There’s a short paper in the latest JME about which I’ve been meaning to write something for a while – ever since I noticed it as a pre-pub: William Muirhead’s “When Four Principles are Too Many”. (Raa Gillon provides a commentary here.) Anyone who’s ever heard me talk professionally for longer than about 35 seconds […]
Category: Thinking Aloud
Of Tusks and Tuskegee: A Problem in Research Ethics
Xtaldave, by his own admission, has the horn. Well, if you’re being accurate about it, he has the tusk. But what’s important is that he has a whopping great piece of ivory to play with. Dave works in the labs here in Manchester, doing clever things with chemicals and science and crystalography and that sort […]
The Status of Bioethics
There’s been a couple of things that’ve appeared on the net over the last few days that have revivified something that’s been niggling away at the back of my mind for quite a long time now: the status of bioethics as an academic discipline. First there was Brian Leiter’s blog post. Commenting on the oddness […]
Building for the Past
David Edmonds poses a question: Imagine three cities. 1. A medieval city (something like Oxford). 2. A city heavily bombed in World War II and completely rebuilt, with original materials etc. (e.g. the centre of Warsaw). 3. A city constructed in 2012 to look just like the medieval city (e.g. Poundbury the ‘traditional’ village Prince […]
Henrietta Lacks and “Enchanting Rhetoric”
Note: There’s a couple of errors of interpretation in this post. I’m not going to re-write it, because I wrote what I wrote, and it’s in the public domain, and I don’t think it’s all that dignified to pretend that one never makes blunders; it’s better to acknowledge them, take the hit, and move on. […]
Nootropic Drugs in the Professions
Across at NewAPPS, Eric Schliesser wonders aloud about how common nootropic drug use is in professional philosophy. (Nootropics are are “drugs, supplements, nutraceuticals, and functional foods that improve mental functions such as cognition, memory, intelligence, motivation, attention, and concentration” – Wikipedia.) And, quite rightly, some of the commentators have pointed out that it’s fairly common. Actually, it’s more […]
What can we Learn from “The Exorcist”?
When John Sentamu stood up in the House of Lords a couple of weeks ago and spoke about the need for the NHS to concern itself with “spiritual” needs – and illustrated his claim with an anecdote about something resembling an exorcism – the response from a lot of the blogosphere was, at its friendliest, one […]
I Met a Relativist, and I’m Baffled
Until fairly recently, I thought I’d met people who could be described as moral relativists. But I recently met someone who’s made me wonder whether they were the real deal. The “relativists” I’d met previously were, broadly, people who make the claim that moral statements do not have the same universal applicability as statements that […]
Organs and Payment: cui bono?
Dipping in and out of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics’ recent report on organ donation (available in various forms from this page), I’ve been struck by a couple of things. One is that the Council is painfully keen to maintain its distance from the idea that organs – especially those from live donors – could […]
Why Use Close Genes?
Real life showing signs of coming back under control, it’s nice to be back blogging again. Hopefully I’ll be up to speed soon. To get back into the swing of things, there’s an interesting post from Ole Martin Moen on the Practical Ethics blog. It’s only short, so I’ll reproduce almost fully here. Today, if […]