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. […]
Category: Philosophy
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 […]
Teaching Ethics in Medical Schools
My attention has wandered recently to this editorial in Clinical Medicine, concerning the place and content of ethics education in the undergraduate medical curriculum. There’s nothing Earth-shattering in there, but the piece does draw out a few persistent problems with teaching ethics within the medical degree: […]