I’m a bit bowled over by this. There’s a Bill currently before the South Dakota legislature that would, if passed, change the scope of justifiable homicide laws. FOR AN ACT ENTITLED, An Act to expand the definition of justifiable homicide to provide for the protection of certain unborn children. BE IT ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF […]
Category: Blogosphere
Ethics (without the brain?)
I’ve set my RSS to receive updates from Secondhand Smoke, which is one of the blogs at First Things. It’s written by Wesley Smith, who is affiliated to the Discovery Institute, the creationist thinktank in Seattle: that gives you an indication of the sort of position he occupies – not just on bioethics, but also […]
Spanish Medical Law Blog
José Fernándes has drawn my attention to this blog, Medicina y Derecho (Medicine and Law) which may be of interest to Spanish-speaking readers. My own grasp of the language is (alas) too poor to allow me to say anything about the blog’s interests, or what’s going on there; maybe someone could give a quick assessment in the […]
Live-Donor Transplants: A Real Prisoner’s Dilemma
You may have seen in the news recently the story of Jamie and Gladys Scott, two sisters in Mississippi serving a life prison sentence for armed robbery. Jamie requires dialysis, and has been offered parole on medical grounds; Gladys has been granted parole on condition that she agree to donate a kidney to her sister. (The […]
Is it OK to Laugh?
Guy Francis has a website and a YouTube channel. Some of the stuff on his YouTube channel is him singing along to pop songs. What’s noteworthy is that Francis also has quite severe Tourette’s syndrome. This makes his karaoke somewhat unique. (For a sample, take a look at this. It’s almost certainly Not Safe for […]
Savulescu on Mathematical Enhancement
Over at Practical Ethics, Julian Savulescu has been thinking about the possibilities raised by the observation that brain stimulation would appear to have increased the mathematical ability of trial participants. He concludes that the observation – and the implicit uses to which it could be put – are ethically important. One of the arguments he […]
The Anti-Abortion Appropriation of Consent
By far the biggest response that this blog has had came when I had a bit of a rant about Nadine Dorries a couple of weeks ago. I’m back on her case today; she’s the gift that keeps on giving. This video* provides footage of her speech to the Commons on Tuesday night; there’s a transcript available […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]