I’d like to draw your attention to this: the latest in a series of online debates hosted by Oxford University. In this round, Julian Savulescu and John-William Devine are, respectively, proposing and opposing the motion “Performance enhancing drugs should be allowed in sport”. Roger Crisp is moderating. For the sake of keeping to the spirit […]
Latest articles
Pharmaceutical Prohibition: as Successful as Ever
An item on Sky news the other day caught my attention. It concerned a new wave of legal highs being manufactured in China. The thrust of the report is that, in the wake of mephedrone having been banned a few weeks ago, enterprising Chinese chemists are working on a new set of chemicals designed to […]
Assistance and Force: Different Things
Imagine a world in which egg sandwiches are illegal. Given that I really don’t like eggs and that I particularly hate the smell of them, I have no desire ever to eat one; this world is fine by me. However, I’m aware that some people might, on occasion, express a desire for egg sandwiches. Some might […]
Brazil Nuts?
Human Rights Watch is reporting that Brazil is in the process of formulating a law that will give “‘absolute priority’ to the rights of the fertilized ovum”. The proposed bill would require any act or omission that could in any way have a negative impact on a fertilized ovum to be considered illegal. The bill […]
The Backward QALY
There’s an intriguing paper in May’s JME by Christopher Cowley in which he proposes a “retrospective QALY”. […]
Official: The M-Cat is Dead.
So – remember those deaths that were linked to mephedrone use? The ones that started a moral panic and that led to the erstwhile government banning the drug in a desperate attempt to curry favour with the tabloids in the fag-end of the Parliament? Yep – those ones. Well, it turns out that Wainwright and […]
Latest Statistics on Abortion in England and Wales…
… available here. […]
Risking Censure, and the Ontology of Misconduct
An article in a recent BMJ has caught my eye: Yates and James’ “Risk Factors at Medical School for Subsequent Professional Misconduct: Multicentre Retrospective Case-Control Study”. Based on an admittedly-small sample, it suggests that male sex, lower estimated social class, and poor early performance at medical school were independent risk factors for subsequent professional misconduct. […]
Age and Assisted Death in Scotland
The Scottish Parliament recently sought evidence in relation to the End of Life Assistance (Scotland) Bill; I responded to that call, and most of what I said would not be new to people who know me, or who read this blog. However, I did make a point there that I’ve not given an outing before; […]
Consent and Consensus
For the past week, the news in the UK has been all about coalitions, compromise, consensus and that sort of thing. The hung Parliament has been heralded as ushering in a new era of politics-by-agreement, rather than by the traditional Westminster model of simply flattening everyone else. And a lot of people seem to think […]