It’s very easy for a European to feel very smug about socialised medicine. Maybe the American system isn’t as bad as all that. Maybe we should be a bit more open about its merits. And maybe we should, in the process, ignore cases like that of JoAnn Knutson. Knutson was 72, and had a fall […]
Category: Life and Death
Killing, Letting Die, and Epistemology
David Shoemaker has an interesting post on PEASoup about the epistemology of advance directives. Starting from a fairly standard thought-experiment about an older, dementing person who wants to accept treatment that her younger, pre-demented person had refused, he adds to the standard metaphysical arguments a claim that the real puzzle for ADs isn’t metaphysical, it’s […]
Welfare, Principles, and an Unexpected Attack
First up, this may seem like a bit of a diversion from JME core concerns, but – as I hope will become clear – it has to do with moral philosophy, so that’s enough of a link. Obviously, news for the last week or so has been dominated by the earthquake in Haiti and its […]
Protecting Innocent Lives?
Last spring, George Tiller was killed. (I was going to say murdered, or assassinated, but both of those are morally and legally weighted…) Tiller was one of a very small community of doctors in the US willing to give late-term abortions, and it was for this that he was shot. Scott Roeder is currently on […]
Funeral Expenses? I’m Going to be Pickled!
Since we’re technically still in the holiday period, have a bit more silliness. This concerns a scheme that is a supposed to disincentivise drink-driving. A funeral home in Rome, Georgia, is offering… Oh, what the hell. I’ll let the local paper, the Rome News-Tribune, tell the story: Between now and noon on Thursday, drivers can […]
Rude Awakenings
Doubtless, everyone in the world has by now heard the story of the “sleeping Belgian”: Rom Houben was believed to have been in a coma for 23 years, but was actually fully conscious for all that time. If the reports are to be believed, it would have potentially serious implications for the way we think […]
Does Medicine – and Medical Ethics – have a Pro-Life Bias?
There’s an essay by Diego Gracia called “Palliative Care and the Historical Background” that I frequently use in classes about Care ethics, and there’s a passage in it that always gets a fascinating reaction from students. In this passage, Gracia claims that the true goal of medicine has always been curing, rather than taking care of […]
Can Saving a Life be the Wrong Thing to Do?
Doubtless many of you will have heard by now of Kerrie Wooltorton, who, apparently depressed by her fertility problems, drank anti-freeze, called an ambulance, and handed a living will to staff at A&E. Her story is reported by the Telegraph under the headline “Suicide woman allowed to die because doctors feared saving her would be assault” […]
Acronym Overload: the CLC on the DPP and the ECHR
In the wake of the DPP’s publication on Wednesday of guidance about assisted suicide, the Telegraph is reporting that the Christian Legal Centre is considering launching legal action to halt the implementation of that guidance. The nub of their claim is that Lord Phillips, who had ruled in the summer that clearer guidance ought to […]
DPP’s Interim Policy on Assisted Suicide Published
The Director of Public Prosecutions has today published interim guidelines on prosecutions for assisted suicide in England and Wales – they’re available here (and Northern Ireland will get its own consultation process). I’ve not had time to consider them in full, but there’s a number of things that stand out to me as worthy of comment. […]