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Do I have a right to access my father’s genetic account?

Do I have a right to access my father’s genetic account?

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 Written By: Roy Gilbar, Netanya Academic College, Israel, and Charles Foster

In the recent case of ABC v St. George’s Healthcare NHS Trust and others,1 [http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/QB/2015/1394.html] a High Court judge decided that:

(a) where the defendants (referred to here jointly as ‘X’) knew that Y, a prisoner,  was suffering from Huntingdon’s Disease (‘HD’); and

(b) X knew that Y had refused permission to tell Y’s daughter, Z (the claimant), that he had HD (and accordingly that there was a 50% chance that Z had it (and that if Z had it there was, correspondingly, a 50% chance that the fetus she was then carrying would have HD),

X had no duty to tell Z that Y was suffering from HD. Z said that if she had known of Y’s condition, she would have had an abortion.Read More »Do I have a right to access my father’s genetic account?

Guest Post: Volunteer Service

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Written By Seth Lazar

Australian National University

Earlier this year, the British Army Reserves launched a recruitment drive, emphasising  the opportunities that volunteering affords: world travel, professional training, excitement and comradeship.[1]  In this sense it was typical. Military recruitment tends not to mention the possibility of being complicit in murder. But those who are considering a military career know that there is a risk they will be used to fight unjust wars. And killing in unjust wars is arguably little better than murder. How, then, should a morally conscientious individual decide whether to join the armed forces of her state?Read More »Guest Post: Volunteer Service

Guest Post: New Tools for Bioethics Education and Public Engagement

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Written by Johann Ahola-Launonen

University of Helsinki

How should bioethical discussion be? The academic debate entails a tension between different parties, which often are difficult to compare. To mention some, for example, some draw from the tradition of liberal consequentialism and demand for rationalism and the avoidance of lofty moral arguments. Others descend from the teleological and communitarian tradition, emphasizing that the moral issues ought to be holistically confronted in their complexity, accepting that they cannot be analyzed in logical, reasonable fragments[1].Read More »Guest Post: New Tools for Bioethics Education and Public Engagement

Guest Post: The Millennium Development Goals and Peter Singer’s new book on Effective Altruism

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Written by William Isdale,

of The University of Queensland

 As many readers will be aware, this year will mark the conclusion of the Millennium Development Goals. For some of these goals, expectations have been exceeded; for instance, the goal of halving global poverty (defined as living on less then US$1.25 a day) was achieved back in 2010.

There are good grounds for believing that extreme poverty can be almost entirely eradicated within our lifetimes. But, for now, a lot of work remains to be done; the average life expectancy among the ‘bottom billion’ remains a miserable fifty years, and the most recent UNICEF estimate of poverty-related deaths among children is 6.3 million each year.Read More »Guest Post: The Millennium Development Goals and Peter Singer’s new book on Effective Altruism

Strange brew: opiates from yeast

A recent series of papers have constructed a biochemical pathway that allows yeast to produce opiates. It is not quite a sugar-to-heroin home brew yet, but putting together the pieces looks fairly doable in the very near term. I think I called the news almost exactly five years ago on this blog.

People, including the involved researchers, are concerned and think regulation is needed. It is an interesting case of dual-use biotechnology. While making opiates may be somewhat less frightening than making pathogens, it is still a problematic use of biotechnology: millions of people are addicted, and making it easier for them to get access would worsen the problem. Or would it?

Read More »Strange brew: opiates from yeast

It’s tough to make predictions*

by Dominic Wilkinson, @Neonatalethics

The Court of Protection is due to review very soon the case of a teenager with a relapsed brain tumour. The young man had been diagnosed with the tumour as a baby, but it has apparently come back and spread so that according to his neurosurgeon he has been “going in and out of a coma”. In February, the court heard from medical specialists that he was expected to die within two weeks, and authorized doctors to withhold chemotherapy, neurosurgery and other invasive treatments, against the wishes of the boy’s parents.

However, three months after that ruling, the teenager is still alive, and so the court has been asked to review its decision. What should we make of this case? Were doctors and the court wrong?

Read More »It’s tough to make predictions*

RESPECTFUL CARE

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Written by Darlei Dall’Agnol [1]

Professor of Ethics at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brasil

 

We humans are, as social beings, care-dependent creatures. Since the very moment we are born (or even before), we need all sorts of attention to meet our basic needs: we must be fed, clothed, sheltered, protected from many kinds of harm and so on. As infants, we need to learn how to become ordinary humans by walking, talking, socializing, etc. all activities mastered –or not– by training and other forms of educational care. Even as adults, as autonomous agents, we need constantly to look after ourselves, so self-care plays a vital role throughout our entire existences. Later in life, most of us, might become vulnerable again and will need to be cared for once more.

Caring may, however, go wrong in many different ways. For one thing, it may be insufficient to attend the basic needs of the cared-for. Thus, it may turn into negligence or even malpractice of the one “caring”. Moreover, it may degenerate into forms of paternalism when the person looking after another imposes her own views on a vulnerable individual, for example, a parent or a teacher on a teenager learning how to be independent; a doctor or a nurse on a patient in need of medical attention; a scientist on a subject of research etc. This is indeed disrespectful to the cared-for. Besides, caring may reveal anxiety, that is, it sometimes may be accompanied by negative feelings compromising the well-being of the one-caring. Then, an important question arises: under which conditions can we say that a person knows-how to care properly?Read More »RESPECTFUL CARE

Guest Post: An Open Response to Roache’s Anti-Conservatism

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Authors: Calum Miller, Final year medical student, University of Oxford; C’Zar Bernstein, BPhil graduate philosophy student, University of Oxford; Joao Fabiano, DPhil philosophy student, University of Oxford; Mahmood Naji, Final year medical student, University of Oxford

One of the first things we did after seeing the election news on the morning after the election was to post a Facebook status including the following: “austerity, despite its necessity, creates difficulty. I hope my fellow Conservatives won’t be blind to the difficulties people go through as a consequence of this result and will step up to do their part combating those hardships”. Other statuses around the same time lauded the Liberal Democrats and expressed regret at Vince Cable and Simon Hughes’ departure from Parliament.

According to Rebecca Roache, these are the words of people who are immune to reason, brainwashed by Murdoch, and whose views are as objectionable as racist and sexist views. We maintain the contrary – not only that this is manifestly false, but that Roache’s own position is far more consonant with the bigoted attitudes against which she protests. It would be easy to respond in kind, simply preaching to our own choir about how awful liberals are and how we should make their views socially unacceptable. This would only serve to deepen political division, however, and is unlikely to move us forward as citizens, rational agents or friends.

Read More »Guest Post: An Open Response to Roache’s Anti-Conservatism

Punishment and Memory

The public outcry at the decision of the Crown Prosecution Service that Lord Janner was not fit to stand trial for 22 sex offences, the last of which were allegedly committed in the 1980s, appears to have led the CPS to initiate a review. Janner’s case raises several issues about the punishment of crimes that may have taken place in the relatively distant past.Read More »Punishment and Memory

Moral Agreement on Saving the World

There appears to be lot of disagreement in moral philosophy.  Whether these many apparent disagreements are deep and irresolvable, I believe there is at least one thing it is reasonable to agree on right now, whatever general moral view we adopt:  that it is very important to reduce the risk that all intelligent beings on this planet are eliminated by an enormous catastrophe, such as a nuclear war.  How we might in fact try to reduce such existential risks is discussed elsewhere.  My claim here is only that we – whether we’re consequentialists, deontologists, or virtue ethicists – should all agree that we should try to save the world.

Read More »Moral Agreement on Saving the World