David, Søren and I have spent the last few days at the WCB in Singapore – one of us will open a “How was it for you?” thread in the next couple of days – and a theme or subtext of many of the talks was an endorsement on Ethical Anti-Univeralism (EAU). Very roughly, the […]
Category: Philosophy
Sporting Chances and the Justification of Surgery
There’s an interesting story on the front page of the Manchester Evening News about an 11-year-old who has asked that her right leg be removed so that she has a better chance of becoming a paralympian. […]
SAP Conference 2010
Since spending the weekend at the Society for Applied Philosophy’s conference in Oxford, I’ve been mulling over the ways in which a couple of the papers I head have implications for bioethics (if, indeed, they have any). […]
Oxford Online Debate: The Use of Drugs in Sport
I’d like to draw your attention to this: the latest in a series of online debates hosted by Oxford University. In this round, Julian Savulescu and John-William Devine are, respectively, proposing and opposing the motion “Performance enhancing drugs should be allowed in sport”. Roger Crisp is moderating. For the sake of keeping to the spirit […]
Age and Assisted Death in Scotland
The Scottish Parliament recently sought evidence in relation to the End of Life Assistance (Scotland) Bill; I responded to that call, and most of what I said would not be new to people who know me, or who read this blog. However, I did make a point there that I’ve not given an outing before; […]
Conference and Public Lecture: Humans and Other Animals
Details below the fold, or from here. […]
Graduate Workshop on Pain, Birmingham, 11th June
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS Stuart Derbyshire (Psychology, Birmingham): “The difficulty of locating the beginnings of pain”. David Bain (Philosophy, Glasgow): “Pain and Imperatives” CALL FOR PAPERS If you are a postgraduate (taught or research) student working on pain, you are invited to submit an abstract for presentation at the workshop. Deadline is 30th April. A contribution to […]
Concord in Ethics and Bioethics
Over at Pea Soup, Ralph Wedgwood makes an interesting claim: I suspect that on several issues that are the focus of fierce moral controversies today – such as homosexuality and the death penalty – there is significantly less disagreement among contemporary philosophers than in the population as a whole. Indeed, I tentatively suggest, the historical […]
Killing, Letting Die, and Epistemology
David Shoemaker has an interesting post on PEASoup about the epistemology of advance directives. Starting from a fairly standard thought-experiment about an older, dementing person who wants to accept treatment that her younger, pre-demented person had refused, he adds to the standard metaphysical arguments a claim that the real puzzle for ADs isn’t metaphysical, it’s […]
Questions, questions…
In response to the post below about circumcision, “IntactByDefault” asked a number of questions. I think that they merit a thread of their own, although I’ve touched on some of the issues before. Is it not the case that, short of legislation, the role of bioethicists is to put a check on the potentially unethical […]