Over at Pea Soup, Ralph Wedgwood makes an interesting claim: I suspect that on several issues that are the focus of fierce moral controversies today – such as homosexuality and the death penalty – there is significantly less disagreement among contemporary philosophers than in the population as a whole. Indeed, I tentatively suggest, the historical […]
Category: Thinking Aloud
On the subject of Mephedrone…
I think that it’s worth pointing out that the way the media have handled mephedrone has been generally pathetic. This is not wholly a surprise, because the way the media handle any drugs story tends towards the pathetic. […]
Journal-ism
I got an email today from one of our current batch of students, who will – all being well – be collecting his MA in the next few months.* The essence of the email is this: over the course of his time with us, he’s found that his interest in medical ethics and law has […]
Parachuting to the Front of the Queue?
A curious letter was sent out by the Department of Health the other day to GPs and the Chief Executives of various health authorities, trusts, and so on. The full text is available online, but here’s the nub of it: ACCESS TO HEALTH SERVICES FOR MILITARY VETERANS – PRIORITY TREATMENT The purpose of this letter […]
Questions, questions…
In response to the post below about circumcision, “IntactByDefault” asked a number of questions. I think that they merit a thread of their own, although I’ve touched on some of the issues before. Is it not the case that, short of legislation, the role of bioethicists is to put a check on the potentially unethical […]
Public Spending – and the NHS in Perspective.
I have a vague memory of John Lydon telling the crowd at the first Sex Pistols reunion gig in 1996 (Woo-hoo! I was there!) that he’d had a message of support from the owner of Creation records. “Don’t trust Alan McGee,” he snarled. “He’s a very clever man.” […]
The Good of Small Things
A few nights ago, I went out for a curry with a doctor friend who’s just returned from a year working in Africa. She was telling me all about the experience and about its difficulties. Some of these difficulties are straightforwardly down to poverty; others are down to mismanagement or – if not exactly mismanagement […]
Too Braney by Half?
One of my favourite blogs is spEak You’re bRanes, “dedicated to the dribble-spattered lunacy of BBC ‘Have Your Say’ discussions”. It’s splenetic, merciless and very, very funny in its dissections of the bigoted, ill-considered and illiterate bilge that gets posted under the guise of “discussion” on the BBC news website. To be fair, the Beeb has to […]
Libel Reform (again)
Further to Søren’s post just below here, it’s worth noting that the site to which he links hosts not only a petition, but also a facility whereby it’ll check who your MP is, and provide a pro-forma letter that you can edit and then email to him or her from the site. I filled that in […]
If Bioethics doesn’t exist, what am I doing here?
OK – I admit it: some rhetorical questions are too easily answered. Still, I’ve been reading Leigh Turner’s paper in the latest JME, and mulling it over. The title of the paper – “Does Bioethics Exist?” is a bit more radical than the content, wich considers the question of whether bioethics exists as a “widely […]