Skip to content

Professional Ethics

Strauss-Kahn, Schwarzenegger, and the Failure of Public Discourse

First came Strauss-Kahn. Then Schwarzenegger. And now Goodwin. Three powerful men, all married, all accused of sexual impropriety. Cue the inevitable trend pieces in the press: why do influential men cheat? But something is wrong here: one of these does not belong. The accusations against Dominique Strauss-Kahn – that he sexually assaulted a housekeeper at his Manhattan luxury hotel – are vastly different from those confronting Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sir Fred Goodwin. The fact that our media culture seems incapable of properly distinguishing rape from simple adultery suggests a failure of moral sensitivity, and perhaps a triumph of prurient gossip-mongering over sincere ethical concern.

TRIGGER WARNING: if you experience discussion of sexual assault as potentially traumatizing, it may be best to read no further.

Read More »Strauss-Kahn, Schwarzenegger, and the Failure of Public Discourse

Should Journalism be Amoral?

George Orwell was not a peace journalist; he was a proper journalist!

 

Jean Seaton, professor of media history at the university of Westminster and official historian for the BBC, hurled the comment from her seat in the audience onto the stage, interrupting the current speaker, Richard Keeble, professor at the University of Lincoln’s school of journalism. Keeble’s passing claim on George Orwell in last Saturday’s OxPeace conference on “Media in Conflict and Peace building” (recordings of the talks will shortly be available on OUCS iTunes) visibly (and audibly) upset Seaton, who was present also as a speaker.

Why did Seaton treat the title of “peace journalist” as an insult?

Read More »Should Journalism be Amoral?

A Judge’s Breakfast

Legal Realism has been caricaturised as a school that believes that judicial decisions are made according to what the judge has had for breakfast. Research conducted in Israel suggests that this may not be so far from the truth.

Read More »A Judge’s Breakfast

Ethical Lessons From Locked-In Syndrome: What Is a Living Hell?

A recent important study by Stephen Laureys and colleagueson what it is like to be to experience severe brain damage has been widely reported. (eg, http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Wellness/locked-patients-life/story?id=12984627). Laureys and colleagues surveyed the views of people with “locked-in” syndrome. This syndrome, which typically occurs after certain kinds of stroke, results in the person unable to move his arms or legs and unable to speak. In some cases, they can move their eyes and communicate through eye movements but in other cases, the eyes are paralysed. They are awake and aware.

Many people would think this is a living hell, imprisoned in one’s own body, with limited if any means of communication. But Laureys et al found differently when they actually asked patients who were in this condition. According to the ABC,

“More than half of patients coping with a form of nearly complete paralysis called locked-in syndrome indicated — through eye blinks in some cases — that they were getting some satisfaction in life, though 8 percent had often thought of suicide.

“Among 65 patients who had developed the syndrome a median of eight years previously, only 18 characterized their lives as “somewhat on the bad side” or worse… Seventeen patients indicated that they felt as well, or almost as well, as in their happiest times before becoming locked-in. Another 21 gave their overall quality of life lesser but still positive marks.”

So what can we learn from this study?Read More »Ethical Lessons From Locked-In Syndrome: What Is a Living Hell?

All between the ears? Homeopathy and experimental treatments for chronic fatigue syndrome

On Monday,  Belgian endocrinologist Francis Coucke appeared before the ‘Orde van Geneesheren’, a national body responsible for enforcing standards within the medical profession. Dr Coucke risks a two year suspension from the profession because his treatment (gamma globulines and home TPN) of patients with the chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) has been deemed non-scientific: it has not been proven to work in large studies. Last year, he and a neuropsychiatrist colleague were required to pay a 635,000 euro fine for prescribing medicines not licensed for CFS to CFS patients. The fine was imposed even though special authorization for the prescriptions had been granted by the medical advisor to the national healthcare service.
Read More »All between the ears? Homeopathy and experimental treatments for chronic fatigue syndrome

You want to publish? Let’s hear all your dirty secrets

By Charles Foster

Most scientific journals require contributors to declare any conflict of interest.

But what about ethicists? We are much more ambitious and presumptuous in our aims than most scientists. We purport to tell our readers not which drug will reduce their blood cholesterol, or which type of plate is best for their radial fracture, but how best to live: how to make right decisions about things that matter far more than cholesterol; how to be the right sort of people. If we write good papers, amounting to more than newspaper opinion pieces, the papers support their conclusions with supposedly objective reasoning. We try to look scientific. And yet, try as we might, we can’t escape from our own histories and tendencies. If an ethicist has been sexually abused as a boy by a paedophilic priest, or forced to watch US evangelical TV, he’ll never be able to think that religion is anything but evil or ridiculous, and his articles will argue, with apparent but wholly fake objectivity, towards that conclusion. If the Jesuits got him before the age of 7, and etched the catechism into his subconscious rather than buggering him, the man they made out of the boy will be theirs for ever, in the Journal of Medical Ethics just as devoutly as in the confessional. And yet there’ll be not a whisper of a warning next to their papers. Those influences are likely to be far more determinative of the views expressed than any financial conflict of interest in a drug trial ever was. Everything about an ethicist’s life raises a potential conflict of interest.Read More »You want to publish? Let’s hear all your dirty secrets

Beauty, brains, and the halo effect

by Alexandre Erler

Satoshi Kanazawa is currently in the news – see e.g. these articles in the Daily Mail, The Australian and Psychology Today. An evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics, Kanazawa has just published a new article in the journal Intelligence (Kanazawa 2011) in which he argues, in continuity with his previous research, that beautiful people tend to be more intelligent than plainer ones (especially if they are men). Only now he is arguing that this correlation may be much stronger than we previously thought. His conclusion is based on data from two studies, conducted respectively in the UK and the US, which tested the intelligence of children and young teenagers but also rated their level of physical attractiveness. In the British study, attractive respondents had a mean IQ about 13 points higher than unattractive ones, and the beauty-intelligence correlation turned out to be of a similar magnitude to that between intelligence and education.

Read More »Beauty, brains, and the halo effect

Who wants to be an abortionist?

By Lachlan de Crespigny

Dr. Evan James never wavered in his determination to become an abortion provider. But he is unusual – few trainee doctors have a driving ambition to become abortionists. The U.S. has seen a 40 per cent drop in the number of doctors who perform abortions since the early 1980s. Those in the field say there's likely a similar trend in Canada. Few Canadian hospitals provide abortions and numbers are dropping. Other countries, including Australia, have similar service provision problems.

Abortion is lawful in at least some circumstances in almost all western countries. Yet most have too few providers and current providers are aging with few replacements coming through.

Read More »Who wants to be an abortionist?

Is professional integrity a futile argument?

by Dominic Wilkinson

In an earlier post this week I argued that there are only two substantive reasons for doctors not to provide treatment that they judge futile – either on the basis of a judgement that treatment would harm the patient (a form of paternalism), or on the basis that providing treatment would harm others (on the basis of distributive justice). I rejected the idea that professional integrity provided an additional reason to withhold or withdraw treatment.

Read More »Is professional integrity a futile argument?