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Economic 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…

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When 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…

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Would Legal Assisted Suicide be the Final Triumph of Market Capitalism?

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…

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A shocking discovery about thinking?

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…

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Thank You Luis Suarez!

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…

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The pill to banish painful memories—forget it!

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…

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Sex with corpses might be philosophically cool. But it’s still not a good idea.

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…

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Tidying up psychiatry

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…

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Historical crimes, historical sentences?

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…

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Tony Coady – Trusting Emotion, Trusting Reason: A False Dichotomy

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…

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