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 […]
Category: Thinking Aloud
A Puzzle about Anti-Universalism
David, Søren and I have spent the last few days at the WCB in Singapore – one of us will open a “How was it for you?” thread in the next couple of days – and a theme or subtext of many of the talks was an endorsement on Ethical Anti-Univeralism (EAU). Very roughly, the […]
Sporting Chances and the Justification of Surgery
There’s an interesting story on the front page of the Manchester Evening News about an 11-year-old who has asked that her right leg be removed so that she has a better chance of becoming a paralympian. […]
The Complexity of Non-Voluntary Euthanasia
Dr Howard Martin has been in the news recently for having told the Telegraph that he intentionally shortened the life of a number of his patients. On the face of it, his actions seem to be fairly straightforward, and to lend some kind of support to the fears of those who think that any easing […]
Pharmaceutical Prohibition: as Successful as Ever
An item on Sky news the other day caught my attention. It concerned a new wave of legal highs being manufactured in China. The thrust of the report is that, in the wake of mephedrone having been banned a few weeks ago, enterprising Chinese chemists are working on a new set of chemicals designed to […]
The Backward QALY
There’s an intriguing paper in May’s JME by Christopher Cowley in which he proposes a “retrospective QALY”. […]
Risking Censure, and the Ontology of Misconduct
An article in a recent BMJ has caught my eye: Yates and James’ “Risk Factors at Medical School for Subsequent Professional Misconduct: Multicentre Retrospective Case-Control Study”. Based on an admittedly-small sample, it suggests that male sex, lower estimated social class, and poor early performance at medical school were independent risk factors for subsequent professional misconduct. […]
Age and Assisted Death in Scotland
The Scottish Parliament recently sought evidence in relation to the End of Life Assistance (Scotland) Bill; I responded to that call, and most of what I said would not be new to people who know me, or who read this blog. However, I did make a point there that I’ve not given an outing before; […]
Consent and Consensus
For the past week, the news in the UK has been all about coalitions, compromise, consensus and that sort of thing. The hung Parliament has been heralded as ushering in a new era of politics-by-agreement, rather than by the traditional Westminster model of simply flattening everyone else. And a lot of people seem to think […]
Slightly Gratuitous Abuse of the Blog…
Someone’s just asked me if it’d be possible to design a virus specifically to kill people with a certain given genetic signature. I have a feeling that the South African security services tried to cook up an ethnically specific biological agent in the ’80s, but am not sure whether this is an urban myth. Any […]