Seriously! Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics has published a paper with a hundred and ninety-eight listed authors! I’ve always been slightly puzzled by multi-authored papers – by just how many people get to add their names to a piece of work. A friend of mine who is a proper scientist once tried to explain how it works in […]
Category: JME
Modesty, Conscience, and What it Takes to be a Doctor (with a bit of Comedy)
Two apparently unrelated new and new-ish papers in the JME have caught my eye over the last few days. One of them is this one: Salilah Saidun’s “Photographing Human Subjects in Biomedical Disciplines: An Islamic Perspective”. We’ll come to the other in a little while. There’s a couple of puzzling things about the paper. One is […]
Jon Cogburn’s Plea to Grad Students (and Others)
[IB: I’m taking the liberty of copying in its entirety Jon Cogburn’s post on NewAPPS about submitting papers to journals, because it’s worth reading. He directs it to graduate students – but I think that the same point applies to anyone, especially if they’re new to the field in which they’re writing. Since a lot […]
Stacey Swimme reports that: Ethicist Reports: Prostitution is Not Harmful
Stacey Swimme a political advocate for sex workers in the US has written a rather nice response piece to a paper recently published in the JME: Is prostitution harmful? You can read her response here: ethicist-reports-prostitution-is-not-harmful Hat Tip to Christian Munthe for picking up on this. […]
Religious Preferences and the Best Interests of the Child
So the JME has – finally – published the paper by Brierley et al concerning withholding and withdrawal of futile treatment from children in the face of doctrinally-informed objections by the parents. It’s taken a while, but it’s there now. The essence of the paper’s claim is pretty simply put: if parental preferences run contrary to […]
Matters of Principlism
There’s a short paper in the latest JME about which I’ve been meaning to write something for a while – ever since I noticed it as a pre-pub: William Muirhead’s “When Four Principles are Too Many”. (Raa Gillon provides a commentary here.) Anyone who’s ever heard me talk professionally for longer than about 35 seconds […]
Some Responses to Giubilini and Minerva
I did mention last week that I’d post links to sites that mentioned Giubilini and Minerva’s paper as they crossed my radar; but it turned out very quickly that there’d be no way to keep up. And, to be frank, a lot of the blogosphere’s response has been fairly scattergun outrage rather than dispassionate engagement […]
An open letter from Giubilini and Minerva
When we decided to write this article about after-birth abortion we had no idea that our paper would raise such a heated debate. “Why not? You should have known!” people keep on repeating everywhere on the web. The answer is very simple: the article was supposed to be read by other fellow bioethicists who were […]
Why Is Infanticide Worse Than Abortion?
Guest Post by James Wilson The controversy over the Giubilini and Minerva article has highlighted an important disconnect between the way that academic bioethicists think about their role, and what ordinary people think should be the role of bioethics. The style of this dispute – its acrimony and apparent incomprehension on both sides – are […]
John Harris Clarifies his Position on Infanticide
John Harris writes in response to Julian’s post: I wish to clarify my position on infanticide to correct the impression that infanticide is something I defend or advocate. There is a big difference between an analysis of the moral symmetry of some abortions and some cases of infanticide on the one hand, and the defence […]