By Iain Brassington (Cross-posted from EJIL: Talk!) For those with an internet connection and an interest in current affairs, the story of Charlie Gard been hard to avoid recently. A decent précis is available here; but it’s worth rehearsing. Shortly after his birth, Charlie’s health began to deteriorate, and he was diagnosed with a terminal and […]
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The ‘Weird’ First Fortnight of the Foetus: Implications for the Abortion Debate
Guest Post: William Simkulet Paper: The Cursed Lamp: The Problem of Spontaneous Abortion For many people, the moral status of abortion stands or falls whether or not a human fetus is morally comparable to you or I; whether its death is a significant loss. Many people believe human fetuses have a right to life from conception, […]
Ethics Committees Should Have Standards in Preparing New Members
Guest Post: Danish Zaidi and Jennifer Kesselheim Paper: Assessment of orientation practices for ethics consultation at Harvard Medical School-affiliated hospitals Ethics advisory committees (EACs), or clinical ethics committees, fulfill an important role in hospitals, providing ethics consultation, contributing to hospital-wide policies, and educating staff on ethical dimensions of medical practice. Our study built upon a central […]
Advances in Neuroscience Strengthen Ethical Opposition to Harmful Experiments on Dogs
Guest Post: Jarrod Bailey, Cruelty Free International, London, UK. Paper: Advances in Neuroscience Imply that Harmful Experiments in Dogs are Unethical More than 200,000 dogs are used in harmful experiments every year worldwide, in research into human and animal diseases and in the testing of new drugs and agrochemicals. This continues despite significant public opposition […]
Pain After Cancer: A New Model for Pain Psychology?
Guest Post by Lauren Heathcote What if every headache, every slight twinge in your back, was potentially life threatening? What if you couldn’t tell a brain tumour from coffee-withdrawal? These can be constant, niggling worries for many people who have survived cancer, and we think their experiences can tell us something important about pain. If […]
Can We Trust Research in Science and Medicine?
By Brian D. Earp (@briandavidearp) Readers of the JME Blog might be interested in this series of short videos in which I discuss some of the major ongoing problems with research ethics and publication integrity in science and medicine. How much of the published literature is trustworthy? Why is peer review such a poor quality control mechanism? How can we judge […]
Re: Nudges in a Post-truth World
Guest Post: Nathan Hodson In a recent article in the Journal of Medical Ethics, Neil Levy has developed a concept of “nudges to reason,” offering a new tool for those trying to reconcile medical ethics with the application of behavioural psychological research – a practice known as nudging. Very roughly, nudging means adjusting the way choices […]
Charlie Gard and the Ethics Commentator
Guest Post: Daniel Sokol ‘Best interest’ cases, such as the Charlie Gard case, are fundamentally about medical ethics, although they are determined by a single judge in a court of law. At the hearing last week, there were at least 4 express references to medical ethics. The first appeared in the hospital’s “position statement”, drafted […]
Guest Post: Withdrawing Life-Prolonging Treatment in the Patient’s Best Interests: The Implications of Briggs
Guest Post: Jenny Kitzinger, Celia Kitzinger and Jakki Cowley Paper: When ‘Sanctity of Life’ and ‘Self-Determination’ clash In a recent landmark judgment in the Court of Protection (Briggs v Briggs [2016] EWCOP 53), a judge authorised withdrawal of life-prolonging treatment from a minimally conscious patient with potential for further recovery. Our article in the Journal of […]
Is Hope a Virtue?
By Iain Brassington It’s perfectly understandable that hope should have featured so prominently in the coverage of the Charlie Gard case; each proposal is presented as offering fresh hope, each reversal presented as dashing hopes. In either case, hope is something presented as desirable. A bit more deeply, hope is one of the Theological Virtues, and […]