-
Ethicists unite: you have nothing to lose but your non-citation
Yesterday Richard Ashcroft, Professor of Bioethics at Queen Mary College, London, wrote in a Facebook update: ‘I am fed up with being asked to come into science/medicine projects, add a bit of ethics fairy dust, usually without getting any share of the pie, just to shut reviewers up. I am not doing it any more.…
-
Is there any point in worrying about the tedium of immortality?
by Alexandre Erler Technologies meant to help extend the human lifespan, such as cryonics, or the procedures investigated by gerontologist Aubrey de Grey under the name “Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence”, are increasingly an object of discussion, including in the popular press. A recent example of this is John Walsh’s piece in The Independent earlier…
-
Why public health campaigns should not promote enhancement
by Rebecca Roache Human enhancement is a hot topic in bioethics. Typically conceived as the use of technology to raise human capacities above what is merely healthy or normal, it attracts questions such as, Is it ethical? Is it desirable? Is it cheating? and, Should the state subsidise it? A common view is that, whilst…
-
Organs and obligations
Simon Rippon has recently argued here that markets in organs lead to harms, harms which may be outweighed by benefits, but which must nevertheless be taken into account in deciding whether such markets should be legal. He has argued that there are harms to specific third parties and harms to society at large. I’m not…
-
Is it easy to debunk religious belief?
The rapid development of the cognitive science of religion over the last 20 years has led to a renewed enthusiasm for anti-religious debunking arguments. The typical form of these is that w thinks that she/he is motivated to believe the tenets of religion x because of y, but w’s real motive for believing the tenets…
-
Democracy and false information: some bad news
A recent study by Nyhan and Reifler has received quite a bit of attention recently. The study aimed to assess how people’s beliefs change in response to evidence. The researchers gave participants mock news stories which contained mistakes (for example, they claimed that WMDs had been found in Iraq). They also included in some versions…
-
Facilitating, Condoning, and Preventing HIV
The Eighteenth International AIDS Conference is currently underway in Vienna, and one of the issues that has been under discussion is how to reduce HIV transmission within the various at-risk groups. One such group is the prison population, among whom HIV transmission occurs due to both illicit sexual activity and intravenous drug abuse. But prison…
-
Performance Enhancement – Athletes are Victims not Delinquents
As an elite sportsperson you’ve almost no opportunity to defend yourself against the prevailing key-players in the sports-industry system, especially in the case of doping. Otherwise you’re going to risk your career or even your status as a moral competitor. In the following lines, I’ll try to explain my position by disclosing the maladministration and…
-
Greeks and geeks
At Harvard Medical School someone is screaming, reports the Boston Globe. ‘Death!’, he shrieks, ‘Why after all these years have you not appeared?’ He begs for euthanasia, tormented by his pain. Medical students listen to him. His lines were written by Sophocles, and the students are listening because they have to: it is part of…
-
Between Life and Death…
A powerful BBC documentary, “Between Life and Death”, screened this evening on BBC One. The documentary (which can be viewed online for the next week in the UK) examined the life and death decisions made for critically ill patients with severe brain injury. Neuro-intensive care provides a way to interrupt the process of dying for…