Over at Practical Ethics, Charles Camosy asks a question: Can bioethics be done without theology? Yep. It can. Well, that was quick and simple. But – oh, all right: I probably ought to say a bit more. Now, Camosy’s post is quite long, and that means that if I want to scrutinise it in any detail, […]
Category: The Academy
Consigned to the Index
There’re probably times when all of us have had a solution, and just had to find a problem for it. It’s an easy trap; and it’s one into which I suspect Gretchen Goldman may have fallen in an article in Index on Censorship about scientific freedom and how it’s under threat from disputes about Federal funding in the […]
Resurrectionism at Easter
There’s a provocative piece in a recent New Scientist about what happens to unclaimed bodies after death – about, specifically, the practice of coopting them for research purposes. Gareth Jones, who wrote it, points out that the practice has been going on for centuries – but that a consequence of the way it’s done is that it tends […]
How Magic can help Teach Students about Medical Ethics
Guest post by Daniel Sokol, KCL For some time, I have been interested in the relationship between magic and medical ethics. Five years ago, I gave a talk in Prague on how to use magic in medical ethics education. More recently, I held a workshop on Magic for Anaesthetists, which touched on ethical issues in […]
Call for Participants: Concepts of Mental Health
British Postgraduate Philosophy Association Masterclass 2013 April 12th-13th, University College London This year’s BPPA masterclass will be on concepts of mental health, and applications are invited from graduate researchers within the field of philosophy and mental health. A masterclass involves a mixture of seminars, group workshops, presentations by students and experts and critical discussion. The […]
198!
Seriously! Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics has published a paper with a hundred and ninety-eight listed authors! I’ve always been slightly puzzled by multi-authored papers – by just how many people get to add their names to a piece of work. A friend of mine who is a proper scientist once tried to explain how it works in […]
Modesty, Conscience, and What it Takes to be a Doctor (with a bit of Comedy)
Two apparently unrelated new and new-ish papers in the JME have caught my eye over the last few days. One of them is this one: Salilah Saidun’s “Photographing Human Subjects in Biomedical Disciplines: An Islamic Perspective”. We’ll come to the other in a little while. There’s a couple of puzzling things about the paper. One is […]
In Defence of Live Tweeting
Questions to which the Answer is Eh? What are you on about? No, really: what?, part 2: Should people who live-tweet conferences be thrown out and barred from future conferences? A story in IHE that concerned a debate (well, I say “debate”, but it was clearly a slow news day…) about the rights and wrongs of live-tweeting […]
Jon Cogburn’s Plea to Grad Students (and Others)
[IB: I’m taking the liberty of copying in its entirety Jon Cogburn’s post on NewAPPS about submitting papers to journals, because it’s worth reading. He directs it to graduate students – but I think that the same point applies to anyone, especially if they’re new to the field in which they’re writing. Since a lot […]
Is Bioethics Really a Bully? Really?
On his blog in The Independent, John Rentoul has a long-running feature called “Questions to which the Answer is No“. In it, he examines the kind of screaming rhetorical-question headline much beloved of certain middle-market tabloids: “Is this photographic evidence of Nessie?”, “Does coffee cure cancer?”, “Does coffee cause cancer?”, “Does MMR bring down house prices?“* and […]