By Zohar Lederman and Benjamin Capps Main post content: What is a theory good for? Is a comprehensive moral theory useful or merely obliged? Could theory be necessary for making normative claims – philosophical statements that say what we ought to do – in the emergent field of One Health (OH) ethics? In a friendly […]
Latest articles
Can survival be a harm? The German Federal Court of Justice rules on a claim for damages after life-sustaining treatment
Ulrich Pfeifer and Ruth Horn. Should it be permissible to convict a doctor who has performed life-sustaining treatment (LST) without medical indication? At first sight, the answer seems obvious: a medical intervention is only lawful if there is 1) valid consent and 2) a medical necessity that is medical indication. In the absence of either […]
What’s in the applesauce? The ethics of covert administration of medication in food
By Megan Dean, Laura Guidry-Grimes and Elizabeth Victor. Do you know what’s in your food? Food is a site of physical and epistemic vulnerability for us all–we rely on often invisible others to produce, store, transport, prepare, and serve our food safely, without contamination or adulteration, and to be honest and accurate when describing and […]
A bird in the hand or two in the bush? On ethics of HCV screening in pregnancy
By Marielle Gross. Since the beginning of my medical career, the American opioid crisis-turned-epidemic made nearly daily headlines. It reflected a complex set of challenges for our healthcare system which concern me not only as a physician and surgeon, but as a bioethicist focused on dismantling “prejudice-based medicine.” It is a perfect storm of moneyed […]
Should the state permit us to be younger and treat us accordingly in health care?
By Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen and Thomas Søbirk Petersen. In some states, citizens can change their officially recognized gender. Why not other identities as well? Why not age, for instance? In December 2018, 69-year-old Dutchman and former politician Emile Ratelband lost his court battle to have his legal age reduced by 20 years. In presenting his case […]
Revisiting the lessons of Frankenstein
By Julian Koplin & John Massie The story of Frankenstein came to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley in a nightmare. It was a miserable, wet summer in 1816, and Mary Shelley was visiting the poet Lord Byron with her sister, Claire Clairmont, and her soon-to-be husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. They spend much of the summer […]
Dissipating historical medical inequity through decolonising healthcare education
By Amali U. Lokugamage Decolonisation is an effort to ‘turn tables’ on the enduring inequities established by colonial rule. It is also about dismantling unfair power imbalances in society. The three authors of the article ‘Decolonising ideas of healing in medical education’ originate from Sri Lanka, an ex-colonial country, but live in the UK. In […]
Partial ectogenesis in context
By Elizabeth Chloe Romanis. Sci-fi stories about the artificial womb abound – from Brave New World to the Growing Season, and now that scientists are seemingly making progress towards technology that might be partially capable of facilitating the process of gestation ex utero, there has emerged exciting academic debate about the potential implications. There is […]
How should we regulate child sex robots: restriction or experimentation?
By John Danaher This post is part of a series on ethical and legal perspectives in sexual and reproductive health first posted on the BMJ Sexual and Reproductive Health blog. In 2017, the Crown Prosecution Services (CPS) decided to clamp down on the importation of child sex dolls into the UK. In doing so, they faced […]
Disability, sexual rights and sexual duties: still puzzling after all this time?
By Ezio Di Nucci Steven J. Firth and Ivars Neiders (thanks! our little debate is ‘fun’ and, as you say, extremely important) have responded to my defense of the sexual rights puzzle according to which ‘universal positive sexual rights are incompatible with universal negative sexual rights’ by arguing that: There is a difference between ‘positive rights […]