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Guest Post: Is it cruel to make children sit and work in silence?

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Written By David Aldridge, Oxford Brookes University

This is a cross post from Dave Aldridge’s blog

 

Ahead of a talk to be given at the Institute of Education, Tom Bennett, behaviour guru and figurehead of the ResearchEd movement, invited questions via twitter that he hoped he could address in his seminar.  One tweeter asked “Is it cruel to make [children] read/ write/ think in silence?”  Bennett’s response on twitter was a one word, “no”, accompanied by this picture of guffawing muppets.Read More »Guest Post: Is it cruel to make children sit and work in silence?

Guest Post: Is it ethical to use data from Nazi medical experiments?

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Written by Dr Lynn Gillam

Academic Director/ Clinical Ethicist,

Children’s Bioethics Centre at the Royal Children’s Hospital,

and Associate Professor in Health Ethics at the Centre for Health and Society at University of Melbourne

Read More »Guest Post: Is it ethical to use data from Nazi medical experiments?

Guest Post: What’s wrong with obesity (and addiction)?

Written by Anke Snoek

Macquarie University

Many of us experience failure of self-control once in a while. These failures are often harmless, and may involve alcohol or food. Because we have experiences with these failures of self-control, we think that something similar is going on in cases of addiction or when people who can’t control their eating on a regular basis. Because we fail to exercise willpower once in a while over food or alcohol, we think that people who regularly fail to control their eating or substance use, must be weak-willed. Just control yourself.Read More »Guest Post: What’s wrong with obesity (and addiction)?

Announcement: The Stockholm Centre for the Ethics of War and Peace (SCEWP) has just launched a new blog.

The Stockholm Centre for the Ethics of War and Peace (SCEWP) has just launched a new blog. The Ethical War Blog will publish short and timely opinion articles on war-related topics in the news, written by specialists in the field, in an accessible and digestible format. The blog launches with five articles, with new content to… Read More »Announcement: The Stockholm Centre for the Ethics of War and Peace (SCEWP) has just launched a new blog.

Guest Post: Why isn’t the world going vegan?

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Written by Catia Faria

Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Last month, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, one of the world’s most influential organizations in its field, published an updated version of a paper concluding that animal-free diets are absolutely healthy (Cullum-Dugan & Pawlak 2015). The article presents the official position of the Academy on this topic, according to which, when well designed, vegetarian and vegan diets provide adequate nutrition for all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood and adolescence.

 It would be reasonable to expect that such conclusion had a significant impact on people’s dietary choices. If adopting a vegan diet imposed great costs on the health of human beings, then doing it might not be what we are required to do. Yet the health argument has been, again, debunked. So, why aren’t people going massively vegan?Read More »Guest Post: Why isn’t the world going vegan?

Catholic Identity and Strong Dissent—How Compatible?

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Written by Professor Tony Coady

University of Melbourne

In a previous Uehiro blog[1] I offered a number of fairly radical criticisms of church disciplinary practices, and of several prevailing “official” teachings of the Church, such as on artificial contraception, abortion and much else in the area of sexual and reproductive ethics. Subsequently, several people put the question to me: “Given your critical views of so much official church teaching, how can you still call yourself a Catholic?”  Read More »Catholic Identity and Strong Dissent—How Compatible?

Guest Post: Why it might be good to pamper terrorists

Written By Anders Herlitz

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

 One of the most heated debates in “Western” countries these days concerns how to deal with individuals who either have traveled or consider traveling to Syria or Iraq in order to join Daesh and return to a “Western” country in which they are citizens. Australia recently announced that they plan to strip Australian-born individuals who fight with Daesh of their Australian citizenship. The United Kingdom already has laws that allow them to strip citizens of their British nationality if it is “conductive to the public good.” Sweden, my home country, gained international attention in somewhat suspicious circles for what to many seemed to be the complete opposite approach to the problem: the city of Stockholm has outlined a plan for how to deal with members of extremist movements, which involves what they call inclusive measures such as assistance with finding housing as well as an occupation, but also health efforts needed to deal with trauma and PTSD that are expected to be common among participants in warfare. Needless to say perhaps, the idea that Swedish tax money could go to treat the trauma of a person who himself decided to travel to a foreign country to participate in barbarism has generated quite an emotional reaction. I’d like to take this opportunity to scratch the surface of the ethical problems of this general problem, show why Stockholm did the right thing, and underline that we are having really, really bad moral luck.Read More »Guest Post: Why it might be good to pamper terrorists

Do I have a right to access my father’s genetic account?

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 Written By: Roy Gilbar, Netanya Academic College, Israel, and Charles Foster

In the recent case of ABC v St. George’s Healthcare NHS Trust and others,1 [http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/QB/2015/1394.html] a High Court judge decided that:

(a) where the defendants (referred to here jointly as ‘X’) knew that Y, a prisoner,  was suffering from Huntingdon’s Disease (‘HD’); and

(b) X knew that Y had refused permission to tell Y’s daughter, Z (the claimant), that he had HD (and accordingly that there was a 50% chance that Z had it (and that if Z had it there was, correspondingly, a 50% chance that the fetus she was then carrying would have HD),

X had no duty to tell Z that Y was suffering from HD. Z said that if she had known of Y’s condition, she would have had an abortion.Read More »Do I have a right to access my father’s genetic account?