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Homelessness as a moral cost to the housed
Written by Neil Levy Homelessness is, of course, above all a cost to the homeless: it’s a dangerous, difficult, insecure way to live. There are therefore strong moral reasons to address it, for the sake of the homeless. There are also (non-moral) reasons to address it, centring on its costs to everyone, homeless and housed…
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COVID: Media Must Rise Above Pitting Scientists Against Each other – Dealing With the Pandemic Requires Nuance
Krakenimages/Shutterstock Trish Greenhalgh, University of Oxford and Dominic Wilkinson, University of Oxford At the start of the pandemic, there was a striking sense of shared resolve and solidarity. Facing a public health crisis greater than any in living memory, people were largely united in their support of difficult measures to protect the vulnerable, safeguard the…
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Might Going to Space Morally Enhance Billionaires?
By Hazem Zohny. Billionaire Richard Branson blasted off to the edge of space this month on his Virgin Galactic rocket plane, and Jeff Bezoz just followed suit in his own Blue Origin rocket ship – Elon Musk may well venture into space as well. The billionaire space race is certainly on, and while there…
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What If Stones Have Souls?
By Charles Foster Over the 40,000 years or so of the history of behaviourally modern humans, the overwhelming majority of generations have been, so far as we can see, animist. They have, that is, believed that all or most things, human and otherwise, have some sort of soul. We can argue about the meaning of…
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COVID: Why We Should Stop Testing in Schools
Dominic Wilkinson, University of Oxford; Jonathan Pugh, University of Oxford, and Julian Savulescu, University of Oxford Education Secretary Gavin Williamson has announced the end of school “bubbles” in England from July 19, following the news that 375,000 children did not attend school for COVID-related reasons in June. Under the current system, if a schoolchild becomes…
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Is a Publication Boycott of Chinese Science a Justifiable Response to Human Rights Violations Perpetrated by Chinese Doctors and Scientists?
By Doug McConnell Recently the editor-in-chief of the Annals of Human Genetics, Prof David Curtis, resigned from his position, in part, because the journal’s publisher, Wiley, refused to publish a letter he co-authored with Thomas Schulze, Yves Moreau, and Thomas Wenzel. In that letter, they argue in favour of a boycott on Chinese medical and…
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Compromising On the Right Not to Know?
Written by Ben Davies Personal autonomy is the guiding light of contemporary clinical and research practice, at least in the UK. Whether someone is a potential participant in a research trial, or a patient being treated by a medical professional, the gold standard, violated only in extremis, is that they should decide for themselves whether…
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Urgency, Delayed Decision-making and Ethics in the Court of Protection
By Dominic Wilkinson, 24th June 2021 cross post from the Open Justice Court of Protection Project On 11th June 2021, I was a public observer (via MS Teams) of a case in the Court of Protection: Case No. 1375980T Re GU (also blogged about by Jenny Kitzinger here). The case was (though I did not know it…
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Cancelling Books
Written by Neil Levy One of the latest flare ups in the culture wars concerns book publishing. Recent books by Mike Pence, Woody Allen and by Milo Yiannopoulos have all been met with protests, many of them stemming from staff within the publishing houses. Sometimes, these protests have been successful, at least to the extent…
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Mandatory Vaccination for Care Workers: Pro and Con
By Dominic Wilkinson and Julian Savulescu An edited version of this was published in The Conversation The UK government is set to announce that COVID-19 vaccination will become mandatory for staff in older adult care homes. Staff will be given 16 weeks to undergo vaccination; if they do not, they will face redeployment from frontline services…