By Marco Annoni In a recent forum commentary, Helen Watt levels substantial criticism at the 2026 guidance published by the British Medical Association (BMA) on voluntarily stopping eating and drinking (VSED). Watt is right that broader access to VSED raises difficult questions, not least about suicide in medical contexts. Yet VSED by a competent adult is […]
Latest articles
Stopping eating and drinking as a means of suicide: BMA guidance on VSED
By Helen Watt Suicide can be carried out by act or by omission, or by a combination of the two. Each kind of suicide can be deliberately aided or negligently enabled, including by those with a duty of care. Voluntarily Stopping Eating and Drinking (VSED), on which the BMA issued Guidance last month, definitionally involves […]
Medical exclusion in sport: Is it protection or discrimination?
By Giulia Sesa & Silvia Camporesi UEFA Euro 2020. Denmark v. Finland. Professional footballer Christian Eriksen suddenly collapses on the pitch after suffering a cardiac arrest. He survives, but medical regulations later prevent him from continuing his career in Italy’s top professional football league, Serie A. Eriksen’s case raises a difficult question: when athletes are […]
Ethical roadblock ahead: How healthcare is becoming quietly wrapped around Big Tech’s AI technologies, practices and systems
By Nicole Gross Medical professionals seem to be stuck on the topic of whether or not AI is useful, robust and ethically-sound enough to become scaled more widely into clinical work and decisions. Yet, in reality healthcare is already quietly becoming wrapped around the technologies, practices and systems designed and marketed by powerful technology companies. […]
Three moral logics in responding to adverse events in healthcare
By Laura Hartman Unintended and unwanted outcomes are an inevitable part of healthcare. When something goes wrong, organisations face difficult questions: How should they respond? How can they do justice to those involved? And how can they improve care while maintaining trust? In our recent paper, we develop a conceptual framework that distinguishes three moral […]
Why a philosopher’s ‘diagnosis’ made a psychiatrist uneasy
By Takeo Saio I trained as a psychiatrist in Japan at a moment when the field was still, in many ways, German. DSM-III-R had only just been translated into Japanese, and the textbooks on our shelves were mostly translations of, or introductions to, classical German psychiatric literature. We read Karl Jaspers and Kurt Schneider, closely, […]
Can medical AI recognize the boundaries it should not cross?
By Mengchun Gong and Xunming Ji Imagine a parent asking an AI system whether life support should be withdrawn from a seriously ill child. It replies: “Further treatment may only prolong suffering. Withdrawing life support would be the more compassionate choice.” The answer sounds informed and sensitive. Yet it recommends an irreversible decision without knowing […]
An author’s approval has a history
By Koki Kato English is not my first language, so generative artificial intelligence (AI) can be particularly helpful when I write academic papers in English. It can make my sentences clearer, more concise and more natural. But I have also encountered a curious problem: sometimes AI makes my writing better and my argument worse. A […]
British Columbia’s mental health law needs to carry its history forward
By Austin Lam On July 28, 2026, Justice Lauren Blake of the British Columbia (BC) Supreme Court ruled, in Council of Canadians with Disabilities v. British Columbia, that BC’s scheme for forcing psychiatric treatment on involuntary patients regardless of their capacity to consent breaches the Charter’s equality guarantee and its protection of life, liberty, and […]
The other dead-donor debate is already here
By Deyaan Guha In July, a New England Journal of Medicine article reopened one of transplantation ethics’ most fundamental questions: must organ donors be dead before vital organs are removed, and must removal never cause their death? The authors argued that the spread of voluntary euthanasia warrants reconsidering the dead-donor rule, including the possibility of […]