A short time ago, I mentioned George Pitcher’s extraordinarily lame showing on the Today programme, when he was invited to talk about assisted suicide. I included a link to his blog – and, I admit it, this was partly intended so that he’d get an “incoming link” notification and either make a comment here, or refer […]
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In this Month’s JME
I have to admit that I’m a bit suspicious of empirical work in ethics: my general instinct is to be less interested in what people actually think or do or want than in what they ought to think or do or want. But it’s also true that empirical work can confirm or cast doubt on […]
More on DNA Retention
Not so long ago, I blogged about the government’s stupid-and-scary response to the drubbing it got at the ECHR concerning the retention of genetic information gathered from arrestees. It would appear that the police have managed to make the policy even more dispiriting than it was already: they’re arresting people in order that they can […]
I’m going to break a private promise to myself.
That promise was to observe the difference between academic ethics and activism, and to eschew the latter. But please, please, please take a couple of minutes to read this article and the statement that goes with it, and then to sign the petition. This is not about putting the boot into the British Chiropractic Association. […]
In ur genez, clozin’ ur futurz
We all know the “open future” argument against genetic modification of humans: that it’s part of being a human that we are apparently in control of our own lives and that a parent who tried to impose a “model” on us would thereby wrong us. I’ve never been sure, in all honesty, whether this tells […]
Do you know what is going to happen in bioethics in the future?
If you know what is going to happen in bioethics in the future here is the competition for you, courtesy of the Swiss Society for Biomedical Ethics. […]
Money for Octuplets
I don’t think that anyone has mentioned the increasingly curious Suleman octuplet story yet on this blog. So I’ll just quickly point out that Nadya Suleman has – obviously – a website, on which she asks for comments and – erm – donations. If someone could tell me what to think about this in a sane and […]
Population Control, Chinese Style?
Enough with one child per family, already – let the kids smoke themselves into population control… Apologies for having to link it: I can’t seem to get LiveLeak to embed. I fail at computer. (Thanks to Garen FD for the pointer.) […]
CFP: Mental Disorder
Friday 6th March 2009 University of Warwick This one-day workshop will be the second event of a new Multidisciplinary Research Network on The Concepts of Health, Illness and Disease, funded by the AHRC. The network is managed by Dr Havi Carel (UWE) and Dr Rachel Cooper (Lancaster). For more information on the network: http://www.uwe.ac.uk/hlss/courses/philosophy/ahrc_chid_network.shtml Within […]
CFP: FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS: ALSP 2009 ANNUAL CONFERENCE
ASSOCIATION FOR LEGAL AND SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY (ALSP) 2009 Annual Conference ‘Ethics for the 21st Century’ July 2-4, 2009 University of Edinburgh – Department of Politics and IR, ESRC Genomics Policy and Research Forum http://www.lifelong.ed.ac.uk/alsp2009/ Outline The last two decades have seen profound social and economic changes in all areas of our lives. To name but […]