by Roger Crisp
For some, the end-of-year holiday offers a little time for relaxation, and perhaps also some general reflection independent of the particular issues one has been thinking about over the year. I’d like to recommend starting with the concepts you use, both to frame ethical questions, and to answer them.Read More »Putting your Philosophical House in Order
Written by Julian Savulescu, Dominic Wilkinson, and Jonathan Pugh
As coronavirus infections surge across Europe, and with the threat of the omicron variant looming, countries are imposing increasingly stringent pandemic controls.
In Austria, citizens will be subject to a vaccine mandate in February. In Greece, meanwhile, a vaccine mandate will apply to those 60 and over, starting in mid-January.
Both mandates allow medical exemptions, and the Greek mandate allows exemptions for those who have recently recovered from COVID.
Other countries, including Germany, may soon follow suit, and the European Commission has raised the need to discuss an EU vaccine mandate. In contrast, the UK health secretary, Sajid Javid, has been clear that the UK will not consider a general mandatory vaccination policy.Read More »Cross Post: Why the UK Shouldn’t Introduce Mandatory COVID Vaccination
Written by: Alberto Giubilini, Julian Savulescu
*A version of this blogpost appears as an article in the Spectator*
Governments are at it again. It has become an involuntary reflex. A few days after South Africa sequenced and identified the new Omicron variant, England placed some South African countries back in the ‘red list’. Quarantine has been imposed on all incoming passengers until they show evidence of a negative test. Some European countries banned incoming flights from that region. Switzerland introduced quarantine for passengers arriving from the UK, but also banned all the unvaccinated passengers from the UK from entering the country. The domino effect we have seen so many times during this pandemic has kicked in again.
Is closing borders ethical? We don’t think so. At the beginning of the pandemic, border closures were, arguably, too little too late. Angela Merkel sealed off Germany’s borders in March 2020 less than a week after having declared that, in the name of solidarity, EU countries should not isolate themselves from one another, as the situation was out of control and extremely uncertain. The UK was also criticized for closing borders and locking down too late. In fact, countries that closed borders relatively early, such as Australia and New Zealand, fared better in terms of keeping the virus at bay.
However, we are at a very different stage of the pandemic now. The disease is endemic, vaccination has been introduced, and we have treatments available. Why do we think the same measures that might have been appropriate in March 2020 are the best response in this very different context?
Read More »Omicron Travel Restrictions Are Not Ethically Justified
Written by: Dominic Wilkinson, and Jonathan Pugh
These measures have tangible costs, and some have argued that they are an over-reaction. Critics of the travel ban claim that new measures will not significantly prevent the spread of the variant. Indeed, World Health Organization (WHO) officials have urged countries not to hastily impose travel curbs, instead advocating a risk analysis and science-based approach.Read More »Cross Post: Omicron: Better To Be Safe (And Quick) Than Sorry
Written by Neil Levy
I recently received an email from someone about a grant application in which I’m involved. In this email, the person coordinating the grant asked recipients to suggest revisions to the text, but noted that as it stood it had a score of 100% on Grammarly. He asked that any changes be made carefully, so that this score was retained.
Read More »Writing Is Not That Easy: Grammarly As Affordance.
St Cross Special Ethics Seminar, Presented by Dr Sarah Chan, 18 November 2021
In this St Cross Special Ethics Seminar, Dr Sarah Chan explores three key areas of risk in ‘challenge trials’ – the deliberate infection of human participants to infectious agents as a tool for vaccine development and improving our knowledge of disease biology. Dr Chan explores a) whether some forms of challenge trials cannot be ethically justified; b) why stratifying populations for vaccine allocation by risk profile can result in unjust risk distribution; and c) how comparing these cases and the evaluation of relative risk reveals flaws in approach to pandemic public health.
By Alberto Giubilini and Julian Savulescu
As resurgent Covid-19 spreads rapidly across Europe, in countries such as Austria and the Netherlands the authorities are re-imposing lockdowns. And in response thousands are marching – and rioting.
People are clearly fed up with losing their liberties. Indeed, more liberties may soon be taken away from people: in Austria, the authorities say they will make Covid vaccination mandatory for almost everyone from February 1. It’s also being reported that Germany may follow suit.
Should the UK do the same?
Read More »Mandatory Vaccination Should Be Selective, Not General
Written by: Jonathan Pugh, Dominic Wilkinson, and Julian Savulescu
Some countries already have vaccine passport schemes to travel or enter certain public spaces. The passports treat those who have had vaccines – or have evidence of recent infection – differently from those who have not had a vaccine. But the proposed selective lockdowns would radically increase the scope of restrictions for the unvaccinated.
Lockdowns can be ethically justified where they are necessary and proportionate to achieve an important public health benefit, even though they restrict individual freedoms. Whether selective lockdowns are justified, though, depends on what they are intended to achieve.Read More »Cross Post: Selective lockdowns can be ethically justifiable – here’s why
Alberto Giubilini
(This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article)
Read More »Cross post: Why COVID passes are not discriminatory (in the way you think they are)
By Charles Foster
This week I went to the launch of the latest book by Iain McGilchrist, currently best known for his account of the cultural effects of brain lateralisation, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. The new book, The Matter with Things: Our brains, our delusions, and the unmaking of the world is, whatever, you think of the argument, an extraordinary phenomenon. It is enormously long – over 600,000 words packed into two substantial volumes. To publish such a thing denotes colossal confidence: to write it denotes great ambition.
It was commissioned by mainstream publishers who took fright when they saw its size. There is eloquent irony in the rejection on the ground of its length and depth of a book whose main thesis is that reductionism is killing us. It was picked up by Perspectiva press. That was brave. But I’m predicting that Perspectiva’s nerve will be vindicated. It was suggested at the launch that the book might rival or outshine Kant or Hegel. That sounds hysterical. It is a huge claim, but this is a huge book, and the claim might just be right.
Nobody can doubt that we’re in a terrible mess. The planet is on fire; we’re racked with neuroses and governed by charlatans, and we have no idea what sort of creatures we are. We tend to intuit that we are significant animals, but have no language in which to articulate that significance, and the main output of the Academy is to scoff at the intuition.Read More »How we got into this mess, and the way out
