Guest Post by Dominic Wilkinson, Associate Editor, Journal of Medical Ethics In a provocative paper published today in the Journal of Medical Ethics, US theologian Cristina Richie argues that the carbon cost and environmental impact of population growth in the West should lead to restrictions on artificial reproduction. She points to the substantial carbon emissions that […]
Category: Philosophy
Consigned to the Index
There’re probably times when all of us have had a solution, and just had to find a problem for it. It’s an easy trap; and it’s one into which I suspect Gretchen Goldman may have fallen in an article in Index on Censorship about scientific freedom and how it’s under threat from disputes about Federal funding in the […]
While We’re Talking about Ambiguous Sex
So: what is one to make of Conchita Wurst? I’ve not heard the song that won Eurovision this year, but I’m willing to bet that the world would be a better place if every entrant had been thrown into the Køge Bay before a single note was struck. But that might just be me. Writing in the Telegraph, Brendan […]
Rescuing the Duty to Rescue
Guest post by Tina Rulli and Joseph Millum It is commonly thought that individuals have a moral duty to rescue others in peril. Bioethicists have leveraged this duty to rescue for a variety of purposes—including to criticize the use of placebo controls in trials in developing countries; to defend duties of researchers to return urgent […]
Winston Churchill and the Spirochaetes
Did you hear the programme about syphilis on Radio 3 on Sunday? If not, you can catch up on it here – and I’d thoroughly recommend doing so: it was superb. One bit in particular caught my attention; it had to do with the use of penicillin to treat the illness during World War II. […]
Is the NIMH Turning its Back on DSM-V?
Thanks to Brian Earp for bringing this release from the US’ National Institute of Mental Health to my attention; it concerns the Institute’s decision to move away from DSM as its diagnostic tool. DSM has been enormously successful – in terms of having established itself at the centre of psychiatry – but it has been […]
JME Special Edition on Infanticide and “After-Birth Abortion”
It’s going to be a little while before regular blogging resumes here – I’m aiming to get back up to speed in the next 10 days or so – but, in the meantime, the special edition of the JME devoted to The Paper Of Which We Do Not Speak is now out and available here. […]
Are Biomedical Ethics Journals Institutionally Racist?
So there’s this letter published in the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry that moots the idea that the top biomedical ethics journals might be institutionally racist. In it, Subrata Chattopadhyay, Catherine Myser and Raymond De Vries point out that the editorial boards of a good number of journals are dominated by members who are located in the global North – countries officially listed as […]
Gay Conversion “Therapy”: Might the CMF have a point?
Spoiler alert: Almost certainly not. But hear me out for a bit. The Christian Medical Fellowship blog had an article posted yesterday about what it praised as a balanced documentary concerning “sexual orientation change efforts” – gay conversion therapy to you and me – on Radio 4 on Sunday. Actually, it wasn’t a documentary – it was […]
Cochlear Implant: On!
A few weeks ago, I linked to a post on William Mager’s blog in which he said (a) that he was about to have a cochlear implant fitted, and (b) that he’d write about the experience as it progressed. I don’t know how many readers of this blog followed the link or subscribed; for those […]