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The Tragedy of Moral Mistakes

The Tragedy of Moral Mistakes

A tragic case was recently reported of a man who died following botched care via the NHS’ telephone helpline. Suffering from blood poisoning, a series of errors, mis-recording and failure to listen meant that he was told simply to take the remedy ‘Gaviscon’. He died shortly afterwards.  This was rightly widely reported in the press as a major failing of the health system. Many such catastrophic errors in medicine are reported in the press, and wherever possible safeguards put in place to prevent their re-occurrence.

However, we seem to accept deaths that occur not through medical mistakes but through what I will call moral mistakes. For example, each day 3 people die on the waiting list to receive organ transplants. Many of those could be saved if all those eligible and consenting to give organs did so. But instead, organs are withheld even when those who have opted in to organ donation die, because their families decide against it. Others are withheld because we have failed to introduce an opt out system of consent, meaning that those who simply never got around to signing up are excluded from bringing life to another person.

This is just one example of how mistakes in medical ethics can kill people. There are many more.

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Can we Have an Interest Theory of Rights for Animals, and a Will Theory for Humans?

By Luke Davies

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A recent article in the New York Times has advocated extending the notion of personhood, and the rights associated with that status, to dogs. Gregory Burns, the author of the article, argued for this position on the basis of the structural and functional similarity between the caudate nucleus of dogs and humans. The caudate nucleus, Burns tells us, is that part of the brain responsible for our feeling of anticipation of things we enjoy. More than this, the activity of the caudate nucleus is so consistent in MRI scans that he claims we may be able to use our monitoring of its activity to predict our tastes for certain things (he lists music, food and beauty). Importantly for Burns, activity in the caudate increased in dogs in response to positive stimulus: a gesture signaling food, or the appearance of the owner. The tentative conclusion to these findings is that the MRI images signal the possibility of canine emotion. Burns makes clear that without the capacity to communicate with us, which dogs certainly do not possess, the findings are still quite limited.  However, he views the existence of emotion as sufficient for personhood, and personhood as sufficient for being a possessor of rights. This leads him to conclude that dogs should be recognized as having the rights persons have.

 

Though there is good reason to doubt the argumentative moves Burns makes in his short article, that’s not what I’d like to do here. (A Letter to the Editor sent to the NTY regarding the article warns, for example, against assuming that complex emotional states–such as love, which Burns mentions–can be reduced to physical states. This alone should give us pause before asserting any larger similarities between human and canine consciousness.)  Rather, I would pose a question that came to me after reading the article: Is it possible that the rights animals possess have a different function the rights humans possess? Read More »Can we Have an Interest Theory of Rights for Animals, and a Will Theory for Humans?

Winchester Lectures: Kamm’s Trolleyology and Is There a Morally Relevant Difference Between Killing and Letting Die?

The Winchester Visiting Lecturerships were established in 1995 for the purpose of inviting visiting lecturers in the fields of International Relations, History, Philosophy, Religion, Theology or Law. We are grateful to the committee for this opportunity to bring Professor Frances Kamm to Oxford for this series of two lectures October 21 – 22, 2013.  

Over the series, Frances Kamm considered a kaleidoscope of cases in which one innocent person must be killed to prevent 5 innocent people being killed. She argued in some situations, killing one is permissible to prevent 5 other people being killed, yet in other cases it is impermissible to kill one to save 5. Or so go her intuitions. She points to what she finds are morally relevant considerations that distinguish permissible from impermissible killing.

The most straight forward case of impermissible killing, and the one in which she and many others have a clear intuitions, is Transplant.

In Transplant, a doctor contemplates killing one innocent person and harvesting his/her organs to save 5 people with organ failure. This is John Harris’ survival lottery.

But this is a dirty example. Transplant imports many intutions. For example, that doctors should not kill their patients, that those with organ failure are old while the healthy donor is young, that those with organ failure are somehow responsible for their illness, that this will lead to a slippery slope of more widespread killings, that this will induce widespread terror at the prospect of being chosen, etc, etc

A better version of Transplant is Epidemic.

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Thorpe Park’s ‘Asylum’ maze is unrealistic. Does this make it more or less inappropriate?

There has been much discussion this week about whether Thorpe Park’s ‘Asylum’ maze perpetuates the stigma that sometimes surrounds mental illness. The live action horror maze is an attraction that has opened for Halloween for the last eight years. Replete with special effects, its interior is set up to look like the intermittently-lit corridors of a dilapidated hospital. As the maze-goers try to find their way through the corridors, actors dressed as ‘patients’ jump out, scare and chase them until they find the exit. You can get a sense of the maze here.

Polls have been set up to gauge the public response to the maze and petitions started in an attempt to get Thorpe Park to close it down. Having set up a poll on Twitter, Paul Jenkins, the chief executive officer of the charity Rethink Mental Illness has been quoted as saying ‘While of course there’s nothing wrong with a bit of Halloween fun, explicit references to ‘patients’ crosses a line and reinforces damaging stereotypes about mental illness.’Read More »Thorpe Park’s ‘Asylum’ maze is unrealistic. Does this make it more or less inappropriate?

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?