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Counterfeit Placebos

Counterfeit Placebos

Last week it was reported that police in Bangladesh had made a major bust at a factory that was producing counterfeit homeopathic drugs. The counterfeiters were attaching the labels of other drug producers to the remedies they were producing in their own factory. Dhaka's Daily Star reported the bust with the rather ironic headline "Fake Medicine Factory Busted".

Of course, even homeopathic remedies need to be guaranteed safe if they are sold in stores, and counterfeiters are not bound by the same safety controls as other more reputable sources. There are also 'intellectual property' issues concerning the use of other company's labels and trademarks. So I am not here to tell you that this drug bust was unnecessary or ridiculous. In fact I want to challenge The Star's implicit suggestion that homeopathic remedies are by their nature counterfeit therapies.

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Is Low Libido a Brain Disorder?

by Julian Savulescu

Update: The same misunderstandings are still in evidence, 2 years on (May 2012), for example:  ‘Brain circuitry different for women with anorexia, obesity’

Having started to work in the field of neuroethics a couple of years ago, I have become staggered by the misunderstanding of what neuroscience can tell us. The best example is a recent BBC story which goes by the wonderful title “Libido problems: ‘brain not mind‘” .

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Anti Addict Mummy Money

A US group that pays drug addicts to undergo sterilisation visits the UK this week, having recently paid its first British client for undergoing a vasectomy. “Project Prevention” claims that its goal is to make addicts and alcoholics use long-term birth control until they can care for the children they conceive. Founder Barbara Harris has said: “We don’t allow dogs to breed. We spay them. We neuter them. We try to keep them from having unwanted puppies, and yet these women are literally having litters of children.”

The visit has provoked strong responses. Some have compared the group to eugenicists, while supporters point to the cost to the children and society of conception by addicted parents. Dominic Wilkinson has controversially suggested on this blog that a version of the programme could be offered on the National Health Service.

This ethical debate is on the level that Mackie (1977) identifies as first order. However, the issue also highlights second order moral issues about the nature of morality. What are we doing when we express a moral view and how do we know that our views are reliable? One approach to answering these sorts of questions is to understand human morality as an adaptation that contributed to our ancestors’ evolutionary fitness. Without addressing the strengths and weaknesses of such an approach here, if correct, it has the potential to illuminate second, and by implication first, order questions.

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Kidneys and the Ultimatum Game

Frequently in life there is some good available if you and I can agree on some split of that good between us. If we cannot agree the good never comes into existence. This fact can be modelled by what is called the ultimatum game. In the ultimatum game somebody offers us £100 to split between us just in case we agree on the split. The rule is that I propose and you dispose. If you accept we get the money split as agreed and if you reject it we both get nothing. Since you are better off whatever positive offer I make, it looks as if it is rational to accept even as little as £1.
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Is the Rescue of the Chilean Miners a Miracle?

A number of clerics of various Christian denominations are claiming that the recent rescue of 33 Chilean miners was a miracle and, therefore, evidence in favour of the particular version of Christianity that they respectively represent. How are we to decide if this, or any other event is a miracle? The first issue to be cleared up is what we mean when we speak of miracles. Some talk of miracle is not meant to be taken literally. When enthusiastic cricket commentators reported that ‘Warne dismissed Gatting with a miracle ball’ they meant nothing more than that they were extremely impressed by a particular instance of Warne’s bowling. No religious connotations were intended. Other talk of miracles does involve religious connotations, however. Miracles are typically invoked in religious contexts as reasons to believe that God exists.

 

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Is it legitimate to ask opponents of embryonic stem cell therapy whether they support IVF?

by Dominic Wilkinson

In the news this week is the first US officially-sanctioned human trial of embryonic stem cells. A patient with spinal cord injury has received an injection of embryo-derived stem cells.

Predictably, the news has not been received positively by those who are opposed to research with embryonic stem cells.

The development, however, was criticized by those with moral objections to research using the cells because days-old embryos are destroyed to obtain them.

"Geron is helping their stock price, not science and especially not patients," said David Prentice, senior fellow for life sciences at the Family Research Council.

The arguments in favour and against embryonic stem cells have been reviewed and rehearsed ad nauseam. I will not repeat them here.

 

But is it reasonable to ask or demand that those who are opposed to ES cells answer 'the question'. What are your views on IVF?

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Sam Harris, the Naturalistic Fallacy, and the Slipperiness of “Well-Being”

This post is about the main argument of Sam Harris’s new book The Moral Landscape. Harris argues that there are objective truths about what’s morally right and wrong, and that science can in principle determine what they are, all by itself. As I’ll try to demonstrate here, Harris’s argument cannot succeed. I call the argument “scientistic” because those who take (a variation of) its first two premises to be obvious are led to exaggerate the importance of scientific measurement for determining what’s morally right, and correspondingly to underestimate the importance of moral reasoning and moral philosophy.

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Individual privacy and the conduct of web users

From October the 12th to the 14th London will host the RSA conference, which gathers together information security experts from across the world to discuss the most pertinent emerging issues in information security.

The safeguarding of users’ privacy is one of the most important and frequently discussed issues in the field of information security, and is therefore a major topic of the RSA conference. In particular, BT's chief technology officer, Mr Schneier expressed his concern about how web companies deal with users’ privacy; he stressed the need for regulations and laws to create or encourage improved management of this issue (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11524041).

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Benefit cuts for large, workless families

The UK's culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, has suggested that the state should limit the provision of social security benefits to large, unemployed families. Hunt said last week that

The number of children that you have is a choice and what we're saying is that if people are living on benefits, then they make choices but they also have to have responsibility for those choices . . . It's not going to be the role of the state to finance those choices.

Two quite different arguments might be offered in support of such a move.

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