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Vaccine Refusal Is Like Tax Evasion

Vaccine Refusal Is Like Tax Evasion

Written by Alberto Giubilini: 

Oxford Martin School and Wellcome Centre for Ethics and the Humanities, University of Oxford

 

Vaccination has received a lot of media attention over the past few months following recent measles outbreaks and the introduction of rigid vaccination policies in some countries. Amid this discussion, a rather strange story hit the headlines a few weeks ago. According to reports, a woman in Michigan was sentenced to 7 days in jail because she refused to vaccinate her child, adducing personal religious reasons. Newspapers reported the story with somewhat misleading – though factually correct – titles, such as “Michigan mother jailed for refusing to vaccinate her son” or “Michigan mother sent to prison for failing to vaccinate her son.”Read More »Vaccine Refusal Is Like Tax Evasion

Cross Post: Machine Learning and Medical Education: Impending Conflicts in Robotic Surgery

Guest Post by Nathan Hodson 

* Please note that this article is being cross-posted from the Journal of Medical Ethics Blog 

Research in robotics promises to revolutionize surgery. The Da Vinci system has already brought the first fruits of the revolution into the operating theater through remote controlled laparoscopic (or “keyhole”) surgery. New developments are going further, augmenting the human surgeon and moving toward a future with fully autonomous robotic surgeons. Through machine learning, these robotic surgeons will likely one day supersede their makers and ultimately squeeze human surgical trainees out of operating room.

This possibility raises new questions for those building and programming healthcare robots. In their recent essay entitled “Robot Autonomy for Surgery,” Michael Yip and Nikhil Das echoed a common assumption in health robotics research: “human surgeons [will] still play a large role in ensuring the safety of the patient.” If human surgical training is impaired by robotic surgery, however—as I argue it likely will be—then this safety net would not necessarily hold.

Imagine an operating theater. The autonomous robot surgeon makes an unorthodox move. The human surgeon observer is alarmed. As the surgeon reaches to take control, the robot issues an instruction: “Step away. Based on data from every single operation performed this year, by all automated robots around the world, the approach I am taking is the best.”

Should we trust the robot? Should we doubt the human expert? Shouldn’t we play it safe—but what would that mean in this scenario? Could such a future really materialize?

Read More »Cross Post: Machine Learning and Medical Education: Impending Conflicts in Robotic Surgery

MSt in Practical Ethics

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The MSt in Practical Ethics is now open for applications for 2025.

The MSt offers high-quality training in practical ethics, drawing on the internationally recognised expertise of Oxford’s Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, the Ethox Centre and the Faculty of Philosophy.

Application Deadlines:

  • Wednesday 29th January 2025, 12:00 noon UK time, (Latest deadline for most Oxford scholarships)

*Applications may remain open after the deadline if places are still available.

For more information on the course and to check the admission status, visit the course page on the Continuing Education website here.

Applications for the modules as standalone courses are also available.

This flexible, part -time course consists of six modules and a dissertation. The MSt in Practical Ethics is a part-time course consisting of six taught modules and a dissertation. Modules may also be taken as standalone courses.

Read More »MSt in Practical Ethics

Harvey Weinstein and the Ring of Gyges

Written by Roger Crisp

At the start of book II of what is perhaps the most famous work in western philosophy, Plato’s Republic, one of the characters in the dialogue, Glaucon, tells Socrates the story of a Lydian shepherd, Gyges. Gyges, having found a ring which made him invisible, used its powers to enter the royal palace, where he seduced the queen, killed the king, and himself assumed power. Glaucon suggests that anyone in Gyges’s circumstances would do the same: we all believe that immorality is more profitable than being moral, and avoid it only through fear of being caught.

The many accusations against the film producer Harvey Weinstein over the past month suggest that Weinstein had – or at least thought he had — discovered something like a ring of invisibility.Read More »Harvey Weinstein and the Ring of Gyges

Blade Runner 2049, Parfit and Identity

Julian Savulescu

 

Contains spoilers for both Blade Runner films. This is a longer version of a shorter piece without spoilers, Blade Runner 2049: Identity, Humanity, and Discrimination, in Pursuit 

Blade Runner 2049, like the original, is about identity, humanity and discrimination.

Identity and Humanity

In both films, bioengineered humans are known as replicants.  Blade Runners “retire” or kill these replicants when they are a threat to society. In the original, Blade Runner Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) has all the memories and feelings of a human and believes himself to be a human, only at the end to discover he is a replicant. In the sequel, K (Ryan Gosling) is a replicant but comes to believe (falsely) that he is Deckard’s child. In Blade Runner 2049, we are left to watch K dying, realising his memories were implanted by Deckard’s daughter.

In both films we are left wondering what difference there is between a human and a replicant. In the original, rogue replicant Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) saves Deckard’s life (as Deckard was trying to kill him) and delivers famous “Tears in the Rain” speech:

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.”

Roy comes across as more human than the humans in the film. Indeed, in a preceding scene, a thorn or spike appears through his hand reminiscent of Christ, whose own identity as fully human and fully divine has puzzled Theologians for two millenia.

Both films challenge what it is to be human. In 2049, K believes the child of Deckard might have a soul because it was born.

Who are we?

The films both raise fundamental questions about personal identity: who are we? What fundamentally defines the existence of a person from one moment to the next? In both films, there is the suggestion that the biological mass, the body, is not what matters but the mind. In the original, bioengineered Roy seems as human as Deckard, as human as someone could be. In 2049, the idea is extended further still: K’s girlfriend Joi is an AI but seems as real as the other characters and her death is equally tragic.

