Guest post by Sorcha Uí Chonnachtaigh On Thursday, 9 December, the Centre for Professional Ethics at Keele hosted a Wellcome funded seminar entitled “Consent and Organ Donation” to coincide with the final lecture in a series on organ donation by visiting Leverhulme Professor Martin Wilkinson. Martin’s lecture on Wednesday evening (8 December), “Reforms for the […]
Category: Philosophy
My Homunculus Made Me Do It!
Many readers will be familiar with the “Sokal Hoax”, in which a nonsensical paper was submitted to, and accepted by, the journal Social Text, thereby demonstrating the vacuity of at least some PoMo theorising. Well, John MacLachlan has repeated the feat, having had a patently absurd abstract accepted for presentation at a conference on integrative […]
Savulescu on Mathematical Enhancement
Over at Practical Ethics, Julian Savulescu has been thinking about the possibilities raised by the observation that brain stimulation would appear to have increased the mathematical ability of trial participants. He concludes that the observation – and the implicit uses to which it could be put – are ethically important. One of the arguments he […]
Can you Insure the DNA Dozen?
There’s an interesting piece that’s been floating around some of the newspapers (Telegraph coverage here; The Australian here) over the last few days about the “DNA Dozen” – 11 scientists and one lawyer who’re having their genome published online in order to demystify the process and tame some of the public’s perception. Fair dos to […]
Brain Death, Decapitation and Good Arguments
One of the complaints that I’ve heard made about the JME is that its papers are too short: a word limit of only 3500 words means that arguments have to undergo a process of severe shrinkage to fit, and at least sometimes don’t survive. Sympathetic as I am to the complaint, I’m also aware that […]
How Important are Genetic Origins?
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, […]
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 […]
When being the Worst-Off isn’t the Worst
For a little over a year now I’ve been tinkering with a paper on the brain drain – that phenomenon by which expertise migrates from poorer to wealthier areas – and how we should think about it from a moral point of view. Earlier drafts have been inflicted on attendees at the “New Directions in […]
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 […]
Professor Richard Ashcroft’s Inaugural Lecture: ‘The Republic of Health – Ethics and Politics in 21st Century Healthcare’
A link to a podcast of Professor Richard Ashcroft’s belated inaugural lecture can be found here: The Republic of Health – Ethics and Politics in 21st Century Healthcare And since Richard is one of JME’s deputy editors I thought some folk might be interested. The abstract is below the fold. […]