Lord Falconer’s Assisted Dying Bill: Is Slow Assisted Dying Legal?
In 2005, the NZ Herald reported. “A man with motor neurone disease plans to starve himself to death rather than wait to die. “Thirty-nine-year-old Andrew Morris of Hamilton has limited movement and can barely speak. He has gone …
Read MoreWhen Cupid fires arrows double-blind: implicit informed agreement for online research?
A while ago Facebook got into the news for experimenting on its subscribers, leading to a fair bit of grumbling. Now the dating site OKCupid has proudly outed itself: We Experiment On Human Beings! Unethical or not?
Read MoreCarbon caps and IVF
by Dominic Wilkinson @NeonatalEthics Over on the Journal of Medical Ethics blog are a couple of posts that might be of interest to Practical Ethics readers. Last week, the journal published online an article by Cristina Richie on carbon cap…
Read MoreEvolutionary psychology and multidisciplinary challenges
Evolutionary Psychology has recently gained some public attention in Finland, as the University of Turku has announced that it will establish the discipline as a permanent study module from the beginning of autumn 2014. University of Turku …
Read MoreGeoengineering: Lessons from Human Bioengineering
[W]e have no non-radical solutions left to deal with climate change… either we face a radical climate catastrophe or we must radically shift our economy and modes of social organisation away from the current fossil fuel economy That was the…
Read More
The Indignity of Imprisonment
Do we need to radically rethink the practice of imprisonment of criminals – not in the direction of novel forms of punishment, but rather in the form of vastly reducing punitive imprisonment altogether? While prisons are integr…
Read MoreA Wrong Turn, A Hundred Years Ago
Just over a hundred years ago, a car took a wrong turn. It happened to stop just in front of Gavrilo Princip, a would-be assassin. Princip took out his gun and shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife from point blank range. This triggere…
Read MorePrinciples for the Legalization of Trade in Rhino Horn
Last Wednesday night in Kenya, on a private ranch near Nanyuki, armed gangs killed four rhinoceroses for their horns. According to a representative from the Kenyan Wildlife Service, this could be the worst rhino-poaching incident the countr…
Read MoreEconomic arguments and assisted dying.
by Dominic Wilkinson (@NeonatalEthics) Lord Falconer’s assisted dying bill is being debated today in the House of Lords. In the past week or two there has discussion in the media of many of the familiar arguments for and against such a prop…
Read MoreWhen Are Objections ‘Religious’ Objections?: Hobby Lobby, Wheaton College, and Contraceptive Coverage
On June 30th, the Supreme Court of the United States handed down its decision in Burwell vs. Hobby Lobby. The case required the court to consider whether closely held for-profit companies owned by individuals with sincere religious objectio…
Read More