Some very strange papers have just appeared in Bioethics regarding homeopathy. Not so long ago, the journal published a paper by Kevin Smith that advanced the claim that homeopathy is not only ineffective, but ethically problematic. The position taken was that homeopathy “ought to be actively rejected by healthcare professionals”, and that it is in fact ethically […]
Category: Philosophy
CFP: Wellbeing and Public Policy
This may be of interest to readers… MANCEPT Workshops in Political Theory – Ninth Annual Conference Manchester Centre for Political Theory (MANCEPT), University of Manchester 5th – 7th September 2012 Workshop on Well-being and Public Policy: Call for Abstracts David Cameron, in a recent speech on introducing national measures of well-being to inform public policy, […]
A Small Solution for a Big Problem?
BioNews asked me to write something about Matthew Liao, Anders Sandberg and Rebacca Roache’s paper on engineering humanity to minimise global warming. I’d been meaning to for a while, so this was the prod I needed. Anyway: my take on their paper is here; but I thought I’d also reproduce it on this blog. What […]
Matters of Principlism
There’s a short paper in the latest JME about which I’ve been meaning to write something for a while – ever since I noticed it as a pre-pub: William Muirhead’s “When Four Principles are Too Many”. (Raa Gillon provides a commentary here.) Anyone who’s ever heard me talk professionally for longer than about 35 seconds […]
An open letter from Giubilini and Minerva
When we decided to write this article about after-birth abortion we had no idea that our paper would raise such a heated debate. “Why not? You should have known!” people keep on repeating everywhere on the web. The answer is very simple: the article was supposed to be read by other fellow bioethicists who were […]
Why Is Infanticide Worse Than Abortion?
Guest Post by James Wilson The controversy over the Giubilini and Minerva article has highlighted an important disconnect between the way that academic bioethicists think about their role, and what ordinary people think should be the role of bioethics. The style of this dispute – its acrimony and apparent incomprehension on both sides – are […]
The Status of Bioethics
There’s been a couple of things that’ve appeared on the net over the last few days that have revivified something that’s been niggling away at the back of my mind for quite a long time now: the status of bioethics as an academic discipline. First there was Brian Leiter’s blog post. Commenting on the oddness […]
Obligatory Ventilation: Why “Elective Ventilation” should not be Elective
Guest post by Dominic Wilkinson (Cross-posted from Practical Ethics) On the BBC’s Moral Maze this evening, the question of elective ventilation was discussed at some length. (For those who missed it, the programme is still available here). There were several striking features of that discussion, but one argument that stood out was the argument against […]
Nothing to lose? Killing is disabling
Guest post by Dominic Wilkinson (Cross-posted from Practical Ethics) In a provocative article forthcoming in the Journal of Medical Ethics (one of a new series of feature articles in the journal) philosophers Walter Sinnott Armstrong and Franklin Miller ask ‘what makes killing wrong?’ Their simple and intuitively appealing answer is that killing is wrong because […]
Discovering Consciousness in the “Permanently Unconscious”: What Should We Do?
Comment on “Bedside detection of awareness in the vegetative state: a cohort study” by Damian Cruse, Srivas Chennu, Camille Chatelle, Tristan A Bekinschtein, Davinia Fernández-Espejo, John D Pickard, Steven Laureys, Adrian M Owen Published in The Lancet, online Nov 10. Cruse and colleagues founds evidence of some kind of consciousness in 3 out of 16 […]