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 […]
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Who Ya Gonna Call?
Here’s a short story about the evolution of modern science: we used to understand very little about the world, and lacked the means to understand it. But we wanted to know how it worked, and we invented things like gods and demons to explain phenomena. As we gradually learned more and more about the way […]
Professor Richard Ashcroft’s Inaugural Lecture: ‘The Republic of Health – Ethics and Politics in 21st Century Healthcare’
A link to a podcast of Professor Richard Ashcroft’s belated inaugural lecture can be found here: The Republic of Health – Ethics and Politics in 21st Century Healthcare And since Richard is one of JME’s deputy editors I thought some folk might be interested. The abstract is below the fold. […]
Does the Taliban have a Mexican Wing?
The Mexican state of Guanajuato has some very strict abortion laws: terminating a pregnancy attracts a three-year prison sentence. However, it would appear that prosecutors occasionally up the ante by bringing a charge of homicide, which brings a much more severe sentence; thus six women have been given 25-30 year sentences for having an abortion. According to […]
WCB 2010: The Post-Mortem
SO… For those of you who’ve just spent four Singaporean days braving fierce heat and humidity outside and fierce air-conditioning inside, how was it for you? What were the hits and misses of this year’s WCB? I’ll start the ball rolling: I particularly enjoyed Anthony Wrigley’s paper on proxy proxies, and am looking forward to […]
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 […]
Vienna Calling!
You’ve possibly heard on the news that the 18th International Aids Conference is currently on in Vienna, and that one of the things that’s been talked about in connection with it is the Vienna Declaration. The essence of the declaration is very simple: The criminalisation of illicit drug users is fuelling the HIV epidemic and […]
MRI Scanners aren’t simply Medically Valuable
I’m assuming that many, if not most, of the readers of this blog will be medical types, and so will have spent a significant amount of time looking at MRI scans of brains and thoracic cavities, all the while fighting the urge to see what would happen if they used the big, expensive and medically […]
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. […]
Procedural Proportionality of Ethical Review
By David Hunter In an excellent paper published in the most recent edition of the Journal of Medical Ethics Gefenas et al make the point that types of research which impose similar burdens of risks and harms appear to be being regulated disproportionately at the moment in the Baltic States. […]