Julian Sheather is specialist adviser (ethics and human rights), policy directorate, BMA.
The question of whether biotechnology should be deployed to improve human beings morally is starting to climb out of the pages of recondite publications and dip a quizzical toe in mainstream media. A recent article in the Telegraph quotes Professor Julian Savulescu from the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics saying that, should it ever […]
According to the historian Tony Judt, the Red Army, after raping and brutalising its way across Europe in the closing stages of the Second World War, left behind, in Germany alone, somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000 “Russian babies.” These figures, he writes, “make no allowance for untold numbers of abortions, as a result of which […]
Every once in a while I dust off my old road bike and head out onto the North Downs to take in a few hills. Panting up a short sharp rise is about as close to elite athleticism as I get—and it is not unusual for me to get off and push. It is from […]
I have been gripped by the trial of Anders Breivik and was intrigued to see the BMJ hosting a Maudsley debate this week about, loosely speaking, Breivik’s “sanity.” The debate ran under the headline question of whether fanaticism is a form of madness which gave a slightly odd spin to the proceedings. As Tom Fahy […]
It is possibly the oldest of all philosophical questions. Although academic specialisation has tended to brush it to the wings—embarrassed perhaps by the sheer indeterminate unwieldiness of it—the question of what constitutes a good or flourishing life and how we can live one will not, for good human reasons, go away. And if academic philosophers […]
In law, the capacity to make a specific decision has a binary quality. Somewhat like a light it is either on or off, you either have it or you don’t and there are no intermediate states. Yes capacity can fluctuate, the bulb can wink on and off, but at any one time we either have […]
There was extensive media comment this weekend about the Court of Protection’s decision to authorise the force-feeding of a seriously anorexic former medical student with a critically low BMI. The woman, referred to only as “E,” is 32 and following sustained sexual abuse as a child has suffered from an eating disorder since she was […]
The recent case of a young Jehovah’s Witness in a sickle cell crisis refusing essential blood products and being allowed to die confirms what should by now be widely known: a competent and informed adult has a right to refuse medical treatment even where the refusal will result in his or her death. Although there […]
During the years when the Book of Revelations was being laid down, some time apparently in the first century AD, human populations were likely, with some exceptions, to be small, imperilled, and surrounded by a seemingly infinite planet. Officially at least, on October the 31st this year the population of the earth reached seven billion. […]
There are four horsemen of the apocalypse: conquest, war, famine (or pestilence) and death, and climate change will unleash all of them. I was at a BMJ conference recently that explored some of the health and security impacts of climate change and these grim riders were everywhere to be seen. Put simply, climate change will […]