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Dementia and the Social Scaffold of Memory

Dementia and the Social Scaffold of Memory

By Jonathan Pugh

 

The number of individuals suffering with dementia is steadily increasing; as such, the moral issues raised by the neurodegenerative diseases that bring about the symptoms typifying dementia are of pressing practical concern. In this context, Richard Holton’s topic for the first of his three 2018 Uehiro lectures (on the theme “Illness and the Social Self”) is a timely one: What are the ethical implications of the progressive and pervasive loss of memory that is a central feature of dementia?

I shall be blogging a synopsis of each lecture in the series on the Practical Ethics blog – You can find a recording of the lecture here

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Why It’s Important to Test Drugs on Pregnant Women

By Mackenzie Graham

Crosspost from The Conversation. Click here to read the full article.

The development of accessible treatment options for pregnant women is a significant public health issue. Yet, very few medications are approved for use during pregnancy. Most drug labels have little data to inform prescribing decisions. This means that most medicines taken during pregnancy are used without data to guide safe and effective dosing.

The United States Food and Drug Administration recently published draft ethical guidelines for how and when to include pregnant women in drug development clinical trials. These guidelines call for “the judicious inclusion of pregnant women in clinical trials and careful attention to potential foetal risk”. The guidelines also distinguish between risks that are related to the research and those that are not, and the appropriate level of risk to which a foetus might be exposed.Read More »Why It’s Important to Test Drugs on Pregnant Women

Announcement: Vacancy Research Fellow in Applied Moral Philosophy

Applications are invited for a full-time Research Fellow position (Grade 7: £31,604 – £38,883 p.a.) to conduct research in philosophy and applied ethics for the research project: Neurointerventions in Crime Prevention: An Ethical Analysis, which is hosted by the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics within the Faculty of Philosophy. This post is fixed-term for… Read More »Announcement: Vacancy Research Fellow in Applied Moral Philosophy

I Feel Pretty – Your Practical Ethics Movie Review

By Neil Levy

Last week, I found myself seeing a film I hadn’t planned to. The film I wanted to see (The Death of Stalin) was sold out, so rather than miss my weekly fix, I picked the Amy Schumer comedy I Feel Pretty. I don’t mind a chick flick and I enjoyed Trainwreck, but the reviews of I Feel Pretty were pretty bad, so I was going to give it a miss. Actually, I Feel Pretty was a better film than the reviews suggested (it was in fact better than the much better reviewed film The Party, which I saw the previous week). It was quite funny, after a slow beginning, and that’s about all one can reasonably ask from these entertainments. From an ethical perspective, however, it is rather troubling.Read More »I Feel Pretty – Your Practical Ethics Movie Review

Doing Good and Being Bad: The Presidents Club, Charity and Moral Licensing.

Last January, an article in the Financial Times broke a story about a men-only charity event run by the Presidents Club, a charitable trust set up to raise money for “worthy children’s causes.” Allegations were made by undercover journalists who attended the black tie event as ‘hostesses,’ 130 of whom were hired to attend the event where they were required to wear a uniform of short tight black dresses, “sexy” black high heels and matching black underwear in order to “keep [the attendees] happy – and fetch drinks when required.” According to the FT, the selection criteria for women to work at the event were that they be “tall, thin and pretty”. Women interviewed by the FT described being repeatedly groped, propositioned for sex, and instructed to “down that glass, rip off your knickers and dance on that table.” The Presidents Club has closed as a result of the negative attention following the article, and many prominent figures in business, entertainment and politics have been publicly named as attending the dinner, and required to defend their involvement.

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Video Series: Tom Douglas Defends the Chemical Castration of Sex Offenders

The Minister of Justice in the UK wants to dramatically increase the use of chemical castration in sex offenders to reduce their risk of reoffending.Dr Tom Douglas (University of Oxford) argues that offering chemical castration to sex offenders might be a better option than current practices to prevent sex offenders from reoffending (e.g. incarceration), and… Read More »Video Series: Tom Douglas Defends the Chemical Castration of Sex Offenders

Should Iceland Ban Circumcision? A Legal and Ethical Analysis

By Lauren Notini and Brian D. Earp

*Note: a condensed version of this article titled “Iceland’s Proposed Circumcision Ban” is being cross-published at Pursuit.

 

For a small country, Iceland has had a big impact on global media coverage recently, following its proposed ban on male circumcision before an age of consent.

Iceland’s proposed legislation seeks to criminalise circumcision on male minors that is unnecessary “for health reasons,” stating individuals who remove “part or all of the sexual organs shall be imprisoned for up to 6 years.”

The bill claims circumcision violates children’s rights to “express their views on the issues [concerning them]” and “protection against traditions that are harmful.”

According to bill spokesperson Silja Dögg Gunnarsdóttir, a key reason for the bill is that all forms of female genital cutting (FGC), no matter how minor, have been illegal in Iceland since 2005, but no similar legislation exists for males.

“If we have laws banning circumcision for girls,” she said in an interview, then for consistency “we should do so for boys.” Consequently, the bill is not specific to male circumcision, but adapts the existing law banning FGC, changing “girls” to “children.”

There is much to unpack here. We first discuss self-determination and informed consent, before addressing claims about potential health benefits and harms. We then explore the religious significance of circumcision for some groups, and ask what implications this should have.

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Ethical AI Kills Too: An Assement of the Lords Report on AI in the UK

Hazem Zohny and Julian Savulescu
Cross-posted with the Oxford Martin School

Developing AI that does not eventually take over humanity or turn the world into a dystopian nightmare is a challenge. It also has an interesting effect on philosophy, and in particular ethics: suddenly, a great deal of the millennia-long debates on the good and the bad, the fair and unfair, need to be concluded and programmed into machines. Does the autonomous car in an unavoidable collision swerve to avoid killing five pedestrians at the cost of its passenger’s life? And what exactly counts as unfair discrimination or privacy violation when “Big Data” suggests an individual is, say, a likely criminal?

The recent House of Lords Artificial Intelligence Committee’s report acknowledges the centrality of ethics to AI front and centre. It engages thoughtfully with a wide range of issues: algorithmic bias, the monopolised control of data by large tech companies, the disruptive effects of AI on industries, and its implications for education, healthcare, and weaponry.

Many of these are economic and technical challenges. For instance, the report notes Google’s continued inability to fix its visual identification algorithms, which it emerged three years ago could not distinguish between gorillas and black people. For now, the company simply does not allow users of Google Photos to search for gorillas.

But many of the challenges are also ethical – in fact, central to the report is that while the UK is unlikely to lead globally in the technical development of AI, it can lead the way in putting ethics at the centre of AI’s development and use.

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Should PREDICTED Smokers Get Transplants?

By Tom Douglas

Jack has smoked a packet a day since he was 22. Now, at 52, he needs a heart and lung transplant.

Should he be refused a transplant to allow a non-smoker with a similar medical need to receive one? More generally: does his history of smoking reduce his claim to scarce medical resources?

If it does, then what should we say about Jill, who has never touched a cigarette, but is predicted to become a smoker in the future? Perhaps Jill is 20 years old and from an ethnic group with very high rates of smoking uptake in their 20s. Or perhaps a machine-learning tool has analysed her past facebook posts and google searches and identified her as a ‘high risk’ for taking up smoking—she has an appetite for risk, an unusual susceptibility to peer pressure, and a large number of smokers among her friends. Should Jill’s predicted smoking count against her, were she to need a transplant? Intuitively, it shouldn’t. But why not?

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