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I’m a taxpayer, I want my data!
A ruling by the Information Commissioner has ordered scientists at Queen’s University in Belfast to hand over copies of 40 years of research data on tree rings after a long battle with a climate sceptic. (PDF of the ruling) This is an important precedent for scientists, who have to comply with the strictest interpretation of…
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Upcoming Events in May 2010
25 May, 17:30, Lecture Theatre, Faculty of Philosophy, 10 Merton Street, Oxford 3rd Leverhulme Lecture "Are Addicts Responsible? Perspectives from Philosophy, Psychology, Neuroscience and Law" Professor Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (Kenan Institute for Ethics, Duke University) All interested in attending should email nicholas.iles@philosophy.ox.ac.uk
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The equal air-time solution for controversial research
When are placebos ethical in medical research? One common answer is that it is only appropriate to use placebos in research when there is no proven effective treatment for the condition (1). On this view, if there is a proven treatment placebos would be unethical, and any trial should compare new drugs or treatments with…
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Arguing about moral responsibility
Outside applied ethics and neuroethics, I work in philosophy of agency, specifically on the interlinked topics of free will and moral responsibility (interlinked because I, like most participants in the debate, understand free will, if it exists, to be the power we have to act in a way that makes us morally responsible for our…
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Volcano Ethics: Should we be Flying the Unfriendly Skies?
An ash cloud produced by the eruption of the Eyjafjallajoekull volcano in Iceland has led to the severe disruption of airline transportation in the UK and across a wide swathe of Europe, with UK airspace almost completely closed since midday last Thursday. Passengers, freight importers and exporters, and airlines are just some of those affected…
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Tuberculosis: the return of the white plague?
The last few weeks have seen an explosion of reports concerning the status of the worldwide fight against tuberculosis, largely precipitated by World TB Day last month on March 24. Tuberculosis was once considered a disease of the past, an illness, like diphtheria, thought to have faded away with the Victorian era as a serious…
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Holidays in Death Camps
The paradox of tragedy, one that has puzzled philosophers for over two millennia, is that people like to go to watch tragedies at the theatre – and tragedies are depressing. How can one enjoy being miserable? This weekend I went as a tourist around Sachsenhausen, a vast complex just outside Berlin. Sachsenhausen was one of…
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The real scandals in organ donation consent
Headlines in a number of newspapers in the last day or two have claimed scandalous failures in organ donation consent in the UK. According to ‘Sky News’, organs were “taken without consent”, while the Sun claims that “NHS doctors took the wrong organs from the bodies of donors”. But it is important to put these…
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The Christian Right is Wrong
An interesting document has just dropped into my in-box. It is a ‘Declaration of Christian Conscience’, to be found at www.westminster10.org.uk It is signed by a number of Christian leaders, all of them noted for their theological conservatism. Christians across the land are being urged to sign the declaration to demonstrate the demographic power of…
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Experience and self-experimentation in ethics
The Guardian has an article about student use of cognition enhancers. It is pretty similar to many others and I have already discussed my views on the academic use of cognition enhancers ad nauseam on this blog. However, it brings up something I have been thinking about since I was last in the media about…