We are happy to announce a symposium on Public Health and Political Philosophy hosted by the Centre for Professional Ethics at Keele and funded by the Wellcome Trust. The symposium will run from 10 – 5 on the 17th of June and is at Keele University. (Directions to Keele can be found here: http://www.keele-conference.com/21/directions ) […]
Month: May 2011
In ur videoz, appreciatin ur formz
After yesterday’s maundering on about Kant, here’s an example of how to keep philosophy in its rightful place. I like to think that the cat was thinking, “Holy tables? Really? I’m going to have to save you from yourself here, matey”. (props to HappyToast for the link.) […]
Musing about Kant (2)
It’s very easy, having encountered Kant for the first time, to think that his account of morality is much too cold and impersonal to be plausible – the sort of thing you might expect from a computer rather than a human. And though this criticism is rather simplistic – I think that Kant does have […]
Medicine and the Military Covenant
There’s been a lot in the news over the last couple of days about the Military Covenant, and how there’s a plant to give it a legal footing as part of the Armed Forces Bill. Some of the reportage over the weekend suggested that there would be explicit prioritisation for members and ex-members of the […]
Apparently, I Support Slavery
I like the idea of free-at-the-point-of-use healthcare, and if you want to call that a right, that’s fine with me, too. In the world of Tea Party-affliated Republican senator Rand Paul, that means I’m the sort of person who’d support turning up at a physician’s door with the police, and forcing that physician (and all […]
Special Offer! Genital Mutilation!
Today’s dose of righteous anger comes, via Ophelia Benson and Marie Myung-Ok Lee writing in The Atlantic, from the fifth annual Congress on Aesthetic Vaginal Surgery, held just outside Tuscon at the end of last year. The affable organizer of the Tucson event, Dr. Red Alinsod, was an early entrant into cosmetic-gyn, and is recognized for […]
Musing about Kant
So… I’ve been writing a paper on Kant, the basic thrust of which is to assert the importance of respect for autonomy over and above respect for persons. (That is, I think that Kant thinks that we ought to respect persons because they’re autonomous; this is in contrast to the modern idea that we ought […]
Stem-Cells: To Patent or Not?
In spare moments, I’ve been wondering about the Advocate-General of European Court of Justice’s recent recommendation that patents involving human embryonic stem-cells be prohibited, and the response that it’s generated. One of the best-publicised responses was the letter from Austin Smith et al that appeared in Nature, which complained that the recommendation would be bad […]
Language and ethics – being “let” to go overdue
By David Hunter The more I think about it the more I think that one issue bioethicists should play much closer attention to is the language used to describe things. This isn’t a new thought, Kongzi (known as Confucius in the West) said: Tsze-lu said, “The ruler of Wei has been waiting for you, in […]