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 […]
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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. […]
Final Call for Participants: Research Ethics in the EU, Keele University 20-21st July
On the 20th of July the Centre for Professional Ethics at Keele is holding a full day conference focusing on the topic of Research ethics in Europe – what is done and how it could be done better On the 21st of July will be a half day workshop on the Role of Autonomy & […]
Ooooh, Matron!
Right: so I understand that hospitals sometimes feel the need to raise revenue, and I understand the idea that resources shouldn’t be left idle – an unused ward represents wasted money. I also fully understand that hospital wards have provided a rich source of smut over the years, some of which has been almost entertaining. […]
SAP Conference 2010
Since spending the weekend at the Society for Applied Philosophy’s conference in Oxford, I’ve been mulling over the ways in which a couple of the papers I head have implications for bioethics (if, indeed, they have any). […]
German Court Rules on Withdrawal of Treatment
German courts have today ruled that it is legal to withdraw lifesaving treatment with consent. According to Deutsche Welle, Germany’s highest criminal court has ruled that passive assisted suicide is legal if the patient has explicitly decreed his or her wish that treatment used to keep the patient alive should be terminated. “Turning off a […]