Members of the Scottish Parliament have overwhelmingly rejected Margo MacDonald’s Assistance in Dying Bill, by 85 votes to 16 – which is about as crushing as I think you can get. The Scotsman reports Nicola Sturgeon as saying that I find myself particularly concerned and fundamentally concerned about the difficulty I think would always and […]
Latest articles
MSF writes to the EU
One of the things we’re interested in here in Manchester is the problem of how to reconcile the need to incentivise and reward research in the medical sector with the palpable need in the developing world for affordable medicines. This quandry is at the heart of the Manchester Manifesto. A lot of emphasis has been […]
Blogging hiatus
Apologies for the drop-off in blogging rates recently: I’ve been snowed under with real work and stuff. I – or Søren or David – wi’ll be back on track in the near future. 🙂 […]
Medical ethics online – the IME needs your views
How do you use the internet in your work? What sort of online support would you find helpful in the field of medical ethics? The Institute of Medical Ethics (IME) is developing a new online community and needs your input. Fill in this short survey by 5pm on Friday 3rd December for the chance to […]
Savulescu on Mathematical Enhancement
Over at Practical Ethics, Julian Savulescu has been thinking about the possibilities raised by the observation that brain stimulation would appear to have increased the mathematical ability of trial participants. He concludes that the observation – and the implicit uses to which it could be put – are ethically important. One of the arguments he […]
Say what you like about the Nazis, but…
Here’s something that occurred to me in the small hours about the argumentum ad hitlerum as it gets applied to the euthanasia dispute. Proponents of the argument point to what happened in the Third Reich as a warning about euthanasia, the claim being that the Nazi so-called euthanasia programme led to the involuntary deaths of many […]
The Anti-Abortion Appropriation of Consent
By far the biggest response that this blog has had came when I had a bit of a rant about Nadine Dorries a couple of weeks ago. I’m back on her case today; she’s the gift that keeps on giving. This video* provides footage of her speech to the Commons on Tuesday night; there’s a transcript available […]
Odone and the CPS: Scaremongering about Euthanasia
The Centre for Policy Studies has recently published a report on euthanasia, authored by Cristina Odone. It’s available to download here, though it would seem that you can also buy a paper version for a tenner. It’s amazing for the sheer poverty of the argument; I might never have thought that so much specious nonsense […]
Stangroom on Opposition to Abortion
Hostile as I generally am to surveys as a tool in ethics, they are able to give us interesting anthropological insights on topics of moral concern. Jeremy Stangroom has been conducting a poll of people’s beliefs about the permissibility of abortion; and, though online polls are not wholly reliable, there seems to be some interesting […]
Malaria trial, the missing nurse and the media
By David Hunter I’m really not sure how to pitch this one – to be frank I don’t have enough credible information to go on – given that my first exposure to the story was via the Daily Mail… But it is also on the BBC’s site in various forms. The rough story is that […]