Skip to content

Ethical questions surrounding the BP Oil Spill

Ethical questions surrounding the BP Oil Spill

Largest oil spill in U.S. history continues to devastate
Gulf wildlife while the press and independent scientists are continually denied access to
spill site and surrounding beaches.

by Stephanie Malik

On April 20 a wellhead on the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling
platform blew out in the Gulf of Mexico approximately 40 miles southeast of the
Louisiana coastline. What BP had initially claimed would be a spill with
“minimal impact”, 69 days later now constitutes the largest offshore oil spill
in U.S. history. Today the well is conservatively estimated to be leaking at a
rate of 1,900,000–3,000,000 litres per day—though several expert estimates
based on footage of the spill suggest the actual rate is more likely to be 3 to
5 times higher than this. The unusually wide disparity in expert estimates is
due to the fact that BP has continually denied the requests of a number of independent
scientists to set up instruments on the ocean floor that could measure the rate
of the leak more accurately. “The answer is ‘no’ to that,” a BP spokesman, Tom
Mueller, said earlier this month. “We’re not going to take any extra efforts
now to calculate flow there at this point. It’s not relevant to the response
effort, and it might even detract from the response effort.”

Read More »Ethical questions surrounding the BP Oil Spill

Drugs in sport debate: Opposers response 2

[This is the last of the formal responses in the debate – both debaters will post closing comments at the end of the week. Don't forget to vote next week!]

by John William Devine

Frank Lampard’s ‘goal’ that never was in England’s World Cup defeat to Germany yesterday is an example of sport being held to ransom by tradition. The use of video technology – as used in elite level tennis and rugby – would have confirmed that his shot had crossed the line and England would have been awarded an equalising goal. FIFA continues to block the introduction of this technology on the grounds that human error in refereeing is part of the game. Does the prohibition against doping similarly stifle progress in sport?

Read More »Drugs in sport debate: Opposers response 2

Foetal pain and the abortion debate: believing what you want to believe

By Janet Radcliffe-Richards

Last Friday’s BBC morning news headlines included a report of two reviews by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of evidence about foetal pain. The reviews concluded that foetuses under 24 weeks could not feel pain, because “nerve connections in the cortex, the area which processes responses to pain in the brain, does not form properly before 24 weeks”, and that even after that stage “a foetus is naturally sedated and unconscious in the womb”.

The corresponding article on the BBC website added the comment that “anti-abortion campaigners challenged the reports”. There were no details about the form these challenges took or who they came from, but as the reports were reviews of scientific evidence, it sounds as though a challenge to the reports must have been a challenge to the scientific claims. Of course scientific claims are always potentially open to challenge, so if the article had reported that scientists had come forward to challenge the methodology of key studies, for instance, or the way the reviews represented the data, we would just have known there was an ongoing scientific debate on the subject. But the implication of the BBC article was that people who were against abortion were challenging the scientific claims about foetal pain. And if this is true, it is interesting. Why should people with particular moral views (about the wrongness of abortion) or political ambitions (to prevent it) issue challenges to scientific claims? Most of these people are not scientists, and there is no reason to think they have special knowledge of nerve connections in the foetal cortex. So why are the challenging what the scientists say?

Read More »Foetal pain and the abortion debate: believing what you want to believe

Drugs in sport debate: Proposer’s update 2

by Julian Savulescu

Illegal prostitution still occurs in countries where it has been decriminalised; illegal use of dangerous drugs still occurs in countries which have relaxed their bans on recreational drugs. But overall, such societies are better for their tolerance, their focus on harm reduction, compared to absolutist, prohibitionist societies. So, too, for doping.

Read More »Drugs in sport debate: Proposer’s update 2

A Universal Moral Code?

Might there be a universal moral code? When we look around, we everywhere find bitter and seemingly interminable moral disagreements about abortion, or euthanasia, or animal rights, or social justice, and many other issues, not to mention the vast gulfs that separate the moral outlooks of different cultures. The idea that there is a universal moral code can thus sound farfetched. Yet the Harvard psychologists Marc Hauser, and several other scientists, have recently claimed that, contrary to appearances, there really is a universal moral code, and that this scientific discovery should change the way we think about ethics (see here, and here for a longer piece by John Mikhail. Hauser’s views are spelled out at length in his book Moral Minds.). Is this really so?

Read More »A Universal Moral Code?

Choosing how to live: death row inmates and terminally ill patients

by Shlomit Harrosh

Convicted murderer Ronnie Lee Gardner was killed by gunfire on July 18, 2010. Given the choice between lethal injection and being shot, Gardner opted for the firing squad. This was the first firing squad execution in the state of Utah since 1996.

In the 37 states where the death penalty is in practice, lethal injection is the primary method of execution. Alternative methods are provided in 20 states, contingent upon the prisoner’s choice, the date of execution or sentence and the constitutional standing of the method used. In Virginia, for example, a convicted murderer can elect to be executed either by lethal injection or electrocution, while in Washington prisoners are executed by lethal injection unless they choose death by hanging.
Assuming that it is a good thing for prisoners to have some choice as to their method of execution, what does this tell us about the morality of voluntary euthanasia in terminally ill patients?

Read More »Choosing how to live: death row inmates and terminally ill patients

Sex and the minimally conscious state

An interesting case is reported in the most recent issue of the Hastings Center Report.  Mrs Z, is a 29 year-old woman who was released into her husband’s carefollowing a traumatic brain injury. She is in a minimally conscious state (MCI), a state of severely impaired consciousness. MCI cases cover a range of cognitive deficits; Mrs Z seems to be at the lower end of cognitive functioning. She is unable to speak and requires 24 hour care, provided by her husband (who is also the guardian of their 4 year-old twins).

Read More »Sex and the minimally conscious state

Goodbye to Josè Saramago, genius, novelist and (sometimes) a bioethicist

 

The very sad news of the day is the death
of Portuguese writer José Saramago. Saramago was a true genius and one of my
favourite authors ever, so I thought it could be a good idea  to show how this great man was able not
only to write books where every single sentence is so beautiful to take the breathe away, but also to stimulate interesting  thoughts about moral 
issues.

Novels and bioethics don’t usually mingle
but when I first read “Death with interruptions”
(published in 2005) I couldn’t help but think about the debate about
euthanasia.

Read More »Goodbye to Josè Saramago, genius, novelist and (sometimes) a bioethicist

How wrong may we be?

By Nicholas Shackel

Consider these propositions:

  1. Mandatory licensing of professional services increases the prices of those services.
  2. Overall, the standard of living is higher today than it was 30 years ago
  3. Rent control leads to housing shortages.
  4. Third World workers working for American companies overseas are not exploited.
  5. Free trade does not lead to unemployment
  6.  Minimum wage laws raise unemployment

Do you think they are true or false?

Read More »How wrong may we be?