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/30/transexual-man-pregnant-twins . The operation has, of course, been postponed while he and his female partner await the birth… Read More »Contradicting Nature
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 by professionals and their professional organizations. Professionals present themselves in public as being in possession of special expertise and as taking on correlate special responsibilities. They require us to grant them special discretion on the promise of holding each other accountable through professional organizations, which organizations in turn present themselves in public as speaking for their profession.
The epistemic duty that concerns me here is the duty to speak the truth about the success and failure of the deployment of their particular profession’s expertise, and about the success and failure of the professional activities in which they are engaged and for which they are responsible. This a duty which professional organizations are reluctant to fulfil. Bluntly, their message to us is often “ we know a lot so shut up, do what we tell you, trust anybody we approve of and don’t hassle us about them: we’ll let you know if there’s a problem”. Too cynical for you?
Read More »Conspiracies against the laity and wishful thinking
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 hospital could withdraw the breathing machine that was keeping OT alive and allow him to die.
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 realist philosophers, that reality is objective and importantly independent of our thinking about it. ( See: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2009/mar/17/templeton-quantum-entanglement). Like many before him d’Espagnat appeals to some of the findings of quantum mechanics, which appear to defy commonsense, to support his case. In particular, he appeals to the phenomenon of quantum entanglement, under which particles that have interacted with one another remain importantly connected to one another even when far apart. D’Espagnat points out that this phenomenon has important consequences for our conception of space and time. Somehow he seems to think that it is also important for debates about realism in general and not just to debates about the nature of space and time, although he does not explain why this is the case. According to him:
This reality is something that, while not a purely mind-made construct as radical idealism would have it, can be but the picture our mind forces us to form of … Of what ? The only answer I am able to provide is that underlying this empirical reality is a mysterious, non-conceptualisable "ultimate reality", not embedded in space and (presumably) not in time either.
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 middle-class liberal conception of what is valuable and good has had a marketing success by managing to monopolise the term ‘ethical’.
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 feel happy”. She argued that the exaggerated focus on building pupils self-esteem left adults overly afraid of… Read More »What kind of happiness?
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 damage. This case has obvious echoes with the highly publicised case of Charlotte Wyatt, and the earlier case of baby MB. In both those instances courts ruled in the parents’ favour and life support was continued.
Read More »Life or no-life on the ventilator: the argument from parental freedom
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 front of her colleauges, suspected of killing an infant. The background is tragic: last year a three month pre-term infant suffered a stroke, causing serious brain damage. This was likely due to a medical mistake that was duly reported. Some months afterwards the dying infant was taken of ventilaton and died, with the consent of the parents. She was given high doses the painkiller morphine and anaesthetic thiopental to prevent suffering. Apparently the prosecutor investigating the initial medical mistake noticed these high levels and decided to investigate whether manslaughter had taken place. Much criticism has been aimed at the prosecutor for the heavy-handed use of the police and putting the doctor into arrest, especially since the events occured several months ago and it is very unlikely there is any danger of tampering with evidence. But it is more troubling that the doctors involved (at least given currently available information) were acting according to standard medical praxis. Are a sizeable fraction of the Swedish medical profession guilty of manslaughter?
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 doctors, pharmacists and other workers in this field refuse to provide services or to give information about contraception, blood transfusions, abortions, vaccinations and anything else that they may find morally repugnant.
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 BBC News and the Guardian among others). The researchers nevertheless issue a few caveats: in order for anger to be
beneficial, one ought to remain in control when expressing it and be able to
“positively channel” it. On the other hand, they advise against outright fury,
which they describe as “destructive”. There is indeed an important lesson contained in these statements; one might have wished, however, that the researchers had been a little more specific in the provisos they add to their main idea.
