Conscientious Objection and What Makes a Medic

Francesca Minerva has drawn my attention to this paper by Sophie Strickland, currently available as a pre-publication download via the JME homepage, concerning conscientious objection among UK medical students. Students were invited to respond to a set of questions in an online poll to determine whether there were procedures to which they’d object, and in which […]

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Pratchett and Assisted Dying: A Question of Balance?

If you’ve not yet seen “Choosing to Die”, Terry Pratchett’s film about Dignitas from Monday night, I recommend that you go and watch it now.  (I don’t know if it’s available outside the UK: I’m sure it’ll appear on YouTube soon, though; or, if you’re outside th UK, get a Brit to download it and […]

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Good News from Keele

It was announced yesterday that both the Centre for Professional Ethics, and the philosophy programme at Keele, have been spared the axe.  From Angus Dawson’s Facebook message: We are delighted to announce that due to substantial discussions over the last two days the proposals to close PEAK (the Centre for Professional Ethics at Keele University) […]

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NHS Treatment and Failed Asylum-Seekers

A medical student from Newcastle writes: I am currently writing an ethics assignment relating to a paediatric placement I undertook earlier this academic year.  During the placement I was involved in the care of 11-month old twins from Khartoum, Sudan, whose parents had brought them into hospital because they were suffering from recurrent generalised tonic-clonic […]

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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 […]

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