Guest Post: Isabelle L Robertson Paper: Student Essay- Designing Methuselah: an ethical argument against germline genetic modification to prolong human longevity I am 16 years old. I am at the start of my life and looking towards my future, deciding on universities, career options and how I want my life to be. At the moment […]
Latest articles
Debate: The Fiction of an Interest in Death? Justice for Charlie Gard
Julian Savulescu Dominic Wilkinson’s Response A judge ruled last week that baby Charlie Gard will have his treatment withdrawn, against the wishes of his parents. His doctors argued that the rare mitochondrial disease (MDDS) he was born with was causing him unbearable suffering. His parents had raised funds to take him to the US […]
Debate Reponse: Charlie Gard, Interests and Justice – an alternative view
Dominic Wilkinson Responding to Julian Savulescu The sad and difficult case of Charlie Gard, which featured in the media last week, is the latest in a series of High Court and Family court cases when parents and doctors have disagreed about medical treatment for a child. Doctors regard the treatment as “futile” or “potentially inappropriate”. […]
The Implications of Libertarianism for Compulsory Vaccination
Guest Post: Justin Bernstein Paper: The Case Against Libertarian Arguments for Compulsory Vaccination In a recent political controversy, libertarian Senator Rand Paul articulated his opposition to a policy of compulsory vaccination, stating that he was “all for [vaccines],” but that he was “also for freedom.” U.S. opponents of vaccines often object to compulsory vaccination on […]
Breakthrough Immunotherapies Seem Like a Dream Come True for Children with Leukemia
Guest Post: Nancy Jecker, Aaron Wightman, Abby Rosenberg, Doug Diekema Paper: From protection to entitlement: selecting research subjects for early phase clinical trials involving breakthrough therapies A breakthrough therapy to cure cancer in children suffering from acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is a dream for many families. New immunotherapies appear to make this dream a reality. Such […]
The Moral Bioenhancement of Psychopaths
Guest Post: Elvio Baccarini and Luca Malatesti Paper: The Moral Bioenhancement of Psychopaths We argue that the prescription of mandatory moral bioenhancement (from now on MB) of psychopaths is justified because it satisfies the requirement of public reason as elaborated in political philosophy. This is the requirement that a moral or political prescription should be […]
Donald Trump’s Mental Health (again)
The speculation about Donald Trump’s mental health that was doing the rounds earlier in the year seems to have died down a bit. That’s to be expected; like it or not, his Presidency is now part of normal life. But I’ve been lagging in my blogging here, and so it’s only now that I’ve got […]
Law Changes and Slippery Slopes
Apparently, there was a TV programme in Australia the other day in which a there was a discussion of assisted dying. It got reported in The Guardian, largely on the basis that an 81-year-old audience member kept calling Margaret Somerville “darling” and then got mildly sweary. I’ve only seen those clips from the programme that […]
Individually-Randomized Controlled Trials of Vaccines Against the Next Outbreak
Guest Post: Nir Eyal, Marc Lipsitch Paper: Vaccine testing for emerging infections: the case for individual randomisation The humbling experience of international response to Ebola taught the world a thing or two on preparing for Zika and for other emerging infections. Some of those lessons pertain to vaccine development against emerging infections. One lesson was […]
The Deadly Business of an Unregulated Global Stem Cell Market
Guest Post: The deadly business of an unregulated global stem cell industry Tereza Hendl and Tamra Lysaght In our paper, we report on the case of a 75-year old Australian woman who died in December 2013 from complications of an autologous stem cell procedure. This case was tragic and worth reporting to the medical ethics community […]