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Should athletes be allowed to use performance enhancing drugs?

Should athletes be allowed to use performance enhancing drugs?

Press Release: British Medical Journal Head to Head: Should athletes be allowed to use performance enhancing drugs? Stories about illegal doping in sport are a regular occurrence. On bmj.com today, experts debate whether athletes should be allowed to use performance enhancing drugs. Professor of ethics Julian Savulescu, from the University of Oxford, argues that rather than… Read More »Should athletes be allowed to use performance enhancing drugs?

Things look really good…if all you care about is money

Are things really getting better? Well, the answer is a resounding ‘yes’ if you’re a monetary consequentialist (i.e., think all that matters is maximizing the amount of monetary resources in the world).  A group of 21 economists plus one Bjørn Lomborg have a new book coming out soon that will survey 10 pressing global problems such as health, air pollution and gender equality in the world from 1900 to 2050.  According to Lomborg’s précis, they have found that on most of the dimensions, things are improving (only biodiversity is identified as having gotten worse), and the positive trends are expected to largely continue.  This will come as some relief to those bemoaning recent political, environmental and humanitarian crises.  But don’t break out the champagne just yet – their analysis evidently relies on a crude GDP-centric measurement tool that obscures a number of crucial issues.  Read More »Things look really good…if all you care about is money

Can a person in a vegetative state get married?

By Luke Davies

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Recently in Illinois, a woman, Colette Purifoy, has been denied a marriage license because her fiancé, John Morris, who is in a vegetative state, cannot sign the marriage form and consent (Find the story here, here, here, and here). In 2009, just before the surgery during which his anoxic brain injury was inflicted (leaving him in his current, unresponsive condition), Morris proposed to Purifoy for a second time. She said ‘Yes’, also for the second time. The couple has been together for 38 years, but hasn’t been able to marry as a result of financial and family commitments.Read More »Can a person in a vegetative state get married?

Electroceuticals and Mind Control

“Electroceuticals”, or therapies utilising electricity, are nothing new and range from the widely accepted defibrillator/ pace makers to the more controversial electric shock therapies like ECT sometimes employed to treat severe depression.

But a recent article in Nature argues that these are just a small, crude sample of what electroceuticals may be able to offer in the future. Universities and pharmaceutical companies are researching a wide range of therapies based around electrical stimulation, promising benefits (in the long term) as diverse as mind-controlled prosthetic limbs to a treatment for anorexia. Transcranial Electric Stimulation (TES) is delivering some promising results in depression and treatment of learning disabilities.

Not only is the research potential there, but it appears that the funding is too. Nature report that GlaxoSmithKline are funding 40 researchers to pursue research in this area, amongst other initiatives to kick start electroceutical development. And earlier this year, the US invested $110 million from 2014’s budget for the “Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative”. At the same time, over in Europe, work has commenced on a 10 year, billion pound ‘Human Brain Project, bringing together 135 institutions to try to map parts of the human brain via computer simulations.

We may be starting out on the track for the “holy grail” of neuroscience: strategic control of single neuronal activity. This is, apparently, one of GSK’s goals.

With that level of control, we could finally reach the realms of science fiction: where the mind and therefore the person is under external control. Freedom might be annihilated.

We would face confronting questions over authenticity and identity. There would be alienation between the pre-existing person and their subsequent brain activity.

Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange is a graphic illustration of a common objection to enhancement, the erosion of freedom. TES at present does not appear to represent a major threat to freedom, but it is one of a family of technologies that could one day be used for effective mind control.

Read More »Electroceuticals and Mind Control

Abortion ‘on grounds of gender’: Like it or not, the DPP was right

There has been a recent storm over the DPP’s decision not to prosecute two doctors in relation to their referral of two women for abortion. The cases were widely represented as cases of abortion on grounds of gender. They came to light in the course of an undercover investigation by the Daily Telegraph of practice in English abortion clinics ( see also here and here).

The DPP has published detailed reasons for his decision. They are well worth reading.

An abortion is only lawful if two medical practitioners are of the opinion, held in good faith, that one of the lawful grounds for abortion is made out. One of the grounds (overwhelmingly the commonest, and the one said to be relevant in both of the cases considered by the DPP), is that ‘the pregnancy has not exceeded its 24th week and that the continuance of the pregnancy would involve risk, greater than if the pregnancy were terminated, of injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman or any existing children of her family.’: Abortion Act 1967, s. 1(1)(a).

