Much as I try to avoid the Daily Mail, it seems never to be too far out of my view; and it’s not uncommon that people bring it to my attention for one reason or another. On this note, I’m dubiously grateful to Muireann Quigley and Sorcha Uí Chonnachtaigh for pointing me in the direction […]
Category: Thinking Aloud
Pratchett and Assisted Dying: A Question of Balance?
If you’ve not yet seen “Choosing to Die”, Terry Pratchett’s film about Dignitas from Monday night, I recommend that you go and watch it now. (I don’t know if it’s available outside the UK: I’m sure it’ll appear on YouTube soon, though; or, if you’re outside th UK, get a Brit to download it and […]
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. […]
Musing about Kant (2)
It’s very easy, having encountered Kant for the first time, to think that his account of morality is much too cold and impersonal to be plausible – the sort of thing you might expect from a computer rather than a human. And though this criticism is rather simplistic – I think that Kant does have […]
Musing about Kant
So… I’ve been writing a paper on Kant, the basic thrust of which is to assert the importance of respect for autonomy over and above respect for persons. (That is, I think that Kant thinks that we ought to respect persons because they’re autonomous; this is in contrast to the modern idea that we ought […]
Stem-Cells: To Patent or Not?
In spare moments, I’ve been wondering about the Advocate-General of European Court of Justice’s recent recommendation that patents involving human embryonic stem-cells be prohibited, and the response that it’s generated. One of the best-publicised responses was the letter from Austin Smith et al that appeared in Nature, which complained that the recommendation would be bad […]
Hyperexpensive royal weddings – the opportunity costs in terms of health
James Wilson (UCL) and I recently wrote a briefing paper for the Nuffield Council on Bioethics on the ethical issues surrounding hyper-expensive treatments – that is treatments which exceed NICEs usual cut off point of £30000 per quality adjusted life year (qualy). One factor that we kept coming back to was the need to consider […]
Assisted Dying for the non-Terminal
I’m a bit behind the curve with this, but I thought it worth noting the story of Nan Maitland, who recently travelled to Dignitas* at the start of March. She was suffering from arthritis – which, though painful, is a long way short of a terminal illness. (Her story is reminiscent of Robert and Jennifer […]
Medical Neutrality? The Red Cross and MSF
Adam Curtis is one of my favourite film-makers: I don’t think his programmes are always right, but they’re always provocative – and I think they’re more right than wrong. He also has a blog, which – though updated even less frequently than this one at the moment – is excellent. His latest post is about […]
Ethics (without the brain?)
I’ve set my RSS to receive updates from Secondhand Smoke, which is one of the blogs at First Things. It’s written by Wesley Smith, who is affiliated to the Discovery Institute, the creationist thinktank in Seattle: that gives you an indication of the sort of position he occupies – not just on bioethics, but also […]