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The cost of living and the cost of dying
X, a patient with reliably diagnosed PVS, lies in a hospital bed for years, fed via a nasogastric tube. He has not, and by definition never will have, any capacity for pain, pleasure or any sort of sensation. Devoted family members come each day to sit by his bedside, but he has no idea that
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Cabs, censorship and cutting tools
The smith was working hard on making a new tool. A passer-by looked at his work and remarked that it looked sharp and dangerous. The smith nodded: it needed to be very sharp to do its work. The visitor wondered why there was no cross-guard to prevent the user’s hand to slide onto the blade,
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Celebrity Culture
Every Saturday evening, and often on other evenings too, my daughters sit goggling at the TV talent show X Factor. Am I witnessing the long tentacles of the dreaded ‘celebrity culture’ we are said to inhabit reaching into my living room? I think not. I confess I find the show tedious, but as part of
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What is feasible?
Climate change raises questions of global distributive justice and I am interested in what kinds of actions might be considered as fair responses. Recently, I have observed that some accounts of climate justice have been dismissed for being “infeasible”. I have started to wonder what this means. In ordinary language, “feasible” might mean “possible” or
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World funds: implement free mitigations
The future is uncertain and far. That means, not only do we not know what will happen, but we don’t reason about it as if it were real: stories about the far future are morality tales, warnings or aspirations, not plausible theories about something that is going to actually happen. Some of the best reasoning
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Discovering Consciousness in the “Permanently Unconscious”: What Should We Do?
Comment on “Bedside detection of awareness in the vegetative state: a cohort study” by Damian Cruse, Srivas Chennu, Camille Chatelle, Tristan A Bekinschtein, Davinia Fernández-Espejo, John D Pickard, Steven Laureys, Adrian M Owen. Published in The Lancet, online Nov 10. Cruse and colleagues founds evidence of some kind of consciousness in 3 out of 16
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Holier and happier than thou?
Are ethical people happier? Many philosophers have claimed this, from Plato and Aristotle onwards. A new study claims it is empirically true, or more exactly that ethical people are more satisfied with life. The 2009 study looked at cross-country data from the World Values Survey from the US, Canada, Mexico and Brazil. It looked at
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Wellcome Lecture in Neuroethics: Moral enhancement? Evidence and challenges, Dr Molly Crockett, University of Zürich
Abstract: Can pills change our morals? Neuroscientists are now discovering how hormones and brain chemicals shape social behaviour, opening potential avenues for pharmacological manipulation of ethical values. In this talk, I will present an overview of recent studies showing how altering brain chemistry can change moral judgment and behaviour. These findings raise new questions about the
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The moral case for elective caesarean section
Should a father dive into a flowing stream to aid his daughter, struggling to keep her head above water? Should a mother donate a kidney to her child with renal failure? Is it ethical for a parent to work two or three jobs so that they can pay private health insurance or school fees for