it comes to criminal responsibility and punishment? In a stimulating talk at the Uehiro seminar (the podcast of which is available here), Frej Klem Thomsen, assistant professor of philosophy at Roskilde University, discussed the answers that the prominent American neuroscientists Joshua Greene and Jonathan Cohen have proposed to those questions [1]. Briefly put, Greene and Cohen predict that cognitive neuroscience will make it increasingly apparent to everyone that (as some philosophers have argued centuries ago already) there is no such thing as free will as commonly understood. This, they add, will shift the approach to punishment in criminal law from the current “retributivist” one to a consequentialist one – a change they also judge desirable, on the grounds that the current approach relies on intuitions they take to be scientifically untenable.
Channel 4 was censured by Ofcom this week for cutting to a light-hearted sponsorship advert just after viewers had watched the particularly graphic and disturbing rape scene in the film The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The Phones 4 U sponsorship ad was thought to be especially inappropriate for that moment as it features a couple apparently having sex, during which the woman pauses and asks to the camera ‘I’m faking it, can I upgrade’? Ofcom received 17 complaints about the timing of the advert and this week concluded that ‘the juxtaposition of a light-hearted sponsorship credit featuring a woman during sex with a disturbing and distressing rape scene in a film was clearly unsuitable… In Ofcom’s view this clearly had the potential to be offensive to viewers’.
The timing was clearly unfortunate, but to say that the juxtaposition was offensive is a stronger claim. Of course, the psychological effect of being immersed in a violent scene at one moment and then confronted with the same(ish) subject matter presented trivially will not do much for the viewer’s aesthetic experience. But the regulator’s suggestion seemed not only to be that the juxtaposition detracted from the viewer’s enjoyment, but also that it was in some way wrong.Read More »Phones 4 U, Ke$ha and becoming offensive
By Charles Foster and Jonathan Herring
Scene 1: An Intensive Care Unit
Like many patients in ICU, X is incapacitous. He also needs a lot of care. Much of that care involves needles. Late at night, tired and harassed, Nurse Y is trying to give X an intravenous injection. As happens very commonly, she sticks herself with the needle.
Nurse Y is worried sick. Perhaps she will catch HIV, hepatitis, or some other serious blood-borne infection? She goes tearfully to the Consultant in charge.
‘Don’t worry’, he says. ‘We’ll start you on the regular post-exposure prophylaxis. But to be even safer, we’ll test some of X’s blood for the common infections. I doubt he’ll be positive, but if he is, we’ll start you straight away on the necessary treatment. We needn’t take any more blood: there are plenty of samples already available.’
A sample of blood is submitted for analysis. Read More »Non-consensual testing after needlestick injury: A legal and ethical drama
