Guest Post by Bob Simpson, Monash University Re: Climate change, cooperation and moral bioenhancement The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has repeatedly said that greenhouse gas emissions increase the likelihood of severe and irreversible harm for people and ecosystems. And in his State of the Union address in 2015, Barack Obama emphasised these problems, saying that climate change […]
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What is a Moral Epigenetic Responsibility?
Guest Post by Charles Dupras & Vardit Ravitsky Re: The ambiguous nature of epigenetic responsibility Epigenetics is a recent yet promising field of scientific research. It explores the influence of the biochemical environment (food, toxic pollutants) and the social environment (stress, child abuse, socio-economic status) on the expression of genes, i.e. on whether and how they […]
Are Doctors Who Know the Law More Likely to Follow it?
Guest Post by Ben White and Lindy Willmott, Australian Centre for Health Law Research This was the question we considered in a recent JME article about the role of law in decisions to withhold or withdraw life-sustaining treatment from adults who lack capacity. The short answer is ‘yes’. The longer answer is also ‘yes’ – although […]
An Accidental Expert
Guest Post by Derick Wade Re: Back to the Beside: Making Clinical Decisions in Patients with Prolongued Unconsciousness In 1994, not long after the Bland judgement, I was telephoned one day by the office of the Official Solicitor. “Was I familiar with the vegetative state, and if so would I be prepared to see two people for […]
No Diagnosis for You, Matey!
Here’s a little amusement for the weekend, from a friend who lives in the States: I received a state of the arts cardio monitor, per a prescription from a cardiologist, to determine if I have an irregular heart beat. All chrome and aluminium and clean and small with various electronic devices to transmit “information” to […]
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 […]
The Challenge of Futile Treatment
Guest Post by Lindy Willmott and Ben White For decades, researchers from around the world have found evidence that doctors provide futile treatment to adult patients who are dying. Some discussion of this topic has turned on matters of definition (see our recent contribution to this debate), with a broader concept of “perceived inappropriate treatment” […]
Individualised and Personalised QALYs in Exceptional Treatment Decisions
Guest Post by Warwick Heale When NICE decides whether to make a treatment available on the NHS it considers both clinical effectiveness and cost effectiveness. Cost effectiveness is based on population-level QALY data, as is appropriate for a population-level policy. However, this can cause problems for exceptional individual patients. When a doctor wants to offer an […]
JOB: Teaching Fellow, UCL (0.4 FTE)
James Wilson has drawn my attention to this opportunity, which may be of interest to those working in public health ethics. Further Particulars This post is a Teaching Fellowship which, in the first instance, will start on 15 September 2016 and run until 14 September 2017. The successful candidate will be expected primarily to provide […]
In Praise of Ambivalence: “Young” Feminism, Gender Identity, and Free Speech
By Brian D. Earp (@briandavidearp) * Note: this article was first published online at Quillette magazine. Introduction Alice Dreger, the historian of science, sex researcher, activist, and author of a much-discussed book of last year, has recently called attention to the loss of ambivalence as an acceptable attitude in contemporary politics and beyond. “Once upon a time,” she writes, “we […]