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 […]
Category: Blogosphere
Nootropic Drugs in the Professions
Across at NewAPPS, Eric Schliesser wonders aloud about how common nootropic drug use is in professional philosophy. (Nootropics are are “drugs, supplements, nutraceuticals, and functional foods that improve mental functions such as cognition, memory, intelligence, motivation, attention, and concentration” – Wikipedia.) And, quite rightly, some of the commentators have pointed out that it’s fairly common. Actually, it’s more […]
Suffering and the Human Condition
I’m currently working my way through the recently-released report by the Commission on Assisted Dying – it’s a long and appropriately life-sapping document, but a number of commentators has been quicker than I to get through it. Douglas Noble, writing at the BMJ blog, isn’t impressed. Based on what I’ve read so far, I’m tempted […]
A Conscience Clause with Claws
There’s a flurry of papers on conscientious objection in the latest JME: Giles Birchley argues, taking his cue from Arendt, that conscientious objection has a place in medicine here; Sophie Strickland’s paper on medical students’ attitude to conscientious objection (which I mentioned in July) is here; and Morten Magelssen wonders when conscientious objection should be accepted here. […]
A Philosopher Writes on her own Infertility
Over at Feminist Philosophers, there’s a great little series of posts by an anonymous female philosopher about her experience of becoming infertile. It’s well worth a read: part 1 is here; part 2 here; and part 3 here. I’m going to take the liberty of reproducing the penultimate paragraph: My partner and I are a […]
Smoking in Cars and the BMA: The Counterwheeze
You can tell libertarians from the sound they make: it’s the faint rattle of a tiny intellect untethered in an otherwise empty mind. Cheap and all-too-easy insults aside, though, I’d been wondering how long it’d be, in the wake of the BMA’s recommendation that smoking be banned from cars, before we got a response from […]
What can we Learn from “The Exorcist”?
When John Sentamu stood up in the House of Lords a couple of weeks ago and spoke about the need for the NHS to concern itself with “spiritual” needs – and illustrated his claim with an anecdote about something resembling an exorcism – the response from a lot of the blogosphere was, at its friendliest, one […]
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 […]
Following on from Last Week’s Post…
… I can’t resist this, from SMBC: Except that I’d want to insert the word “not” before the antepenultimate word. […]
C-Sections on Demand? Not Quite…
Stephen Latham has picked up a lead about NICE guidelines on the provision of caesarian sections: An update of a new guidance document being developed by the UK’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellenct (“NICE”) would permit caesarian section on maternal request, even when there are no medical indications for the procedure. […] The new […]