The Act does not say anywhere that the gender of the fetus is a relevant criterion. But it plainly could be. Take two examples:Read More »Abortion ‘on grounds of gender’: Like it or not, the DPP was right

‘Trust Me, I’m a Doctor’: On the Unnecessity of Some Necessary Post-Mortems

Having a post-mortem (henceforth PM) carried out on a recently deceased loved one can be hugely distressing for those left behind. The procedure involves a detailed examination of the body after death, and requires what some would deem to be a violation of the deceased’s bodily integrity. For obvious reasons, the subject of the PM him or herself is not harmed by the procedure (unless, perhaps, they had previously expressed a wish not to undergo a PM). Rather, it seems that the harm that PMs do, if any, is most readily understood as being inflicted upon those of the friends and relatives of the deceased who are distressed by the idea of a pathologist examining their loved one, mere days after they have been confronted with the loss of that person. Here, I shall consider the ethics of certain legally required post mortems.Read More »‘Trust Me, I’m a Doctor’: On the Unnecessity of Some Necessary Post-Mortems

Announcement: “Brave New Love” in AJOB:Neuroscience – peer commentaries due October 7

Announcement: “Brave New Love” – peer commentaries due October 7 Dear Practical Ethics readers, The paper, “Brave new love: the threat of high-tech ‘conversion’ therapy and the bio-oppression of sexual minorities” by Brian D. Earp, Anders Sandberg, and Julian Savulescu has been accepted for publication in the American Journal of Bioethics: Neuroscience. Proposals for open peer commentaries are… Read More »Announcement: “Brave New Love” in AJOB:Neuroscience – peer commentaries due October 7

There are no significant facts about human beings

By Charles Foster

A few days ago, at dinner, I sat next to a well-known literary biographer. As you’d expect, we fell to talking about the biographer’s obligations, and as you’d also expect, she said that the biographer should be neither advocate nor prosecutor – indeed should strive to keep herself out of the book as much as possible, aiming for objectivity. I heard myself saying that, worthy though this aspiration may be, it was so obviously doomed to failure that it probably wasn’t worth trying. When I reviewed that conversation later, I squirmed. On re-reviewing it I think that the response was right. And here’s why.

There are no significant facts about individual human beings. Or, to wrap it up in philosophese, a human has no qualities which partake of factness sufficiently to make it sensible to treat those qualities in the same way that one would treat, say, the weight of a brick or the length of a stick. Yes, I have physical and chronological dimensions, but in themselves they don’t indicate anything very significant about me. If you told me your date of birth, I could say how long, according to the conventional metrics, you had been alive on the planet: but so what? Your cells age at a different rate from anyone elses, and neither of us knows with which juggernaut the mischievous universe has planned to flatten you, or when. ‘You are as young as you feel’, you will say, and who but you knows how you feel? No one at all thinks that significance lies in the mere accumulation of years, or the mere number of inches from the ground to the top of your head. Where does it lie, then? In the events that fill the years? They, or their corollaries, are the interesting parts of biographies. But what are the events? Yes, a few people have lives marked significantly by their association with undoubted facts: leave the undoubted fact of the double helix out of a biography of Crick or Watson and there would be a serious gap; but even Crick and Watson were infinitely more than their Eureka moment and its prologue and epilogue.Read More »There are no significant facts about human beings

A not-so-great escape: suicide in prison

Christian Brown is a newly qualified junior doctor with an interest in psychiatry and ethics. 

Early last month, Ariel Castro, convicted kidnapper, rapist, and murderer, used a bed sheet and a window-ledge to commit suicide in his prison cell. He was just four weeks into a life sentence. Recently on this blog, Rebecca Roache wrote a post about the possibility of enhancing prison sentences – today, I’d like to consider the right-to-die of inmates, and the role of medical professionals in their suicidal behaviour.

Inside the walls of our high security prisons, small numbers of prisoners face life-long sentences, deprived of all but the minimum of human contact, and confined for most of the day to their cells. Some people argue that it can be rational to commit suicide – for the purposes of this post, I’ll refer to suicidal acts which are voluntary, informed, and the individual shown to have mental capacity, as ‘rational suicide’. If one accepts this, it is hard to imagine a more subjectively powerful circumstance in which to kill oneself than at the outset of a life sentence. Indeed, suicide rates among prisoners are around six times higher than those of the general male population. Of course, a proportion of these cases will not meet the criteria for ‘rational suicide’, but let’s consider those that do.Read More »A not-so-great escape: suicide in prison