Exercise, Population Health and Paternalism
Written by Rebecca Brown
The NHS is emphatic in its confidence that exercise is highly beneficial for health. From their page on the “Benefits of exercise” come statements like:
“Step right up! It’s the miracle cure we’ve all been waiting for”
“This is no snake oil. Whatever your age, there’s strong scientific evidence that being physically active can help you lead a healthier and happier life”
“Given the overwhelming evidence, it seems obvious that we should all be physically active. It’s essential if you want to live a healthy and fulfilling life into old age”.
Setting aside any queries about the causal direction of the relationship between exercise and good health, or the precise effect size of the benefits exercise offers, it at least seems that the NHS is convinced that it is a remarkably potent health promotion tool. Continue reading
How Should We Regulate Genetic Enhancement Technologies?
A Guest Post Written by Jonny Anomaly
It’s been 20 years since Allen Buchanan and his colleagues published From Chance to Choice: Genetics and Justice. The book was a landmark, and it repays careful reading.
But there is at least one kind of question that has been largely (if not entirely) ignored in discussions about whether we should regulate parental choice, once parents have access to technologies that allow them to sculpt the genetic endowment of their children. How should we think about reproductive choices that are good for each but not for all? What should we do when there is a conflict between parents selecting the best traits for their children, when a different distribution of traits might be better from a social standpoint? Another way of asking the question is this: how should we think about situations in which there is a potential conflict between the principle of procreative beneficence and the principle of procreative altruism? Continue reading
Arbitrariness as an Ethical Criticism
Written by Ben Davies
We recently saw a legal challenge to the current UK law that compels fertility clinics to destroy frozen eggs after a decade. According to campaigners, the ten-year limit may have had a rationale when it was instituted, but advances in freezing technology have rendered the limit “arbitrary”. Appeals to arbitrariness often form the basis of moral and political criticisms of policy. Still, we need to be careful in relying on appeals to arbitrariness; it is not clear that arbitrariness is always a moral ‘deal-breaker’.
On the face of it, it seems clear why arbitrary policies are ethically unacceptable. To be arbitrary is to lack basis in good reasons. An appeal against arbitrariness is an appeal to consistency, to the principle that like cases should be treated alike. Arbitrariness may therefore seem to cut against the very root of fairness.
The Ethics of Regulation
The New York Times just ran a fairly lengthy article that reported the use of psilocybin, a hallucinogenic drug, in a controlled experiment aimed at reducing anxiety and depression in cancer patients. (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/01/health/hallucinogenic-mushrooms-psilocybin-cancer-anxiety-depression.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news)
A few days earlier the New York Times ran a story on trials using MDMA (i.e., ecstasy) to treat post traumatic stress disorder. (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/29/us/ptsd-mdma-ecstasy.html)
Why are these stories news? Continue reading
The incoherence of Obama’s position on marijuana
U.S. President Barack Obama’s recent interview in the New Yorker was surprisingly interesting. While some have noted his disapproval towards a (hypothetical) son playing pro football out of concussion concerns, the more remarkable comments concern marijuana: he says it’s “not very different from…cigarettes” and “I don’t think it’s more dangerous than alcohol.” He did not come out in favour of legalisation, however, and this makes his views (and, to a certain extent, the position of the executive branch charged with carrying out federal law) incoherent – by which I mean, his various positions taken together are inconsistent. Obama may well ‘evolve’ further as he did with gay marriage, but any such evolution will likely come too late in his term to lead to an effective, permanent change in policy. Continue reading
Beyond 23andMe’s Shutdown: The Role of the FDA in the Future of Direct-to-Consumer Genetic Testing
Kyle Edwards, Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and The Ethox Centre, University of Oxford
Caroline Huang, The Ethox Centre, University of Oxford
An article based on this blog post has now been published in the May – June 2014 Hastings Center Report: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/hast.310/full. Please check out our more developed thoughts on this topic there!
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