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T-illegal actions and the case for legal ambiguity
Question: When is a crime not a crime? Answer: when it will never be prosecuted. The release this week by the Director of Public Prosecutions of his interim policy on prosecution of assisted suicide raises a number of questions – as discussed yesterday in this blog by Simon Rippon. The new policy formalises what has
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Supercoach and the MRI machine
Are there neuroethical issues in sports? Dr Judy Illes thinks so, in a talk given in Canada on September 17. People are using neuroimaging to assess ability (which may also pick up unsuspected pathologies in the brain), intervening against depression in athletes, and perhaps using deep brain stimulation for enhancing motor performance. Does enhanced training
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Assisted Suicide and Accusations
As a result of a court ruling requiring clarification of the law, the UK's Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), Keir Starmer, yesterday issued some guidelines concerning the legal grey area of assisted suicide. The DPP published a list of factors that will weigh in favour of and against prosecutions for assisted suicide. Care Not Killing
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Why pander to the pandas?
Chris Packham has recently (and not for the first time) suggested that we should stop trying to save the panda — an expensive exercise — and instead put our efforts and resources to ‘better use.’ This suggestion is worth some unpacking. His argument is a familiar one about cost-effectiveness and resource allocation: we should use
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Wealth versus Happiness
Economists have long used Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita as a proxy measure for the average level of wellbeing within a country. GDP is a measure of the goods and services produced in a country and is a fairly good proxy for material wealth. However, it fails to capture many other factors that are
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Anaesthe-steak™: pain-free meat and the welfare paradox
A recent article in the New Scientist raises the prospect that alongside ‘gluten-free’, ‘GM free’, ‘sugar free’, and ‘dairy free’ our supermarket shelves may soon contain ‘pain-free’ meat. American philosopher Adam Shriver, writing in Neuroethics, argues that everyone concerned with animal welfare should support the replacement of animals used in factory farming with livestock genetically
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Academic freedom isn’t free
Should scientists be allowed to publish anything, even when it is wrong? And should there be journals willing to accept everything, as long as it seems interesting enough? That is the core of a debate that has blossomed since the journal Medical Hypotheses published two aids-denialist papers. Medical Hypotheses is a deliberately non-peer reviewed journal:
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Should Bankers Repent?
The Times (as well as a slew of other newspapers) reports that the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams is complaining that financiers have, in general, failed to feel repentance for the ‘excesses of the boom that led to financial meltdown’ (See http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article6836496.ece ). The Archbishop does not present evidence to back up the claim
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Longer life, more trouble?
An article in the Times argues that life extension will bring us problems: long-lived people will bankrupt the NHS, pensions would become expensive, the pension age would need to be changed, there would be a pressure for resources and life would become meaningless. It is a surprisingly common criticism that would never be levelled at