Derek Parfit died in January this year. He was the world’s most famous moral philosopher (and his favourite film was another Ridley Scott classic, The Duellists). One of his famous ideas is that “identity” is not what matters. He articulated this in his masterpiece, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). According to Parfit, what matters is psychological continuity and connectedness, that is, the unity of our mental states.

Read More »Blade Runner 2049, Parfit and Identity

Cross Post: Sex Versus Death: Why Marriage Equality Provokes More Heated Debate Than Assisted Dying

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Written by Julian Savulescu

A version of this article has been published by The Conversation

Epicurus wrote: “Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist. ”

We are in the midst of two great ethical debates: marriage equality and assistance in dying. The great plebescite is ongoing and the Victorian parliament is debating a new law to allow assistance in dying in the last year of life.

A search of Victorian paper “The Age” reveals about 2400 results for “marriage equality” and only about 1700 for assisted dying related terms. But even more striking is the difference in the strength of the feelings they have embodied: despite the fact that one of these topics is literally a life and death matter, the same-sex marriage debate has been far more polarizing.Read More »Cross Post: Sex Versus Death: Why Marriage Equality Provokes More Heated Debate Than Assisted Dying

A Fundamental Problem with Moral Enhancement

by Joao Fabiano

Moral philosophers often prefer to conceive thought experiments, dilemmas and problem cases of single individuals who make one-shot decisions with well-defined short-term consequences. Morality is complex enough that such simplifications seem justifiable or even necessary for philosophical reflection.  If we are still far from consensus on which is the best moral theory or what makes actions right or wrong – or even if such aspects should be the central problem of moral philosophy – by considering simplified toy scenarios, then introducing group or long-term effects would make matters significantly worse. However, when it comes to actually changing human moral dispositions with the use of technology (i.e., moral enhancement), ignoring the essential fact that morality deals with group behaviour with long-ranging consequences can be extremely risky. Despite those risks, attempting to provide a full account of morality in order to conduct moral enhancement would be both simply impractical as well as arguably risky. We seem to be far away from such account, yet there are pressing current moral failings, such as the inability for proper large-scale cooperation, which makes the solution to present global catastrophic risks, such as global warming or nuclear war, next to impossible. Sitting back and waiting for a complete theory of morality might be riskier than attempting to fix our moral failing using incomplete theories. We must, nevertheless, proceed with caution and an awareness of such incompleteness. Here I will present several severe risks from moral enhancement that arise from focusing on improving individual dispositions while ignoring emergent societal effects and point to tentative solutions to those risks. I deem those emergent risks fundamental problems both because they lie at the foundation of the theoretical framework guiding moral enhancement – moral philosophy – and because they seem, at the time, inescapable; my proposed solution will aim at increasing awareness of such problems instead of directly solving them.

Read More »A Fundamental Problem with Moral Enhancement

Flu Vaccination for Kids: a Moral Obligation?

Written by Ben Bambery and Julian Savulescu

Rosie Anderson, aged 8, died from influenza infection last Friday the 15th of September. Her tragic death followed the recent death of young father, Ben Ihlow, aged 30, who died suddenly on Father’s Day this year, also from influenza infection.

Contrary to public perception, “the flu” is a deadly disease. In Victoria this year, at least 97 people have lost their lives to influenza. The majority of these deaths are amongst the elderly, who are particularly vulnerable to severe disease, but as made painfully clear by Rosie and Ben’s deaths, the flu kills young people too.Read More »Flu Vaccination for Kids: a Moral Obligation?

Judges Are Paid To Express Opinions

Introduction

In a series of five harrowing judgments, the President of the Family Division, Sir James Munby, expressed his frustration with the system that endangered the life of a child who was the subject of care proceedings. He was forthright. Some of his words were quoted in the press. A headline in the Guardian read: ‘Judge warns of ‘blood on our hands’ if suicidal girl is forced out of secure care.’ ‘Why won’t NHS help?’ asked the Sun. ‘State will have ‘blood on its hands’ if suicidal teen doesn’t get hospital bed soon, top judge warns.’

While the judge’s comments seemed generally to be applauded by the media, not all were happy. Here is a typical example of a commentator who was not:

‘To use a rhetorical outburst in one case to make broader political points about the state of public services jeopardises the principle of judicial separation. In saying that there are occasions when doing right “includes speaking truth to power”, and openly condemning the lack of adequate public resources, is to leave the respected realm of judicial neutrality and to enter the political fray. Language and tone matter. Even if the diagnosis is fair, for a judge to use this tactic is, well, pretty ill-judged.’Read More »Judges Are Paid To Express Opinions

Cross Post: UK Gene Editing Breakthrough Could Land an Aussie in Jail for 15 Years: Here’s Why Our Laws Need to Catch Up

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Written by Dr  Research Fellow in Biomedical Ethics, Murdoch Childrens Research Institute, and Professor  Uehiro Chair in Practical Ethics,Visiting Professor in Biomedical Ethics, Murdoch Childrens Research Institute and Distinguished Visiting Professor in Law, Melbourne University, University of Oxford

This article was originally published on The Conversation

 

One of the greatest mysteries in life is why only about one in three embryos formed naturally ever go on to produce a baby. Most miscarry. By genetically engineering human embryos, scientists in the UK have identified a key gene in enabling embryos to develop.

Kathy Niakan, of the Francis Crick Institute in London, led a team which used gene editing technique CRISPR to investigate the role of a particular gene in the development of embryos. The study could potentially lead to better understanding of miscarriage, and hopefully prevention of it, and improve treatment of infertility.

However, this ground-breaking research would be illegal in Australia. Scientists doing this in Australia could be imprisoned. It’s time to review Australia’s laws in this area, which are 15 years old.Read More »Cross Post: UK Gene Editing Breakthrough Could Land an Aussie in Jail for 15 Years: Here’s Why Our Laws Need to Catch Up