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Ethicists unite: you have nothing to lose but your non-citation

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. If they think we are important, treat us with respect. Otherwise, get lost.’

Lots of people liked this. So do I. Ethicists have for too long been the invisible but essential backroom boys and girls of biomedicine; patronised by the practitioners of ‘hard’ science; seen as unimaginative but powerful bureaucrats who have to be kept sweet; as despised social scientists who wield rubber stamps made essential by other zeitgeist-dictating social scientists who want to keep their woolly-headed chums in a job; as factotums who don’t deserve to have their names on the papers any more than the temp who does the photocopying. Why is this? 

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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 this month. He is one of several authors who find it worth telling us that they wouldn’t want to live forever, even if they could. At times his article appears to aim merely at being entertaining and polemical, yet his central idea has been put forward by respected philosophers such as Bernard Williams, in his famous essay The Markopulos case: reflections on the tedium of immortality. In short, the idea is that living forever would just be atrociously boring.

 

Should we draw normative conclusions from such pieces about the development and use of life extension technologies, regarding them as superfluous or even downright undesirable? I want to argue for a negative answer to that question.

 

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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 therapy—which aims to restore human capacities to what is healthy or
normal, but not to raise them above this level—is desirable; enhancement is at
best unnecessary [1], and at worst unethical [2].  Human enhancement, one might be tempted to
think, is for oddballs only: the average person is content merely to be
healthy.

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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 persuaded by his arguments that these harms arise. 

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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 of religion x is z, which is not sufficient to warrant acceptance of x; therefore w is unwarranted in accepting x. For example w may think that she/he has a sound argument for the claim that God probably exists and is motivated to believe in God in virtue of accepting this sound argument. But Pascal Boyer and others tell us that humans are predisposed to believe in the existence of supernatural beings (minimally counterintuitive agents) and are inclined to do so, on the basis of less evidence than they would ordinarily accept to warrant belief in an agent, therefore w is unwarranted in believing that God exists. 

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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 of the story a correction.
They found that subjects who received false information followed by a
correction actually believed the false information more than those who received
no correction. Given that we want people to be able to make informed decisions
when they vote, this study is bad news. It suggests that people tend to believe
what they want to believe, without much regard to the facts. The effect was
greatest on those most partisan: those who wanted to believe that WMDs were
found were left with a stronger belief than ever.

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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 authorities have often resisted putting in place public health measures such as condom or needle distribution that have been shown to be effective, because they regard sexual activity and drug use as prohibited in their prisons, and do not want to to be seen as condoning these activities. Is this concern a reasonable one?

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Performance Enhancement – Athletes are Victims not Delinquents

To describe the obvious power dynamic in modern sports industry from my personal point of view, I’m going to make use of a little metaphor. Therefore you have to imagine sport as a squash game played by several opponents. The competitors, hitting the ball from one corner into the other, represent the different stakeholders in elite-sports. Spectators, coaches, sponsors, national and international associations to mention a few. Of course there’s also one tiny ball incarnating the athlete himself as a kind of focal point, trying to satisfy the different demands. As a ball you’re certainly one of the most important parts of the game. But simultaneously you might be very easy to manoeuvre, because your being spherical, which could imply your lack of personal influence. Merely your ability to leave behind a little black marking on the squash court “wall of fame” is your only chance to colour your sport individually. As an elite sportsperson you’ve almost no opportunity to defend yourself against the prevailing key-players in the system. 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 mild coercion top-athletes are confronted with, emphasising four different issues of the “sports-system”.

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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 their curriculum.

The remarkable thing is not that Harvard medical students are being marinated in Sophocles, but that the Globe thought it worth reporting. Most medical students in mainstream western universities will get some ethics teaching. Sophocles is just one tool in the teachers’ toolkit. It’s a very effective one, by all accounts, but no different in kind from the lectures and seminars more conventionally deployed. Ethics teaching aims to teach students some problem-solving strategies, and to help them to recognise, evaluate, criticise, cull or cultivate the values that they themselves bring to the wards. 

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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 such patients. But it raises difficult questions for medical staff and for families about the wishes of patients, the wishes of family members, and about uncertainty. Should treatment continue at the risk of the patient surviving in a severely impaired state? Or should patients be allowed to die, with the risk that perhaps if treatment had continued they may have recovered?

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