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
Cross Post: Sacred Places and Traditions with Lea Ypi
Suppose a religious community regards a site – with, say, a stone circle – as sacred. It has for centuries been used as a place of prayer and contemplation. The land is owned by the state and they want to sell it off to build apartment blocks. You might think that the deep attachment the religious community has to this place of worship is what gives it some right to protect the site. But Lea Ypi of the London School of Economics, is not so sure.
Lea Ypi’s paper ‘Structural Injustice and the Place of Attachment’, was published in the Journal of Practical Ethics, Vol 5 No.1.
In response to her paper Lea Ypi has been interviewed by David Edmonds for the Philosophy 24/7 podcast series. The podcast is available here on the Philosophy 24/7 website
Lea Ypi is Professor in Political Theory in the Government Department, London School of Economics, and Adjunct Associate Professor in Philosophy at the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University. Before joining the LSE, she was a Post-doctoral Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College (Oxford) and a researcher at the European University Institute where she obtained her PhD. Her website is here.
Podcast: Justifications for Non-Consensual Medical Intervention: From Infectious Disease Control to Criminal Rehabilitation
Dr Jonathan Pugh’s St Cross Special Ethics Seminar on 12 November 2015 is now available at http://media.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/uehiro/MT15_STX_Pugh.mp3
Speaker: Dr Jonathan Pugh
Although a central tenet of medical ethics holds that it is permissible to perform a medical intervention on a competent individual only if that individual has given informed consent to that intervention, there are some circumstances in which it seems that this moral requirement may be trumped. For instance, in some circumstances, it might be claimed that it is morally permissible to carry out certain sorts of non-consensual interventions on competent individuals for the purpose of infectious disease control (IDC). In this paper, I shall explain how one might defend this practice, and consider the extent to which similar considerations might be invoked in favour of carrying out non-consensual medical interventions for the purposes of facilitating rehabilitation amongst criminal offenders. Having considered examples of non-consensual interventions in IDC that seem to be morally permissible, I shall describe two different moral frameworks that a defender of this practice might invoke in order to justify such interventions. I shall then identify five desiderata that can be used to guide the assessments of the moral permissibility of non-consensual IDC interventions on either kind of fundamental justification. Following this analysis, I shall consider how the justification of non-consensual interventions for the purpose of IDC compares to the justification of non-consensual interventions for the purpose of facilitating criminal rehabilitation, according to these five desiderata. I shall argue that the analysis I provide suggests that a plausible case can be made in favour of carrying out certain sorts of non-consensual interventions for the purpose facilitating rehabilitation amongst criminal offenders.
Loebel Lecture 3 of 3: What is the upshot?
Lecture 3 Audio [MP3] | YouTube link [MP4]
Grove Auditorium, Magdalen College, Longwall Street, Oxford
5 November 2015, 6-8pm Continue reading
Lecture 2 of 3: Science is quietly, inexorably eroding many core assumptions underlying psychiatry
Lecture 2 Audio [MP3] | YouTube link [MP4]
Grove Auditorium, Magdalen College, Longwall Street, Oxford
4 November 2015, 6-8pm Continue reading
Loebel Lectures and Workshop, Michaelmas Term 2015, Lecture 1 of 3: Neurobiological materialism collides with the experience of being human
The 2015 Loebel Lectures in Psychiatry and Philosophy were delivered by Professor Steven E. Hyman, director of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard as well as Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology. Both the lecture series and the one-day workshop proved popular and were well-attended. Continue reading
The dappled causal world for psychiatric disorders: implications for psychiatric nosology
On Thursday 16th October, Professor Kenneth Kendler delivered his second (and final) Loebel Lecture, entitled ‘The dappled causal world for psychiatric disorders: implications for psychiatric nosology’. You can view it online here or listen here.
Whilst Kendler’s first lecture – summarised by Roger Crisp here – focused on empirical issues, the second lecture was more philosophical. Kendler’s key question in the second lecture could perhaps be formulated as: Given the complex aetiology of mental disorders, how can we best understand and explain how they arise? Continue reading
Professor Tim Scanlon: When Does Equality Matter?
2013 Uehiro Lectures by Professor Tim Scanlon (Department of Philosophy, Harvard University)
We are very grateful to Professor Tim Scanlon (Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity, Harvard University) for delivering the 10th Annual Uehiro Lectures in December 2013, entitled “When Does Equality Matter?”
Lecture 1: “Equal Treatment” AUDIO
Lecture 2:”Equal Status” AUDIO
Lecture 3: “Equal Opportunity” AUDIO (includes discussion with Professors John Broome, Janet Radcliffe Richards and David Miller).
Video files will shortly be available here.
Uehiro Lectures and Book Series: The annual public Uehiro Lecture Series captures the ethos of the Uehiro Centre, which is to bring the best scholarship in analytic philosophy to bear on the most significant problems of our time, and to make progress in the analysis and resolution of these issues to the highest academic standard, in a manner that is also accessible to the general public. Philosophy should not only create knowledge, it should make people’s lives better. In keeping with this, the Annual Uehiro Lectures are published as a book series by Oxford University Press. See Uehiro Series in Practical Ethics on the OUP website for further details
Speaker bio: Professor Scanlon received his B.A. from Princeton and his Ph.D. from Harvard. In between, he studied for a year at Oxford as a Fulbright Fellow. He taught for many years at Princeton before taking up a position at Harvard in 1984. His dissertation and some of his first papers were in mathematical logic, where his main concern was in proof theory, but he soon made his name in ethics and political philosophy, where he developed a version of contractualism in the line of John Rawls, Immanuel Kant, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Professor Scanlon has also published important work on freedom of speech, equality, tolerance, foundations of contract law, human rights, conceptions of welfare, theories of justice, as well as on foundational questions in moral theory. His books include What We Owe to Each Other (Harvard University Press, 1998) and The Difficulty of Tolerance (Cambridge University Press, 2003). Other recent publications include Moral Dimensions: Permissibility, Meaning, Blame, published by Harvard University Press in September 2008
Podcast: Is Networking Immoral?
Guest Post: Ned Dobos, University of New South Wales
This post is a summary of a talk presented by Dr. Dobos at the University of Oxford. Listen to the Podcast
Despite being ubiquitous in both the public and private sectors, “networking” has largely escaped ethical scrutiny. But is it the perfectly innocuous business and career-advancement strategy it is presumed to be? Let us concentrate on a specific kind of career networking: networking aimed at increasing one’s prospects of prevailing in a formal competitive selection process for a job or university placement. That is the end, so what is the means? How exactly is networking supposed to deliver this advantage? Experts tend to answer with at least one of the following responses: 1) networking is about building relationships with people that are (or might be) in a position to benefit your career; 2) networking is about demonstrating your worth to these people.
On either account, networking arguably involves seeking unfair advantage.
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