The Centre for Policy Studies has recently published a report on euthanasia, authored by Cristina Odone. It’s available to download here, though it would seem that you can also buy a paper version for a tenner. It’s amazing for the sheer poverty of the argument; I might never have thought that so much specious nonsense […]
Month: October 2010
Stangroom on Opposition to Abortion
Hostile as I generally am to surveys as a tool in ethics, they are able to give us interesting anthropological insights on topics of moral concern. Jeremy Stangroom has been conducting a poll of people’s beliefs about the permissibility of abortion; and, though online polls are not wholly reliable, there seems to be some interesting […]
Malaria trial, the missing nurse and the media
By David Hunter I’m really not sure how to pitch this one – to be frank I don’t have enough credible information to go on – given that my first exposure to the story was via the Daily Mail… But it is also on the BBC’s site in various forms. The rough story is that […]
Project Prevention? Well, since you asked…
So the Guardian got in touch to see if I’d be able to contribute a Comment is Free column on Project Prevention, which has just started operating in the UK. For one reason or another, I didn’t get the email until the deadline had passed; but since I was planning on saying something about PP […]
Egregious Silliness in the Euthanasia Debate…
There’s a report in the Montreal Gazette from last Thursday concerning proposals to legalise euthanasia. And, assuming that the report is accurate, some of the things being said about those proposals are painfully, painfully, painfully daft. Margaret Somerville’s objection to euthanasia seems to be that it is killing, and that killing remains morally wrong “even […]
Can you Insure the DNA Dozen?
There’s an interesting piece that’s been floating around some of the newspapers (Telegraph coverage here; The Australian here) over the last few days about the “DNA Dozen” – 11 scientists and one lawyer who’re having their genome published online in order to demystify the process and tame some of the public’s perception. Fair dos to […]
Bioethics as a Spectator Sport
Remember when the BBC and ITV had both used to pretend that the other didn’t exist, except in veiled references to “the other side”? I always feel that talking about papers in Bioethics is a bit like that. Oh, I know that journals don’t engage in rivalry, that it’s all collegiate, and so on. But, […]
The Nobel Prize and the Holy See
Robert Edwrds was this week awarded a Nobel Prize for his pioneering work on IVF. It’s true, of course, that IVF made possible a range of procedures that generate important ethical questions – Arthur Caplan mentions some of them here (although the article in which he’s quoted is a little lightweight, and gives altogether too much […]
Brain Death, Decapitation and Good Arguments
One of the complaints that I’ve heard made about the JME is that its papers are too short: a word limit of only 3500 words means that arguments have to undergo a process of severe shrinkage to fit, and at least sometimes don’t survive. Sympathetic as I am to the complaint, I’m also aware that […]
Dorries, Disability and Benefit
When Nadine Dorries MP was elected to the Commons Health Select Committee, eyebrows were raised. But, hey – she’s an ex-nurse, so perhaps she could be relied on to have at least some sort of insight into matters relating to health (even if she does think that a foetus is capable of reaching out of […]