David King warns that we should modify society, not childrens' brains. This is a response to a recent Radio 4 documentary on "the criminal mind", which discussed recent evidence for biological underpinnings of some forms of an…

Melbourne's Catholic Churches have decided to test potential priests for sexual orientation, banning those that appear to be gay. This is in accordance with the Vatican recommendation that even celibate gays should not be allowed in the…

Rubén Noé Coronado Jiménez is 25 and pregnant with twins. He is unusual in that he is a transsexual man, in the middle of hormone treatments and about to undergo a full operation to change his sex: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/3…

Most duties are concerned with or grounded in the significance of actions. By contrast, an epistemic duty is a duty whose grounding object is belief or knowledge rather than action. My concern here is with a certain epistemic duty had…

Over the weekend a nine-month old infant, baby ‘OT’, died following a court ruling that allowed doctors to remove life support. As discussed in a post last week, his parents had wanted treatment to continue, but the court ruled that the hos…

In a recent article in the Guardian entitled ‘Quantum Weirdness: What we call ‘reality’ is just a state of mind’, quantum physicist and winner of the 2009 Templeton prize Bernard d’Espagnat argues against the commonsense view, championed by…

Andy Miah calls the “surge in popular activism, broad democratic demands and institutional reforms” an “ethical turn”. I’m not at all convinced, particularly about the activism. Rather, and feeling most cynical, it seems that a particular m…

At a conference for headteachers child psychologist Dr Carol Craig (chief executive of the Centre for Confidence and Glasgow) warned that “young people were being encouraged to believe that the most important thing in life is whether they f…

In the High Court this week, parents of nine-month old infant OT are fighting a request by doctors to turn off the infant’s life support. The infant has been on a breathing machine since 3 weeks of age, and apparently has severe brain damag…

Ethics, medical practice and the law should ideally coincide. But as a current affair in Sweden shows, it is all too easy for them to collide. On March 2 police took a doctor into custody at the Astrid Lindgren Children's Hospital in fr…