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Philosophical Fiddling While the World Burns

Philosophical Fiddling While the World Burns

By Charles Foster

An unprecedented editorial has just appeared in many health journals across the world. It relates to climate change.

The authors say that they are ‘united in recognising that only fundamental and equitable changes to societies will reverse our current trajectory.’

Climate change, they agree, is the major threat to public health. Here is an excerpt: there will be nothing surprising here:

‘The risks to health of increases above 1.5°C are now well established. Indeed, no temperature rise is “safe.” In the past 20 years, heat related mortality among people aged over 65 has increased by more than 50%.Hi gher temperatures have brought increased dehydration and renal function loss, dermatological malignancies, tropical infections, adverse mental health outcomes, pregnancy complications, allergies, and cardiovascular and pulmonary morbidity and mortality. Harms disproportionately affect the most vulnerable, including children, older populations, ethnic minorities, poorer communities, and those with underlying health problems.’Read More »Philosophical Fiddling While the World Burns

We Should Vaccinate Children in High-income Countries Against COVID-19, Too

Written by Lisa Forsberg, Anthony Skelton, Isra Black

In early September, children in England, Wales and Northern Ireland are set to return to school. (Scottish schoolchildren have already returned.) Most will not be vaccinated, and there will be few, if any, measures in place protecting them from COVID-19 infection. The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) have belatedly changed their minds about vaccinating 16- and 17-year olds against COVID-19, but they still oppose recommending vaccination for 12-15 year olds. This is despite considerable criticism from public health experts (here, here, and here), and despite the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) declaring COVID-19 vaccines safe and effective for children aged 12 and up—Pfizer/BioNTech in the beginning of June, and Moderna the other week.

In Sweden, children returned to school in the middle of August. As in the UK, children under 16 will be unvaccinated, and there will be few or no protective measures, such as improved ventilation, systematic testing, isolation of confirmed cases, and masking. Like the JCVI in the UK, Sweden’s Folkhälsomyndigheten opposes vaccination against COVID-19 for the under-16s, despite Sweden’s medical regulatory authority, Läkemedelsverket, having approved the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines for children from the age of 12. The European Medicines Agency approved Pfizer and Moderna in May and July respectively, declaring that any risks of vaccine side-effects are outweighed by the benefits for this age group.

Read More »We Should Vaccinate Children in High-income Countries Against COVID-19, Too

Judgebot.exe Has Encountered a Problem and Can No Longer Serve

Written by Stephen Rainey

Artificial intelligence (AI) is anticipated by many as having the potential to revolutionise traditional fields of knowledge and expertise. In some quarters, this has led to fears about the future of work, with machines muscling in on otherwise human work. Elon Musk is rattling cages again in this context with his imaginary ‘Teslabot’. Reports on the future of work have included these replacement fears for administrative jobs, service and care roles, manufacturing, medical imaging, and the law.

In the context of legal decision-making, a job well done includes reference to prior cases as well as statute. This is, in part, to ensure continuity and consistency in legal decision-making. The more that relevant cases can be drawn upon in any instance of legal decision-making, the better the possibility of good decision-making. But given the volume of legal documentation and the passage of time, there may be too much for legal practitioners to fully comprehend.

Read More »Judgebot.exe Has Encountered a Problem and Can No Longer Serve

In Praise of ‘Casual’ Friendship

By Ben Davies

Academics, especially early in our careers, move around quite a lot. Having done my PhD in London, I have also lived or worked in Leeds, Liverpool, Oxford, and rural Pennsylvania; I am far from the most well-travelled academic I know. In many cases, when we arrive at a new job, we know that it is likely to only last a short period, perhaps less than a year.

This blog post isn’t about how hard it is to be an academic (though there are plenty of real problems that arise from the precarity in which many early career researchers find themselves). Instead, I want to consider something which all this moving around necessitates: casual friendship.

Read More »In Praise of ‘Casual’ Friendship

Healthcare, Responsibility, and Golden Opportunities

Written by Gabriel De Marco

This blog post is based on a co-authored paper (w. Tom Douglas and Julian Savulescu) recently published in Ethical Theory and Moral Practice.

 

When it comes to determining how healthcare resources should be allocated, there are many factors that could—and perhaps should—be taken into account. One such factor is a patient’s responsibility for his or her illness, or for the behavior that caused it; e.g. whether a lifetime smoker is responsible for developing his lung cancer, or whether someone is responsible for heart disease on the basis of having an unhealthy diet. Policies that take responsibility for the unhealthy lifestyle or its outcomes into account—responsibility-sensitive policies, or RSPs, for short—have been a matter of debate for some time.

