I recently enjoyed this article by Ben Goldacre in the Guardian on vitamin pills and risk compensation – basically arguing that placebos are not harmless, because if we feel we have improved our health then we may take more risks in other areas. […]
Tag: David Hunter
Couldn’t find the language – the positive counterparts of risk and hazards
Continuing my recent theme of the impact of language on ethics and decision making I’m presently writing a paper on the use of claims based on justice to object to new technologies such as human enhancement or synthetic biology. In the process of writing this paper I’ve encountered a rather odd gap in our language. […]
The good old but somewhat cold days
Chris Bertram of Crooked Timber links to this 1958 piece of research on how children behaved when locked inside fridges… Using a specially designed enclosure, 201 children 2 to 5 years of age took part in tests in which six devices were used, including two developed in the course of this experiment as the result […]
Toleration and method in bioethics
It has been argued by some that bioethicists and in particular philosophers must be tolerant of the variety of different methods that might be employed in trying to answer the questions focused on by medical ethics/bioethics. Thus it is claimed we ought to accept as equally valid to classic philosophical analysis; empirical work, psychological work, […]
Welcome to the Medical Ethics blog!
Medical ethics is a fast moving field where there is always some new scientific or political development to analyse and discuss. It is difficult for a journal like the Journal of Medical Ethics (JME) to keep up with these day to day developments in its print version, but we hope to do it in this […]