There’s an aisle at the supermarket that has a sign above it that reads “ADULT CEREALS”. Every time I see it, I snigger inwardly at the thought of sexually explicit cornflakes. (Pornflakes. You’re welcome.) It’s not big, and it’s not clever: I know that. But all these years living in south Manchester have taught me to […]
Category: Thinking Aloud
R-E-S-P-E-C-T
Here’s an intriguing letter from one John Doherty, published in the BMJ yesterday: Medical titles may well reinforce a clinical hierarchy and inculcate deference in Florida, as Kennedy writes, but such constructs are culture bound. When I worked in outback Australia the patients called me “Mate,” which is what I called them. They still wanted me to be in […]
Assisted Dying’s Conscience Claws
Aaaaaaaand so the latest attempt to get assisted dying of some sort onto the statute books in the UK has bitten the dust. I can’t say I’m surprised. Watching the debate in the Commons – I didn’t watch it all, but I did watch a fair chunk of it – it was striking just how […]
“Our lives are not actually our own”
Long-term readers of this blog will know that, every now and then, I have a look at the CMF’s blog. This is largely because of my interest in the ethics of assisted dying, and the blog is actually a pretty good way into developments on the other side of the lines. There is rarely, if […]
Bad Surgeons and Good Faith
This is a bit of a strange post, not least because it involves citing sources – a blog post, and a whole blog -that have since been taken down from the net, for reasons that will become clear. It’s also going to involve a pair of fairly hefty quotations, largely because it’s the absence of […]
How to be a good (consequentialist) bioethicist…
There has recently been a pattern of papers (and I am not going to identify which ones) which I take as being slightly embarrassing to academic bioethicists because they portray us in a less than flattering light because of the naive mistakes they seem to make, or the outlandish poorly argued claims they make. I […]
Eating Disorders and Ramadan
One of those things that’d simply never occurred to me before was highlighted a few days ago in a story on Buzzfeed: how do you reconcile Ramadan fasting with recovery from an eating disorder? Indeed: can you reconcile them at all? “Food is obviously a big part of the holy month,” Sofia says. “Usually after […]
Jeremy Hunt and Costs to the Taxpayer
“Personal responsibility” is a strange phrase: while not as slippery as some, it can mean any number of things, and be put to use in any number of political contexts. It was the title of the speech that the Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, gave yesterday. In that, he spoke of three aspects to the concept. First […]
On Being a Hypocrite
A piece appeared in The Atlantic a few days ago that aims to prick the perceived bubble of professional ethicists. In fact, the headline is pretty hostile: THE HYPOCRISY OF PROFESSIONAL ETHICISTS. Blimey. The sub-headline doesn’t pull its punches either: “Even people who decide what’s right and wrong for a living don’t always behave well.” I […]
Research Ethics: You’re Doing it Wrong!
With any luck, the marking tsunami will have receded by the end of the week, and so I should be able to get back to blogging a bit more frequently soon. In the meantime, I’ll fill some space by ripping off something from the “Feedback” page of the latest New Scientist: The TV industry has […] […]