By Andrew Hantel, Gregory Abel, Mark Siegler Few people would consider rationing to be a positive concept. When confronted with restricted access to something we want or need, we inevitably react with negative feelings. Such a reaction belies the overall concept of allocating a scare resource and distracts from the good that can come from […]
Category: Distributive justice
Charging migrant women for pregnancy care is a worrying sign of the times
By Arianne Shahvisi and Fionnuala Finnerty Precious is a 26-year-old Eritrean woman who has recently arrived in the UK. She wishes to apply for asylum but is yet to do so. Precious is destitute and is living in a church and relying on the kindness of the Eritrean community. She sees a GP at an […]
It’s Time to Pay Attention to “Chronic Fatigue Syndrome”
By Diane O’Leary. Professional and public debate about myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) has reached a new pitch. A London Times article in August described the “acrimonious scientific row” that’s erupted in the UK now that the US Institute of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, and Centers for Disease Control insist that ME/CFS is not a psychosomatic condition, but […]
Getting libertarians on board with mandatory vaccination
By Charlie T. Blunden Non-vaccination is causing serious problems worldwide. Take measles as an example. The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control say that 95% of a population must receive two doses of a measles vaccine in order to prevent transmission of the disease through the population. However, many nations are falling below this […]
A Moral Framework for Living Donor Transplantation
By Lainie Friedman Ross and J. Richard Thistlethwaite Living donor transplantation has been controversial since its inception because it exposes donors to medical risks for the medical benefit of their intended recipients. The usual bioethics argument about the moral permissibility of living kidney donation focuses on the concept of respect for persons which is often […]
A Hot Take on a Cold Body
It’s good to see Nils’ post about the recent UK cryonics ruling getting shared around quite a bit – so it should. I thought I’d throw in my own voice, too. About 18 months ago, Imogen Jones and I wrote a paper musing on some of the ethical and legal dimensions of Christopher Priest’s The Prestige. […]
Gouging
Jumping to the defence of pharmaceutical companies over their pricing policies isn’t fashionable – and a lot of the time, it’s not going to end prettily. But it’s perfectly coherent to think that the profit motive is one of the motors of innovation, and that it’s part of the quid pro quo for spending money on […]
Free Labour and Quiet Doubts
Those of us on the academic side of things will almost certainly recognise the situation: you’re sitting in your school’s Teaching & Learning committee, or a staff/student committee meeting, or something like that, and you hear the complaint from students that they should get more contact time. Academics should spend more time teaching rather than […]
Should Doctors Perform “Minor” Forms of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) as a Compromise to Respect Culture?
by Brian D. Earp / (@briandavidearp), with a separate guest post by Robert Darby A small surgical “nick” to a girl’s clitoris or other purportedly minimalist procedures on the vulvae of young women and girls should be legally permitted, argue two gynecologists this week in the Journal of Medical Ethics. Their proposal is offered as a “compromise” […]
Jeremy Hunt and Costs to the Taxpayer
“Personal responsibility” is a strange phrase: while not as slippery as some, it can mean any number of things, and be put to use in any number of political contexts. It was the title of the speech that the Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, gave yesterday. In that, he spoke of three aspects to the concept. First […]