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Take Back Control? Doctors as Appointed Fiduciaries
Written by Ben Davies There’s a story that’s often told about the evolution of the doctor-patient relationship. Here’s how it goes: back in the bad old days, doctors were paternalists. They knew what was best, and the job of the patient was simply to do as they were told and hopefully get better. Then, in
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Better Living Through Neurotechnology
Written by Stephen Rainey If ‘neurotechnology’ isn’t a glamour area for researchers yet, it’s not far off. Technologies centred upon reading the brain are rapidly being developed. Among the claims made of such neurotechnologies are that some can provide special access to normally hidden representations of consciousness. Through recording, processing, and making operational brain signals we
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Separation Anxiety – Should Treatment be Imposed for Conjoined Twins?
by Dominic Wilkinson @Neonatalethics On the BBC News website this week, there is a feature on a pair of conjoined twins from Senegal who are currently living in Wales. They have an extremely rare condition – fused at the lower abdomen they have separate brains, hearts and lungs, but shared liver, bladder and digestive system.
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Press Statement: He Jiankui
The response to reckless human experimentation has to go way beyond Dr He’s dismissal. This is not merely a failure of compliance, Dr He failed to grasp the ethical principles and concepts he was vigorously espousing. There will undoubtedly be more guidelines and laws on gene editing but we also need basic education of the
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A third MRT-baby is on its way
Written by César Palacios-González It has been recently reported (link in Spanish) that a 32 year old Greek woman is 27 weeks pregnant with a child who was conceived after a mitochondrial replacement technique (MRT) – in this case Maternal Spindle Transfer (MST). If true this is really big news in terms of reproductive medicine and
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Cross Post: Biased Algorithms: Here’s a More Radical Approach to Creating Fairness
Written by Dr Tom Douglas Our lives are increasingly affected by algorithms. People may be denied loans, jobs, insurance policies, or even parole on the basis of risk scores that they produce. Yet algorithms are notoriously prone to biases. For example, algorithms used to assess the risk of criminal recidivism often have higher error rates in
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Cross Post: Philosophy Can Make the Previously Unthinkable Thinkable
Written by Dr Rebecca Brown In the mid-1990s, Joseph Overton, a researcher at the US think tank the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, proposed the idea of a ‘window’ of socially acceptable policies within any given domain. This came to be known as the Overton window of political possibilities. The job of think tanks, Overton
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Is Addiction an Expression of One’s Deep Self?
By Doug McConnell Chandra Sripada (2016) has recently proposed a conative self-expression account of moral responsibility which claims that we are responsible for actions motivated by what we care for and not responsible for actions motivated solely by other desires. He claims that this account gives us the intuitively correct answers when used to assess
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Reversibility, Colds, and Neurosurgery
By Jonny Pugh This blog was originally published on the Journal of Medical Ethics Blog Happy new year to readers of the blog! I always approach the new year with some trepidation. This is not just due to the terrible weather, or even my resolution to take more exercise (unfortunately in the aforementioned terrible