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Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics: Secondary Intentions in Euthanasia, written by Isabel Canfield
This essay received an Honourable Mention in the Undergraduate Category of the Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics 2017 Written by University of Oxford student, Isabel Canfield The debate about the moral permissibility of euthanasia is often presented as hinging upon the distinction between killing and letting die. This debate is often focused around a discussion…
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Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics: What Makes Discrimination Wrong? Written by Paul de Font-Reaulx
This essay was the winner in the Undergraduate Category of the Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics 2017 Written by University of Oxford student, Paul de Font-Reaulx What makes discrimination wrong? Most of us intuitively take discrimination based on gender or ethnicity to be impermissible because we have strong rights to be treated on the…
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Announcement: 3rd Annual Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics
After our enforced time offline it is with great pleasure that we can now announce and publish the winners of the Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics 2017 on the Practical Ethics in the News Blog. The winner of the Undergraduate Category is Paul de Font-Reaulx, with his essay ‘What Makes Discrimination Wrong?’ The runner…
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Cross Post: Five ways the meat on your plate is killing the planet
Cross-posted from The Conversation shutterstock Francis Vergunst, Université de Montréal and Julian Savulescu, University of Oxford When we hear about the horrors of industrial livestock farming – the pollution, the waste, the miserable lives of billions of animals – it is hard not to feel a twinge of guilt and conclude that we should eat…
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Debate: The Fiction of an Interest in Death? Justice for Charlie Gard
Julian Savulescu Dominic Wilkinson’s Response A judge ruled last week that baby Charlie Gard will have his treatment withdrawn, against the wishes of his parents. His doctors argued that the rare mitochondrial disease (MDDS) he was born with was causing him unbearable suffering. His parents had raised funds to take him to the US for…
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Debate Response: Charlie Gard, Interests and Justice – an alternative view
Dominic Wilkinson Responding to Julian Savulescu The sad and difficult case of Charlie Gard, which featured in the media last week, is the latest in a series of High Court and Family court cases when parents and doctors have disagreed about medical treatment for a child. Doctors regard the treatment as “futile” or “potentially inappropriate”.…
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Damages and communitarianism
By Charles Foster The Lord Chancellor recently announced that the discount rate under the Damages Act 1996 would be decreased from 2.5% to minus 0.75%. This sounds dull. In fact it is financially tectonic, and raises some important ethical questions. In the law of tort, damages are intended to put a claimant in the position…
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Synthetic life and biodiversity
Written by Dr Chris Gyngell Last year, the first truly novel synthetic life form was created. The Minimal Cell created by the Venter Lab, contains the smallest genome of any known independent organism.[1] While the first synthetic microbe was created in 2010, that was simply a like for like synthetic copy of the genome of…
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How do medical professionals decide on treatment options for children?
Following widespread media coverage about the court case where baby Charlie Gard’s parents were told that his life support would be removed against their wishes, Dominic Wilkinson appeared on BBC’s Newsnight to discuss the factors that doctors take into account when making such difficult decisions. Short Video Full Programme