By Rosalind McDougall. Clinical ethicists around the world are responding to COVID-19 in an effort to support our clinician colleagues at the frontline. The clinical ethics community is compiling resources, developing ethical guidelines, and contributing to hospital policy as the scale of the crisis increases. The hope is that ethics can offer a structured way […]
Latest articles
COVID-19 pandemic
Ernest Hemingway understood courage to be “grace under pressure” and doctors, nurses and health care professionals have been profoundly courageous in the face of the Covid 19 pandemic. It is too early for philosophical or scholarly reflection upon this crisis, the priority should be to find a path through it and for those of us […]
The Moral Cost of Coronavirus
By Joshua Parker and Mikaeil Mirzaali. COVID-19 is now a global pandemic. As cases rise rapidly, one effect will be to raise deep and troubling ethical issues. If the UK follows Italy, as it is predicted to, one such ethical issue will be an extreme demand placed on healthcare resources, specifically intensive care. Indeed, given […]
Westworld, ethics and maltreating robots
By Colin Gavaghan and Mike King This week saw the return, for a third season, of the critically acclaimed HBO series Westworld. WW’s central premise in its first 2 seasons was a theme park, sometime in the near future, populated by highly realistic robots or ‘hosts’. Human guests can pay exorbitant sums to interact with […]
Having a possible escape to end life at your own timing offers reassurance and changes the perspective on current and prospective suffering
By Martijn Hagens. In a recent blog, Ben Colburn discusses that ‘the option of assisted dying is good for you even if you don’t want to die. In the paper related to that blog, he argues that “if someone knows they have a (potentially) acceptable escape, it changes the character of the choice set as a […]
Euthanasia please, we are Portuguese
By Vera Lúcia Raposo Recently, in spite of protests from conservatives and the Catholic Church, the Portuguese parliament approved five proposals aimed to allow medically assisted death (referred to as ‘anticipation of death’) at the patient’s request. The procedure requires specific conditions: patients of legal age, with incurable and fatal disease or permanent injury, and […]
Who cares for the ‘low-skilled’ care worker? The flawed new Brexit immigration policy
By David Shaw The UK Government has unveiled its post-Brexit immigration policy, unleashing an avalanche of criticism about the potential effects on the economy. The biggest change is the focus on “highly skilled” workers, and the imposition of a points system for people who wish to come and work in the UK. Economics aside, these […]
Why care about severity?
By Mathias Barra, Mari Broqvist, Erik Gustavsson, Martin Henriksson, Niklas Juth, Lars Sandman, and Carl Tollef Solberg In an ideal world, everyone one of us would receive medical treatments in a timely manner, in the best possible way. There would be an unlimited number of organs available for transplantation. There would be enough health workers […]
Does one health ethics need a comprehensive theory?
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 […]
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 […]