Read More »Healthcare, Responsibility, and Golden Opportunities

The end of the COVID-19 pandemic

 

Alberto Giubilini, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and WEH, University of Oxford

Erica Charters, Faculty of History and WEH, University of Oxford

 

 

A discussion on the end of the COVID-19 pandemic is overdue. We keep hearing that ‘we are in the middle of a pandemic’. However, it is not clear what it means to be in the middle of a pandemic if we don’t know what it means for a pandemic to end.  How can we know what the middle is if we don’t know what the end is?

We were given a clear date by the WHO for the start of the pandemic (11 March 2020). A few days earlier the WHO Director-General had for the first time used the term ‘epidemic’ to refer to COVID-19 outbreaks in some countries (5 March 2020). A disease is categorized as an epidemic when it spreads rapidly, with higher rates than normal, in a certain geographical area. A pandemic is an epidemic spreading over more than one continent. Thus, declaring epidemic and pandemic status is a decision based on epidemiological criteria.

By contrast, the end of an epidemic is not determined by epidemiological factors alone. Historically, epidemics end not with the end of the disease, but with the disease becoming endemic – that is, accepted and acceptable as part of normal life.

However, when and how a disease becomes normal or acceptable is primarily a social, cultural, political, and ethical phenomenon, rather than scientific or epidemiological.  It is a more subtle phenomenon – and less precise – than the start of the epidemic.  The end depends on how a society decides to respond to a pathogen that keeps circulating.  We might well find ourselves out of this pandemic without realising when and how it happened.

So, when will this pandemic end?

Read More »The end of the COVID-19 pandemic

Homelessness as a moral cost to the housed

Written by Neil Levy

Homelessness is, of course, above all a cost to the homeless:  it’s a dangerous, difficult, insecure way to live. There are therefore strong moral reasons to address it, for the sake of the homeless. There are also (non-moral) reasons to address it, centring on its costs to everyone, homeless and housed alike. It’s a financial cost to all of us, at least if it is true that it’s cheaper to give homeless people housing than to pay the costs associated with homelessness (policing, emergency care and shelters). Homelessness is an aesthetic cost and might bring with it associated litter, drunkenness (addiction is both a cause and a consequence of homelessness), and disorder. It decreases amenity for everyone. I want to suggest that homelessness is also a moral cost to the housed.Read More »Homelessness as a moral cost to the housed

COVID: Media Must Rise Above Pitting Scientists Against Each other – Dealing With the Pandemic Requires Nuance

Krakenimages/Shutterstock

Trish Greenhalgh, University of Oxford and Dominic Wilkinson, University of Oxford

At the start of the pandemic, there was a striking sense of shared resolve and solidarity. Facing a public health crisis greater than any in living memory, people were largely united in their support of difficult measures to protect the vulnerable, safeguard the health system and sustain key workers.

There were, of course, differences of opinion. For example, some disagreed about the severity of the threat posed by COVID, about the wisdom of different national approaches to lockdown, about the timing of restrictions, and the effectiveness face masks.

More recently, there has also been disagreement on how vaccines should be distributed, whether vaccine passports are a good idea, and whether vaccination should be mandatory for certain occupations)

Throughout the pandemic, scientists attempting to explain their findings have had to deal with unprecedented levels of dissent, anger and abuse from the lay public and occasionally from other scientists.

Since the government lifted COVID restrictions on July 19, views on how best to handle the pandemic have become more polarised than ever, broadly splitting into two camps: the “open up” camp and the “not yet” camp.Read More »COVID: Media Must Rise Above Pitting Scientists Against Each other – Dealing With the Pandemic Requires Nuance

Might Going to Space Morally Enhance Billionaires?

By Hazem Zohny.

 

Billionaire Richard Branson blasted off to the edge of space this month on his Virgin Galactic rocket plane, and Jeff Bezoz just followed suit in his own Blue Origin rocket ship – Elon Musk may well venture into space as well.

The billionaire space race is certainly on, and while there are at least half a dozen ways to scoff at it, it’s interesting to wonder what the impact on billionaires’ moral outlook might be once they go to space and look back at the planet. Might they experience the overview effect?

Read More »Might Going to Space Morally Enhance Billionaires?