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The Liverpool Care Pathway in the News: Even by the Mail’s Standards, this is Low
(Cross-posted from the Journal of Medical Ethics blog) The Liverpool Care Pathway provides a rubric for managing the care terminally ill as they approach death. A helpful pamphlet explaining what it is and what it does is available here. Ideally, I’d quote the lot; but for the sake of efficiency, I’ll make do with an
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Tony Coady on Religion in the Political Sphere: Part 2, Deliberative Restraint
In his second Leverhulme Lecture on November 22nd, Professor Tony Coady focused on the issues underlying the common assertion that we ought to exclude religious arguments from deliberations in the political sphere of liberal democratic societies. Coady traces this idea to arguments by Audi and Rawls on ‘secular reasons’ and ‘public reasons’ respectively, which suggest
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The best ethical ideas of the year?
Foreign Policy magazine recently released its annual list of the top 100 global thinkers of the year. The members included a wide range of activists, scientists, politicians, academics and businesspeople, but what most interested me was a sidebar feature. The feature consists of a half-dozen questions that were posed to each person on the list,
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Don’t tax the fat!
by Rebecca Roache Dr Philip Lee, Conservative MP for Bracknell and a practising GP, today suggested that people whose lifestyle choices lead to medical problems should have to contribute towards their healthcare costs. He apparently highlighted type 2 diabetes – which can be brought on by an unhealthy diet, being overweight, and lack of exercise, although
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Condom County: Porn, Condoms and Liberty in Los Angeles
On November 6th, while most of the world focused on the United States’ presidential election, the citizens of Los Angeles County confronted a slightly more explicit question at the voting booth: should porn performers be required to wear condoms while filming? Nearly fifty-six percent of LA county voters said yes.
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Tony Coady on Religion in the Political Sphere: Part 1
In the last twenty years, there has been great interest in the dangers religion presents to liberal democracies, in particular as a result of terrorist attacks, and the political success of the religious right in the United States. Religion is difficult to define and its appropriate role in the public domain is frequently disputed. Violence
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Treating ADHD may reduce criminality
Pharmaceutical treatment of attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is associated with reduced criminality according to a study published yesterday in the New England Journal of Medicine. The study of over 25,000 Swedish adults with the disorder found that men undergoing pharmaceutical treatments had a 51% chance of committing at least one crime in a 4-year period
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Armstrong the Good Giraffe and the Moral Value of Effort
Let me introduce you to Armstrong the Good Giraffe. Appearing in the news last week due to his goodness (and probably his giraffeness), Armstrong is a man in a costume who goes around voluntarily doing good deeds. Throwing himself into helpful tasks – such as providing free water and bananas to runners, picking up litter
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Janet Radcliffe Richards on the past, present and future of sex: Part 2
In the second of her Uehiro lectures on the topic of feminism in the 21st century (which you can listen to here), Professor Janet Radcliffe Richards addresses the question of how the sexes may be said to differ in the light of a shift in our metaphysical understanding of the world.
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A Dyslexic boy in a Trojan horse
‘Come in’, said the Well Known Educational Psychologist. We did. ‘Please sit down’, she said, and we did. She didn’t waste time, and quite right too. We wanted to know. ‘Tom and I have had a very interesting afternoon.’ That sounded bad. ‘He’s a very able child indeed’. That sounded worse, because it came with