Skip to content

Contradicting Nature

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…

Read More

Conspiracies against the laity and wishful thinking

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…

Read More

Overruling parents and allowing infants to die

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…

Read More

Is Reality Just a State of Mind?

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…

Read More

The Abuse of ‘Ethical’

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…

Read More

What kind of happiness?

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…

Read More

Life or no-life on the ventilator: the argument from parental freedom

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…

Read More

Bad doctor, bad prosecutor or bad laws?

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…

Read More

The weight of conscience

  President Obama is about to rescind the “conscience rule” the previous president G. W. Bush had instituted. This clause allows health care workers to refuse to do anything that might conflict with their conscience. This means that d…

Read More

Just lose it?

A recent study by researchers from the Harvard Medical School concludes that getting angry at work, contrary to common opinion, may not be a bad thing, but may actually be beneficial to your career and your overall happiness (as reported by…

Read More
1 235 236 237 238 239 263