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.” Continue reading
Organ Donation: Presumed Consent and Focusing on What Matters
Recent newspaper reports covered the story of Jemima Layzell, a 13 year old who died suddenly of a brain aneurysm in 2012. According to reports, shortly before Jemima died, the subject of organ donation had come up in discussions with her family, prompted by the death of a family friend in a car accident. As a result, Jemima’s family were confident she would have wanted her organs to be donated. Subsequently, Jemima’s kidneys, liver, lungs, pancreas, small bowel and heart were transplanted. This meant that a record eight people’s lives were saved, prolonged or dramatically enhanced as a consequence of Jemima’s and her family’s decision.
Decisions about organ donation are extremely difficult. Family members are approached about the prospect of donating their loved one’s organs at a time of extraordinary distress. Uncertainty about the wishes of the person who has died, along with confusion or scepticism about brain death criteria, religious or other spiritual beliefs about bodily integrity, fear about how donated organs will be used, and inability or unwillingness to engage with any form of decision-making can result in the refusal of family members to allow organs to be donated. In England, family members can prevent donation even when the individual has expressed a wish to donate her organs, for instance, by signing up to the organ donor register. Continue reading
Cross Post: Re: Nudges in a Post-truth World
Guest Post: Nathan Hodson
This article originally appeared on the Journal of Medical Ethics Blog
In a recent article in the Journal of Medical Ethics, Neil Levy has developed a concept of “nudges to reason,” offering a new tool for those trying to reconcile medical ethics with the application of behavioural psychological research – a practice known as nudging. Very roughly, nudging means adjusting the way choices are presented to the public in order to promote certain decisions.
As Levy notes, some people are concerned that nudges present a threat to autonomy. Attempts at reconciling nudges with ethics, then, are important because nudging in healthcare is here to stay but we need to ensure it is used in ways that respect autonomy (and other moral principles). Continue reading
Cross Post: Italy has introduced mandatory vaccinations – other countries should follow its lead
Written by Alberto Giubilini
This article was originally published on The Conversation
In the first four months of this year, around 1,500 cases of measles were reported in Italy. As a response to the outbreak, the Italian government introduced a law making 12 vaccinations mandatory for preschool and school-age children.
Parents will have to provide proof of vaccination when they enroll their children in nursery or preschool. In this respect, the Italian policy follows the example of vaccination policies in the US. But there’s one crucial difference: the Italian law doesn’t allow parents to opt out on the grounds of “conscientious objection”. Continue reading
Are Incentives Corrupting? The Case of Paying People to be Healthy.
Written by Dr Rebecca Brown
Financial incentives are commonplace in everyday life. As tools of states, corporations and individuals, they enable the ‘tweaking’ of motivations in ways more desirable to the incentiviser. A parent may pay her child £1 to practice the piano for an hour; a café offers a free coffee for every nine the customer buys; governments offer tax breaks for homeowners who make their houses more energy efficient. Most people, most of the time, would probably find the use of financial incentives unobjectionable.
More recently, incentives have been proposed as a means of promoting health. The thinking goes: many diseases people currently suffer from, and are likely to suffer from in the future, are largely the result of behavioural factors (i.e. ‘lifestyles’). Certain behaviours, such as eating energy dense diets, taking little exercise, smoking and drinking large amounts of alcohol, increase the risk that someone will suffer from diseases like cancer, heart disease, lung disease and type II diabetes. These diseases are very unpleasant – sometimes fatal – for those who suffer from them, their friends and family. They also create economic harms, requiring healthcare resources to be directed towards caring for those who are sick and result in reduced productivity through lost working hours. For instance,the annual cost to the economy of obesity-related disease is variously estimated as £2.47 billion, £5.1 billion and a whopping $73 billion (around £56.5 billion), depending on what factors are taken into account and how these are calculated. Since incentives are generally seen as useful tools for influencing people’s behaviour, why not use them to change health-related behaviours? Why not simply pay people to be healthy? Continue reading
Cross Post: Why you might want to think twice about surrendering online privacy for the sake of convenience
Written by Carissa Veliz
DPhil Candidate in Philosophy, Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, University of Oxford
This article was originally published in The Conversation
It is inconvenient to guard one’s privacy, and the better one protects it, the more inconvenience one must endure. Enjoying privacy, at a minimum, demands installing software to block tracking online, using long and different passwords for online services, remembering to turn off the WiFi and Bluetooth signals on your mobile phone when leaving the house, using cash, and so on. Continue reading
Cross Post: Liberal or conservative? Most of our beliefs shift around
Written by Prof Neil Levy,
Senior Research Fellow, Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, University of Oxford
This article was originally published on The Conversation
One common reaction to the election of Donald Trump (and perhaps to a lesser extent, the Brexit vote) among liberals like me is an expression of dismay that some of our fellow citizens are more racist and more sexist than we had dreamed. It seems many were prepared, if not to support openly racist comments and sexist actions, then at least to overlook them. It looks as though battles we thought we had won, having to do with a recognition of a basic kind of equality, need to be fought all over again. Many have concluded that they were never won at all; people were just waiting for a favourable climate to express the racism and sexism they held hidden. Continue reading
Cross Post: Solomon’s frozen judgement
Written by Anders Sandberg
This post was originally published on Andert II
A girl dying of cancer wanted to use cryonic preservation to have a chance at being revived in the future. While supported by her mother the father disagreed; in a recent high court ruling, the judge found that she could be cryopreserved.
As the judge noted, the verdict was not a statement on the validity of cryonics itself, but about how to make decisions about prospective orders. In many ways the case would presumably have gone the same way if there had been a disagreement about whether the daughter could have catholic last rites. However, cryonics makes things fresh and exciting (I have been in the media all day thanks to this).
What is the ethics of parents disagreeing about the cryosuspension of their child? Continue reading
Affiliations
Recent Comments