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Ethics

Is anti-ageing worth it?

The Telegraphs proclaims that Anti-ageing drugs 'will fuel euthanasia'. The origin of the story was a lecture by Dr David Gems at UCL. He pointed out that if people were to live much longer healthy lives more would choose to end them themselves, and that centralized control of birthrates might become necessary. Francis Fukuyama argued at a conference in Aarhus last week that life extension also implies problems with age graded hierarchies and generational turnover. Some people, like Fukuyama, find these potential social consequences serious enough that life extension research should be discouraged. But are they strong enough?

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Organ Donation Euthanasia

by Dominic Wilkinson and Julian Savulescu

There are 8000 patients on transplant waiting lists in the UK. Every year 400 patients die while waiting for an organ to come available.
We are all far more likely to be in need of an organ transplant than to be a donor. Most of us expect that if we needed a transplant that someone would donate one. On the basis of the ethical golden rule – do unto others as you would want them to do for you, we should all think seriously about whether and how we could donate our organs if we no longer need them.

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Lord Justice Nero?

There is
a shrill, unpleasant new sound in the UK church. It is the sound of
conservative Christians saying that they are persecuted. It’s the voice of a
minority. And as Rowan Williams trenchantly observed: ‘The Church of England is
like a swimming pool: all the noise comes from the shallow end.’ The claim of
persecution is an insult to the vast numbers of Christians in the world who really
are persecuted. Please read the Bible and the history books before going on
prime time TV to say that you’re persecuted. 

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The privacy of the shrew

Is it wrong for documentary film makers to film intimate moments in the lives of non-human animals? David Attenborough has used fibroptic cameras to obtain views of the inside of a platypus’ nest, providing never-before-seen images of the birth and feeding of a newborn platypus. But imagine that he had used similar technology to obtain pictures from a human home birth, or to take pictures of copulating couples in their homes? Brett Mills, a lecturer in television studies at the University of East Anglia has controversially suggested that animals may have a right to privacy that is breached by filming them without their consent.

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Are We Future Evil Aliens?

By: Julian Savulescu

Stephen Hawking, the Cambridge physicist, has recently argued, in a Discovery channel documentary, that alien life forms probably exist somewhere in the Universe, but we should avoid contact with them. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8642558.stm). His reason is, apparently, that if they are anything like humans, they are likely to be aggressive and either exterminate us or pillage our resources.

"If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans," he said. "We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet." 

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Morality: what’s disgust got to do with it?

Kathleen
Taylor has got an interesting recent piece in the Guardian about the importance
of the emotion of disgust for our moral lives. “If you had a dog”, she asks,
“and it died a natural death, how would you feel about roasting and eating it?”
Most of us would be revulsed by such an idea. And yet by hypothesis we
would not be causing the dog any harm whatsoever; suppose also we made sure
that the meat was adequately prepared so that it did not pose a health risk to
us and our children. Why should eating the dog raise any moral issue at all?

 

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I’m a taxpayer, I want my data!

A ruling by the Information Commissioner has ordered scientists at Queen’s University in Belfast to hand over copies of 40 years of research data on tree rings after a long battle with a climate sceptic. (PDF of the ruling) This is an important precedent for scientists, who have to comply with the strictest interpretation of the
Freedom of Information (FoI) Act. According to the Times: "Phil Willis, a Liberal Democrat MP and chairman of the Science and
Technology Select Committee, said that scientists now needed to work on
the presumption that if research is publicly funded, the data ought to
be made publicly available." More and more, there are demands for public releases of research data.

Were the scientists right in trying to withhold data, or is the public interest stronger? Is there a moral obligation to publish not just the results of publicly funded research, but the underlying data?

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The equal air-time solution for controversial research

When are placebos ethical in medical research? One common answer is that it is only appropriate to use placebos in research when there is no proven effective treatment for the condition (1). On this view, if there is a proven treatment placebos would be unethical, and any trial should compare new drugs or treatments with the existing proven one. But what if the question of ‘proof’ is in dispute? For new medical treatments there often comes a point where some researchers and doctors are convinced that the new treatment is effective and safe while others remain unconvinced. When placebo-controlled trials take place in this setting they are often controversial.

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Volcano Ethics: Should we be Flying the Unfriendly Skies?

An ash cloud produced by the eruption of the Eyjafjallajoekull volcano in Iceland has led to the severe disruption of airline transportation in the UK and across a wide swathe of Europe, with UK airspace almost completely closed since midday last Thursday. Passengers, freight importers and exporters, and airlines are just some of those affected by the disruption; some British employers are also taking a hit due to absent workers who went abroad for their Easter holidays and then found themselves stranded and unable to get home. The reasons for grounding the planes are non-trivial: as the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) wrote in a press release last week: “Since volcanic ash is composed of very abrasive silica materials, it can damage the airframe and flight surfaces, clog different systems, abrade cockpit windows and flame-out jet engines constituting a serious safety hazard.”

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The real scandals in organ donation consent

Headlines in a number of newspapers in the last day or two have claimed scandalous failures in organ donation consent in the UK. According to ‘Sky News’, organs were “taken without consent”, while the Sun claims that “NHS doctors took the wrong organs from the bodies of donors”. But it is important to put these claims in context. There are some bigger and more serious scandals when it comes to organ donation consent.

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