Tomorrow  in the House of Lords Lord Falconer’s bill on assisted dying will be debated. The bill would allow those who are terminally ill and likely to die within six months to request life-ending drugs from their doctor for the patients to…

You’ve probably already seen the story. Participants in an experiment were asked to sit and think. The only distraction available was the possibility of giving themselves a mild electric shock. One third of women and two thirds of men…

The world cup is winding down, and a lot of astonishing, surprising things happened throughout the tournament. But nothing offered more to people interested in morality than when Luis Suarez, Uruguayan football star and Premier League playe…

It is a curious feature of the late 20th and early 21st centuries that the media regales readers and viewers almost daily with exciting details of breakthroughs in medical science: new cures, reversals of previous certainties about old reme…

It is reported that Jimmy Savile crept at night into the mortuary at Leeds General Infirmary and committed sex acts on corpses.1 So what? Well, for a start, assuming the acts involved penetration, he had committed a serious criminal offence…

By Rebecca Roache Follow Rebecca on Twitter here This is a cross post with psychiatricethics.com   Psychiatry’s progress lags behind that of other areas of medicine: the last half-century has seen impressive gains in life expectancy an…

Rolf Harris has been sentenced to five years and nine months in prison for sexual offences he committed at various points in the 60s, 70s and 80s.  There has been public outrage at the supposed leniency of his sentence, which will now be re…

In his recent seminar (a recording of which can be found here), Australian philosopher Tony Coady seeks to criticize the entrenched dichotomy of ‘emotion’ and ‘reason’. He argues that this rigid division is outdated and unsophisticated, and…

The purpose of this blog is, as you know, to comment on ethics in the news. It is written here just above: “Practical Ethics – Ethics in the News”. In this post, I am going to diverge from this purpose, and address a somewhat different topi…

Over on the Ethox blog Angeliki Kerasidou and Ruth Horn discuss the European Union and the need for cultural understanding between member states, with a focus on the concept of dignity at the end of life. The results of the recent European …