In case you missed it, there’s a little under a week left to listen again to last night’s Radio 4 documentary on the Swiss assisted suicide movement: follow this link.  For what it’s worth, I couldn’t help thinking that it was a little scare-mongering and tabloid.  (So the mentally ill or non-terminal might be able to access AS; maybe even the not-ill-at-all.  Woo-hoo.  I don’t really see why that should have to be a problem.  At the very least, it seems to display a shoddy blanketing of all those with mental illness as being, like, CRAZY ALL THE TIME.  Not so.  It seems perfectly reasonable to imagine, say, a schizophrenic or bipolar person deciding calmly that they no longer want to live this kind of life - and the mere fact that, strictly speaking, they have a mental illness is neither here nor there for most of the time.  Granted, you might want to assist with suicide during a psychotic episode - but there’s more to it than that.)

The programme gets a reasonable write-up in The Times - with, unsurprisingly, extra comments from people like Care not Killing and Dignity in Dying.  Sarah Wootton, of the latter organisation, is quoted as saying that

We believe the law should change in the UK to allow terminally ill, mentally competent, adults to have the choice of an assisted death but we are also very clear that should be within a strict framework of legal safeguards.  I am very concerned about Dignitas. Mental competence is an essential precursor to an assisted death and we are absolutely immovable on that. We need to give a clear signal that to assist non-terminally ill adults to die is wrong.

Well, yes: legal safeguards are probably in order.  But I find myself siding with Dignitas’ Ludwig Manelli here - why the terminal illness criterion?  (Apologies for the blatant spamming, but this is a question I’ve raised elsewhere.)  If a person wants to cash in their chips and they’re competent, and if there’s someone who’s willing to help, then why not let them?

Okay - since everyone else on teh t’interwebz seems to be blogging about Watchmen, I thought I might join in.  Especially because, if I don’t, David will: I think he’s more of a geek than I.  (Most people are.)  So, yeah.  Long, violent, extraordinarily faithful to the book except for the improved dénouement, I’d've shot the final scene differently, and so on.  But what struck me was the way in which the lead characters seem to embody certain moral archetypes almost perfectly.

***I don’t think that there are any spoilers ahead, but if you’ve not read the book or seen the film, you might want to take care…***

more…

This has been bugging me for months, if not years.  Sorry to spam it here, but maybe someone could provide me with an answer: if and when an effective treatment is discovered for c. difficile, will it have to be renamed - perhaps as c. facile?  Have I missed something?

Like I said - sorry.

I’ve been thinking recently about what’s going on when one’s engaged in a piece of ethical writing, and what counts as a proper parameter for it.  Particularly, I’ve been wondering whether there’s any obligation to be consistent between papers - is there any need for the papers that one publishes to be compatible at all?

Obviously, people sometimes change their minds over this or that issue, and perhaps they issue retractions or write papers saying, “In 2002 I thought that the sky was blue and the grass green.  However, I have been forced to reconsider this in the light of…” and so on.  That’s not really what I have in mind, though.  My thought has more to do with a broadly ethical question to do with the kind of role ethicists ought to take in print or the kind of thing a philosophical researcher ought to be.

Here’s the thought: Imagine that I can see an argument in favour of a given position, and an argument against it.  Each is formally valid - the difference is that they disagree on a premise.  (Let’s say that one is consequentialist, and the other non-consequentialist.)  Would it be OK for me to write and publish two papers - one advocating each position - if I could do so well?

Part of me thinks that there’d be no problem at all, and there’s a couple of reasons for this.  more…

The latest JME is out today… and I’d just like to draw everyone’s attention to the paper on facial allograft transplantation by Ben White and some random bloke who needs a haircut.  This isn’t because I had anything to do with it, but because (a) it’s very good, and (b) it’s based on Ben’s dissertation from his intercalated degree with us here at Manchester.  To go from a standing start as an ethicist to a publishable paper in a little over 9 months is impressive indeed.

He’s not the first Manchester intercalater to trouble the pages of the journal; I hope he’s not the last.

CLARIFICATION: As Sorn points out in the comments, this paper was in the JME tubes long before the blog got going.  And I think it’s teriffic for ANY student to be subitting papers and having them accepted.  No favouritism here.