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How to Prescribe Smart Drugs to Children Ethically

How to Prescribe Smart Drugs to Children Ethically

Ilina Singh and colleagues argue that the use of drugs such as Ritalin among young people is becoming so common that family doctors should be able to prescribe them as study aids to school pupils aged under 18.(1)

While the Guardian article rather cherry-picks from the range of Singh’s arguments in her original article, I have made broadly similar arguments to those in the Guardian article supporting cognitive enhancement myself (see here for a selection on enhancement).

However, one might ask whether the prescription of enhancement for young children who are incapable of consenting for themselves raises unique issues. 

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George and the British election

Politics is the art of compromise, but rarely has compromise been so necessary a political virtue in Britain as it is today.

Very soon we’ll know who’s done a deal with whom. The Liberal Democrats are the king-makers: ultimately they’ll decide whether to prop up a Tory or a Labour-led government. Let us be exceptionally generous and take the politicians at their word: let’s assume that what’s currently weighing on their minds is not personal interest, or party interest, but national interest. They may disagree about what constitutes the national interest, and how it is best achieved, but they agree that it’s what really matters.

Political and moral theory has a lot to say about compromise. And one character it’s worth remembering is George. 

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Organ Donation Euthanasia

by Dominic Wilkinson and Julian Savulescu

There are 8000 patients on transplant waiting lists in the UK. Every year 400 patients die while waiting for an organ to come available.
We are all far more likely to be in need of an organ transplant than to be a donor. Most of us expect that if we needed a transplant that someone would donate one. On the basis of the ethical golden rule – do unto others as you would want them to do for you, we should all think seriously about whether and how we could donate our organs if we no longer need them.

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Lord Justice Nero?

There is
a shrill, unpleasant new sound in the UK church. It is the sound of
conservative Christians saying that they are persecuted. It’s the voice of a
minority. And as Rowan Williams trenchantly observed: ‘The Church of England is
like a swimming pool: all the noise comes from the shallow end.’ The claim of
persecution is an insult to the vast numbers of Christians in the world who really
are persecuted. Please read the Bible and the history books before going on
prime time TV to say that you’re persecuted. 

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Is it wrong to vote tactically?

Tomorrow will see the closest election in the UK for many years and there is considerable debate about whether tactical voting is acceptable (see here, here, here). This is a particularly big issue this election as the Liberal Democrats (the UK's third largest party) have had a significant rise in popularity and the vote looks to be split fairly evenly among the three parties. A three-party race causes significant problems for the 'first past the post' voting system used in the UK and the US, as it means that a party can win a seat even if 60% or 70% of the people in the seat think that it is the worst option. For example, suppose that a seat has the vote split as follows:

40% — Conservatives

38% – Liberal Democrats 

22% – Labour

The Conservatives would win this seat even if they were the third choice of all the Liberal Democrat and Labour voters. In such a case, the Labour supporters might realise that they have relatively little chance of winning and that they can avoid a worst-case scenario by voting Liberal Democrat. Voting for a party that is not your preferred party is known as tactical voting and is quite contentious.

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The privacy of the shrew

Is it wrong for documentary film makers to film intimate moments in the lives of non-human animals? David Attenborough has used fibroptic cameras to obtain views of the inside of a platypus’ nest, providing never-before-seen images of the birth and feeding of a newborn platypus. But imagine that he had used similar technology to obtain pictures from a human home birth, or to take pictures of copulating couples in their homes? Brett Mills, a lecturer in television studies at the University of East Anglia has controversially suggested that animals may have a right to privacy that is breached by filming them without their consent.

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Response to Embrace the controversy: let’s offer Project Prevention on the NHS

Dominic is right thataddicts are competent to decide on sponsored sterilisation. I have argued that addicts can be autonomous and can consent to research trials involving drugs of addiction (Foddy, B., Savulescu, J.. (2006). ‘Addiction and Autonomy: Can Addicted People Consent to the Prescription of Their Drug of Addiction?’ Bioethics. 20 (1): 1-15 (Feb). DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8519.2006.00470.x). I have also argued that paying people large amounts of money to participate in risky experiments does not coerce them or unreasonably induce them (Savulescu, J. (2001) ‘Taking the Plunge’. New Scientist; 169:50) and elsewhere that it is reasonable to offer people money for their organs – the only real ethical issue being to settle on a fair minimum price.

So there is nothing intrinsically wrong with offering addicts money to be sterilised. The only issue is – why stop at addicts? The principle behind this would seem to be that addicts are unfit to parent. But what about paedophiles, the mentally ill, or intellectually disabled? It is hard to see how the principle would not extend to a form of passive eugenics, like what the Nazis imposed in more extreme forms.

The obvious way to avoid this is to offer the inducement to everyone. This has the lovely consequence that those who don’t really want to or value parenting would take the money. And they are not likely to be any more model parents that addicts are.

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For Sale: Body Parts?

The Nuffield Council on Bioethics has recently published a consultation paper entitled Give and Take? Human Bodies in Medicine and Research: https://consultation.nuffieldbioethics.org/fileLibrary/pdf/Human_bodies_in_medicine_and_research_consultation_paper.pdf The paper seeks responses from individuals or groups on a wide range of issues relating to the use of human bodies or body parts in medical treatment and research. Section 6 is on… Read More »For Sale: Body Parts?

Oklahoma pro-life measures: preventing abortions and promoting sadism

Two abortion bills passed by the Oklahoma legislature made the headlines recently. The first of these bills requires a doctor to force a patient seeking for an abortion to first undergo an ultrasound and listen to a detailed description of the foetus while having the ultrasound monitor in front of her.  The second bill prevents women who gave birth to a handicapped child to sue the doctor who purposely refused to provide her information about the foetus defects, fearing that this information would induce the pregnant woman to terminate the pregnancy.

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Embrace the controversy: let’s offer Project Prevention on the NHS

A controversial US-based charity that pays drug addicts to undergo sterilisation or long-term contraception has recently opened for business in the UK. Project Prevention pays drug users $300 if they provide a medical certificate of drug dependency and another certifying that they have had tubal ligation, vasectomy or a contraceptive implant. The founder of the charity points to the significant physical and psychological problems in children born to drug-using parents. Noone would deny that it would be good to avoid these problems. Drug counselling often includes advice about contraception, and encouragement of those who are interested to take up options including long term contraception or sterilisation – we don’t think that that is a particular problem. So what is wrong with Project Prevention?

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