It’s good to see Nils’ post about the recent UK cryonics ruling getting shared around quite a bit – so it should. I thought I’d throw in my own voice, too. About 18 months ago, Imogen Jones and I wrote a paper musing on some of the ethical and legal dimensions of Christopher Priest’s The Prestige. […]
Category: Distributive justice
Gouging
Jumping to the defence of pharmaceutical companies over their pricing policies isn’t fashionable – and a lot of the time, it’s not going to end prettily. But it’s perfectly coherent to think that the profit motive is one of the motors of innovation, and that it’s part of the quid pro quo for spending money on […]
Free Labour and Quiet Doubts
Those of us on the academic side of things will almost certainly recognise the situation: you’re sitting in your school’s Teaching & Learning committee, or a staff/student committee meeting, or something like that, and you hear the complaint from students that they should get more contact time. Academics should spend more time teaching rather than […]
Should Doctors Perform “Minor” Forms of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) as a Compromise to Respect Culture?
by Brian D. Earp / (@briandavidearp), with a separate guest post by Robert Darby A small surgical “nick” to a girl’s clitoris or other purportedly minimalist procedures on the vulvae of young women and girls should be legally permitted, argue two gynecologists this week in the Journal of Medical Ethics. Their proposal is offered as a “compromise” […]
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 […]
Gaia Doesn’t Care where your Baby Comes From
Guest Post by Dominic Wilkinson, Associate Editor, Journal of Medical Ethics In a provocative paper published today in the Journal of Medical Ethics, US theologian Cristina Richie argues that the carbon cost and environmental impact of population growth in the West should lead to restrictions on artificial reproduction. She points to the substantial carbon emissions that […]
Enhancing the ill: The therapy-enhancement…
This post is in effect a gauntlet, a challenge for those who are significantly bothered by enhancements, such that they think that enhancing would be unethical or at least that there is a significant ethical difference between the two, largely because I can’t really work out what the fuss is and would like someone to […]
Junk food feeders are criminal child abusers? Really?
Public Service Announcement: Sensitivity Advisory Sticker – Caution Post contains sarcasm. In the interests of our more sensitive readers not taking offence I recommend they skip this post on the grounds that it will contain gentle sarcasm, disagreement and a certain amount of me asking “Is that really what they mean to say?”* Blog Post: […]
Why philosophical theorising about distributive justice in health care (mostly) doesn’t work
I had the pleasure yesterday at the IAB 2012 to see Daniel Wikler run a symposium on population level bioethics – which primarily focused on prioritisation decisions. This was useful for me since it helped me coalesce why I think many if not all attempts to give a philosophical account of distributive justice in health […]
Cancer drugs and magic money fountains of youth
The McMillian Cancer trust has published a report described on the radio as I drove to Manchester this morning as a damming and shameful report about the NHS and discrimination. The report alleges that more than 14 thousand elderly cancer sufferers are allowed to die in the UK because of age based discrimination. […]