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Pandemic Ethics: Should Frontline Doctors and Nurses Get Preferential Treatment?
Dominic Wilkinson, University of Oxford It is mid-March 2020. James is a 29-year-old junior doctor working in a London hospital. Last week, James cared for a man who had become sick after returning from abroad. The man had been treated in isolation and is now improving. However, James has since become unwell. He developed a…
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Pandemic Ethics – Resources 2020
With all the concern at present about the coronavirus outbreak in China (and the rest of the world), we will host a special series on the blog relating to ethical issues during pandemics. We last ran a series on this topic in 2009 during the Swine flu outbreak. In this blog, I’ll collect together blogs…
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Dr Neil Armstrong – Why is Mental Healthcare so Ethically Confusing
Co-authored with Daniel D’Hotman de Villiers In the first St. Cross seminar of the term, Dr. Neil Armstrong talked about ethical challenges raised by mounting bureaucratic processes in the institutional provision of mental healthcare. Drawing on vignettes from his ethnographic fieldwork, Dr. Armstrong argued that the bureaucratization of mental healthcare has led to a situation in…
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Assessing and Respecting Sentience After Brexit
Thanks to a generous grant from Open Philanthropy, last year the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and the Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities co-sponsored a workshop with the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) examining the ethical and legal implications of recent advancements in our ability to assess the mental…
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Heritable Human Genome Editing Can Cure or Prevent Diseases
By César Palacios-González @CPalaciosG More than a year after the fallout from He Jiankui’s announcement to the world that he had edited human embryos in order to made them resistant to HIV, the debate on whether we should move ahead with heritable human genome editing has given no signs of slowing down. For example, just a…
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The Right Not to Know and the Obligation to Know
By Ben Davies Most people accept that patients have a strong claim (perhaps with some exceptions) to be told information that is relevant to their health and medical care. Patients have a Right to Know. More controversial is the claim that this control goes the other way, too. Some people claim, and others deny, that…
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Responsibility, Healthcare, and Harshness
Written by Gabriel De Marco Suppose that two patients are in need of a complicated, and expensive, heart surgery. Further suppose that they are identical in various relevant respects: e.g., state of the heart, age, likelihood of success of surgery, etc. However, they differ on one feature: for one of these patients, call her Blair,…
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Ecological Rationality: When Is Bias A Good Thing?
By Rebecca Brown Many people will be broadly familiar with the ‘heuristics and biases’ (H&B) program of work, made prominent by the psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in the 1970s. H&B developed alongside the new sub-discipline of Behavioural Economics, both detailing the ways in which human decision-makers deviate from what would be expected of…
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Why Epistemologists Should Sniff
By Charles Foster There are lots of big and clever books about epistemology. It’s a complex business. Although one can do some epistemology (some icy thinkers say all) without making any empirical claims about what the senses show (and hence how the senses work), such empirical claims are essential for the discipline to get any…
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Health vs Choice? The Vaccination Debate.
On Sunday 3 November, OUC’s Dr Alberto Giubilini participated in a debate on compulsory vaccination at 2019 Battle of Ideas Festival (Barbican Centre, London). Chaired by Ellie Lee, the session also featured Dr Michael Fitzpatrick (GP and author, MMR and Autism: what parents need to know and Defeating Autism: a damaging delusion); Emilie Karafillakis (Vaccine Confidence Project); and Nancy McDermott (author, The Problem with…