It’s something of a commonplace to suggest that genetics poses a number of problems both in and for bioethics as it’s traditionally done. One of the problems in bioethics is that there could well be times when giving genetic information to a person about himself based on a test that he’s had will mean, necessarily, […]
Category: Blogosphere
Spineless in Saudi?
A little while ago, Richard Ashcroft alerted me to this story: a judge in Saudi Arabia was considering surgical paralysis as the sentence for a man who had caused a similar injury to someone else in a fight. The BBC’s story came via a report on Amnesty’s website, which you can find here. The story […]
COBRA Conference on Teaching Professional Ethics
Nathan Emmerich reviews the conference here. He’s also asked me to add a reminder about the conference on Social Scientific Approaches to Bioethics to be held in London in January. I posted the CFP here a little while ago, but the conference website is here. […]
On Nailing one’s Colours to the Mast
“You’re a Kantian,” people in my department tell me. At least, I think that’s what they say – I’m assuming that there’s no comma before the final syllable, and that I’ve got all the vowels right. I don’t think I am, actually (a Kantian, that is – I couldn’t comment on the other option). I’m […]
Killing Time – or Wasting It?
It was reported a couple of days ago that Ray Gosling was to face charges of wasting police time after having made certain statements on a TV programme about the death of a partner – statements that the police subsequently investigated and that led to his arrest for murder in February. The charge of wasting […]
Let’s hope he only paid a fraction of the postage…
Xtaldave, who does things with science here at the University of Manchester, has found a vacancy for a job working as an NHS homeopath in Tayside – a trust that has just had to shed 500 real jobs. Manchester is nice, but Tayside is nicer, and the pay is excellent. Naturally, he’s applied for it. […]
Who Ya Gonna Call?
Here’s a short story about the evolution of modern science: we used to understand very little about the world, and lacked the means to understand it. But we wanted to know how it worked, and we invented things like gods and demons to explain phenomena. As we gradually learned more and more about the way […]
MRI Scanners aren’t simply Medically Valuable
I’m assuming that many, if not most, of the readers of this blog will be medical types, and so will have spent a significant amount of time looking at MRI scans of brains and thoracic cavities, all the while fighting the urge to see what would happen if they used the big, expensive and medically […]
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 […]
More on the Oklahoma Abortion Law
A couple of weeks ago, I posted something here about the progress of a handful of Bills working their way through the Oklahoma legislature that would, among other things, require that women have an unnecessary scan – potentially internal – before being allowed an abortion. I think that the proposals are pretty much indefensible. Not […]