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  • Imposter Syndrome And Environmental Sampling

    Written by Rebecca Brown Imposter syndrome has received recent, though still fairly limited, philosophical discussion. Scholars such as Katherine Hawley (and, drawing upon Hawley in a recent and excellent podcast, Rebecca Roache), amongst a handful of others have illuminated issues such as how we can develop a useful definition of imposter syndrome, the extent to…

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  • Is Life-Sustaining Treatment Being Lawfully Withdrawn From Patients In Prolonged Disorders Of Consciousness? Nobody Seems To Know

    By Charles Foster From the time of the decision of the House of Lords in Airedale NHS Trust v Bland (1993) until the decision of the Supreme Court in An NHS Trust v Y (2018) (which I will refer to here as ‘Y”) it had been understood that the withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment (typically clinically…

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  • Stowaway, Self-Defense, and the Sheriff Case

    Written by Hazem Zohny. You and your two fellow astronauts are on your way to Mars when you uncover a stowaway in your spaceship. His mere presence means there won’t be enough oxygen for anyone to survive the journey. You toss him out the spaceship, of course. But what if that stowaway is there by…

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  • Ambient Intelligence

    Written by Stephen Rainey An excitingly futuristic world of seamless interaction with computers! A cybernetic environment that delivers what I want, when I want it! Or: A world of built on vampiric databases, fed on myopic accounts of movements and preferences, loosely related to persons. Each is a possibility given ubiquitous ambient intelligence.

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  • Cross Post: Vaccine passports: why they are good for society

    Written by Barbara Jacquelyn Sahakian, University of Cambridge; Christelle Langley, University of Cambridge, and Julian Savulescu, University of Oxford   As more and more people get vaccinated, some governments are relying on “vaccine passports” as a way of reopening society. These passports are essentially certificates that show the holder has been immunised against COVID-19, which…

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  • A Juror’s Guide to Going Rogue

    Written by Doug McConnell A jury recently acquitted several activists charged with causing £25,000 worth of damage to Shell’s HQ in London despite the defendants admitting that they caused the damage and the judge informing the jury that the defendants had no legal defence. In other words, if the law were applied correctly, the jury…

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  • Crosspost: Immunity Passports: A Debate Between Jay Bhattacharya and Alberto Giubilini

    By Alberto Giubilini (University of Oxford) and Jay Bhattacharya (Stanford University)   crosspost with Lockdown Sceptics   [Prof Jay Bhattacharya (Professor of Medicine, Stanford University) and I collaborate on Collateral Global, a new project that aims to evaluate the impact of lockdowns and other pandemic restrictions. We have the same view on lockdown and pandemic…

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  • Lockdown Erodes Agency

    By Charles Foster A couple of lockdown conversations: The other day I met a friend in the street. We hadn’t seen one another for over a year. We mimed the hugs that we would have given in a saner age, and started to talk. ‘There’s nothing to tell you’, she said. ‘Nothing’s happened since we…

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  • Vaccine Nationalism: Striking the balance

    Written by Owen Schaefer and Julian Savulescu This is an updated cross-post of an article published in MediCine On 2 February 2021, the Director-General of the World Health Organization, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, issues a broadside against COVID-19 vaccine nationalism, calling it “morally indefensible” and “tantamount to medical malpractice at a global scale.” Rich countries…

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  • Cross Post: End-of-Life Care: People Should Have the Option of General Anaesthesia as They Die

    Written by Dominic Wilkinson and Julian Savulescu Dying patients who are in pain are usually given an analgesic, such as morphine, to ease their final hours and days. And if an analgesic isn’t enough, they can be given a sedative – something to make them more relaxed and less distressed at the end of life. We have…

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