You must, by now, have heard of the Saudi Arabian blogger Raif Badawi. Just in case you haven’t (really?), here’s a potted biography: having set up the secularist forum Free Saudi Liberals, he was arrested for insulting Islam and showing disobedience. Among the formal charges he faced was one for apostasy, which carries the death penalty in Saudi. […]
Category: Politics
Bye-Bye Saatchi Bill?
It would appear that Lord Saatchi’s Medical Innovation Bill is toast. The Lib Dems, who are reportedly the ones to have vetoed it, are nevertheless being mealy-mouthed about something they should be proclaiming from the rooftops: the Bill is/ was needless at best, and possibly dangerous. But, hey: there’s an election coming up, and cancer treatment […]
Does Religion Deserve a Place in Secular Medicine?
By Brian D. Earp The latest issue of the Journal of Medical Ethics is out, and in it, Professor Nigel Biggar—an Oxford theologian—argues that “religion” should have a place in secular medicine (click here for a link to the article). Some people will feel a shiver go down their spines—and not only the non-religious. After […]
Free Speech and the CMF
Despite a slight reticence when it comes to quoting Mill approvingly, I do have to admit that sometimes he does articulate a thought clearly and pithily, and sometimes it’s a thought in which all right-thinking people ought to see the merit. Like, for example, this, from the opening paragraph of chapter III in On Liberty: An opinion […]
Would the Falconer Bill Increase the Suicide Rate?
This is just a quickie – I promise. A tweet this morning from Kevin Yuill raises what he sees as a scary prospect: The Falconer bill will treble suicides amongst the terminally ill, according to Dignity in Dying. Is that what we want? Reject this bill. He bases his claim on two things, both from […]
Once More unto the Breach of Covenant?
The “Military Covenant” is in the news again: The government is failing to abide by its military covenant, medical experts who treat injured soldiers have said. Leading professors in psychology and orthopaedics say the healthcare system is not providing veterans with the service they have been promised. […] The moral obligation to treat veterans should […]
Gaia Doesn’t Care where your Baby Comes From
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 […]
ARTs in a Warming World
There are some people who disagree, but we can take some things as read: there is such a thing as global climate change, it is at least substantially anthropogenic, and there are moral reasons to try to minimise it. With that in mind, how should we think about reproductive technologies? These are techniques whose intent […]
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 […]