I’m a bit behind the curve with this, but I thought it worth noting the story of Nan Maitland, who recently travelled to Dignitas* at the start of March. She was suffering from arthritis – which, though painful, is a long way short of a terminal illness. (Her story is reminiscent of Robert and Jennifer […]
Category: Thinking Aloud
Medical Neutrality? The Red Cross and MSF
Adam Curtis is one of my favourite film-makers: I don’t think his programmes are always right, but they’re always provocative – and I think they’re more right than wrong. He also has a blog, which – though updated even less frequently than this one at the moment – is excellent. His latest post is about […]
Ethics (without the brain?)
I’ve set my RSS to receive updates from Secondhand Smoke, which is one of the blogs at First Things. It’s written by Wesley Smith, who is affiliated to the Discovery Institute, the creationist thinktank in Seattle: that gives you an indication of the sort of position he occupies – not just on bioethics, but also […]
Is it OK to Laugh?
Guy Francis has a website and a YouTube channel. Some of the stuff on his YouTube channel is him singing along to pop songs. What’s noteworthy is that Francis also has quite severe Tourette’s syndrome. This makes his karaoke somewhat unique. (For a sample, take a look at this. It’s almost certainly Not Safe for […]
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 […]
Say what you like about the Nazis, but…
Here’s something that occurred to me in the small hours about the argumentum ad hitlerum as it gets applied to the euthanasia dispute. Proponents of the argument point to what happened in the Third Reich as a warning about euthanasia, the claim being that the Nazi so-called euthanasia programme led to the involuntary deaths of many […]
Project Prevention? Well, since you asked…
So the Guardian got in touch to see if I’d be able to contribute a Comment is Free column on Project Prevention, which has just started operating in the UK. For one reason or another, I didn’t get the email until the deadline had passed; but since I was planning on saying something about PP […]
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 […]
Videotape, Sex and Danger
Muireann Quigley has pointed me in the direction of this story, concerning the risks of HIV faced by those working in the porn industry. An Aids activist group has filed a workplace safety complaint against Larry Flynt, accusing the porn king of creating an unsafe environment for his stable of sex stars by not requiring they […]