By Erik Gustavsson and Lars Lindblom. If you visit a conference or workshop on priority setting there will most certainly be several slots on empirical studies exploring public values about principles for priority setting. Over the last 20 years, there has been numerous such studies, and the interest among researchers to perform such studies accentuated […]
Category: Methodology
More ethics is good, right?
By Jane Johnson and Chris Degeling The ethics of synthetic biology, the ethics of conspiracy theories, the ethics of movie producers… it seems there could be a separate ethics for almost anything. And with each separate ethics there could be distinctive issues that are involved, as well as specialized ethical approaches, theories, and so on. […]
Unethical World Medical Association Standards for Placebo Trials?
Guest post by Jeremy Howick Trials show that drugs called ‘interferon alpha’ extend life in people with advanced skin cancer (by a bit). If we invented a new drug to treat advanced skin cancer, most patients would want to know whether the new drug was better than interferon alpha. It would be less useful […]
Not Just About Consent: The Ethical Dimensions of Research Methodology Knowledge in IRBs
Guest Post: Sarah Wieten The recent article, “Some Social Scientists Are Tired of Asking for Permission” in the New York Times inspired a great deal of debate about the role of institutional research ethics board (IRB) oversight in social science, which some argue is in most cases unlikely to involve significant harm to participants. While […]
Writers Whose Expertise is Deplorably Low
Something popped up on my twitter feed the other day: this document from Oxford’s philosophy department. (I’m not sure quite what it is. Brochure? In-house magazine? Dunno. It doesn’t really matter, though.) In it, there’s a striking passage from Jeff McMahan’s piece on practical ethics: Even though what is variously referred to as ‘practical ethics’ or […]
Circumcision and Sexual Function: Bad Science Reporting Misleads Parents
by Brian D. Earp / (@briandavidearp) Introduction Another day, another round of uncritical media coverage of an empirical study about circumcision and sexual function. That’s including from the New York Times, whose Nicholas Bakalar has more or less recycled the content of a university press release without incorporating any skeptical analysis from other scientists. That’s par for […]
The Unbearable Asymmetry of Bullshit
By Brian D. Earp (@briandavidearp) * Note: this article was first published online at Quillette magazine. The official version is forthcoming in the HealthWatch Newsletter; see http://www.healthwatch-uk.org/. Introduction Science and medicine have done a lot for the world. Diseases have been eradicated, rockets have been sent to the moon, and convincing, causal explanations have been given for a whole range […]
Stop What You’re Doing: This is Important.
I’d not realised it, but the latest iteration of the erstwhile Medical Innovation Bill – colloquially known as the Saatchi Bill – is up for debate in the Commons on Friday. This is it in its latest form: to all intents and purposes, though, it’s the same thing about which I’ve blogged before. In a […]
How to be a good (consequentialist) bioethicist…
By David Hunter There has recently been a pattern of papers (and I am not going to identify which ones) which I take as being slightly embarrassing to academic bioethicists because they portray us in a less than flattering light because of the naive mistakes they seem to make, or the outlandish poorly argued claims […]
On Being a Hypocrite
A piece appeared in The Atlantic a few days ago that aims to prick the perceived bubble of professional ethicists. In fact, the headline is pretty hostile: THE HYPOCRISY OF PROFESSIONAL ETHICISTS. Blimey. The sub-headline doesn’t pull its punches either: “Even people who decide what’s right and wrong for a living don’t always behave well.” I […]