Guest Post: Angela Ballantyne and G. Owen Schaefer Paper: Consent and the ethical duty to participate in health data research Health systems are producing exponentially more data about patients and there is increasing demand to use that data – for predictive modelling, precision medicine, funding decisions and health system design. One of the features that makes […]
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Past Health is Relevant in Priority-setting
Guest Post: Samuel Altman, University of Oxford Full Article: Against Proportional Shortfall as a Priority-Setting Principle Past health is regularly considered irrelevant in priority-setting decisions. Often, people mistakenly think of past health, or rather past ill-health, as a ‘sunk’ cost which can be ignored when making decisions about present and future health. However, past health is […]
Toby Young, Eugenics, IQ, and the Poor (part 2)
By Iain Brassington Having staked out the claim in my last post that even if Toby Young’s claims about intelligence and embryo selection in his essay are eugenic, that’s not the end of the moral argument, I’m now going to have a quick look at the reasons why I think his claim does fail. The roots of […]
Toby Young, Eugenics, IQ, and the Poor (part 1)
By Iain Brassington The response to Toby Young’s appointment to the new Office for Students has covered the whole range from “He’s not the best person for the job” to “He’s the worst person for the job”. Some of the reasons offered have to do with unsavoury comments about women; some have to do with his […]
New Scientist is Not Amused
By Iain Brassington You might remember the couple of days a few years ago in which the overlyhonestmethods hashtag went viral on Twitter: for those of you who don’t, it was a little joke in which academics – mainly, I think, natural scientists – made not-entirely-serious “confessions” about how they do their work and the corners […]
The Real Problem With Human Head Transplantation
Guest Post: Michael S. Dauber, MA * Note: this article is being cross-posted at the Practical Ethics blog. In 2015, Sergio Canavero announced that he would perform a therapeutic head transplant procedure on a human subject by December 2017. Since then, he has recruited the assistance of surgeon Xiaoping Ren and switched from Valery Spiridonov to an […]
Life and Death: Apples and Oranges?
Guest Post: Carl Tollef Solberg, Ole Frithjof Norheim and Mathias Barra Article: The Disvalue of Death in the Global Burden of Disease The global burden of disease (GBD) study is “a systematic, scientific effort to quantify the comparative magnitude of health loss due to diseases, injuries, and risk factors by age, sex, and geographies for […]
Ethics of Fertility Preservation for Prepubertal Children: Should Clinicians Offer Procedures Where Efficacy is Largely Unproven?
Guest Post: Rosalind J McDougall, Lynn Gillam, Clare Delany, Yasmin Jayasinghe Article: Ethics of fertility preservation for prepubertal children: should clinicians offer procedures where efficacy is largely unproven? Should we offer a procedure with so little evidence? Isn’t it burdening a sick child without real justification? But it’s often low risk – if we don’t offer, are we depriving the […]
Pedophilia and Child Sexual Abuse Are Two Different Things — Confusing Them is Harmful to Children
By Brian D. Earp (@briandavidearp) Note: this post appeared first at the Practical Ethics blog and is being re-posted. Pedophilia and Child Sexual Abuse Are Two Different Things — Confusing Them is Harmful to Children Republican politician Roy Moore has been accused of initiating sexual contact with a 14-year-old girl when he was in his early […]
Can Options Make Us Worse Off? Choice, Pressure, and Paid Kidney Donation
Guest Post: Julian J. Koplin Article: Choice, pressure and markets in kidneys Paying people to donate a ‘spare’ kidney might help alleviate the current shortage of transplantable organs. However, doing so would conflict with a principle widely accepted within the medical community since the earliest days of organ transplantation: that bodily organs should not be bought […]