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The Ethics of Age-Selective Restrictions for COVID-19 Control
Written by: Bridget Williams1,2, James Cameron3, James Trauer2, Ben Marais4, Romain Ragonnet2, Julian Savulescu1,3 Cross-posted with the Journal of Medical Ethics blog One of the major controversies of the COVID-19 pandemic has been disagreement about whether age-selective measures should be introduced, with greater focus on preventing infection in older people but tolerance of some transmission
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Who You Really Are And Why It Matters
By Charles Foster [This is a review of The Flip: Who you really are, and why it matters, by Jeffrey J. Kripal. Penguin, 2020] A few years ago I dislocated my shoulder. I went off to hospital, and breathed nitrous oxide while they tried to put it back. Something very strange yet very common happened.
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Current Lockdown Is Ageist (Against The Young)
Written by Alberto Giubilini Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities University of Oxford Former UK supreme court justice and historian Lord Jonathan Sumption recently made the following claim: “I don’t accept that all lives are of equal value. My children’s and my grandchildren’s life is worth much
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Are Immunity Passports a Human Rights Issue?
Written by Julian Savulescu A shorter version of this post appears in The Telegraph Imagine you are about to board a plane (remember that…) Authorities have reason to believe you are carrying a loaded gun. They are entitled to detain you. But they are obliged to investigate whether you have a gun. And if you
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Ethical Considerations For The Second Phase Of Vaccine Prioritisation
By Jonathan Pugh and Julian Savulescu As the first phase of vaccine distribution continues to proceed, a heated debate has begun about the second phase of vaccine prioritisation, particularly with respect to the question of whether certain occupations, such as teachers and police officers amongst others, should be prioritised in the second phase. Indeed,
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Vaccines and Ventilators: Need, Outcome or a Right to a Fair Go?
Written by Julian Savulescu and Jonathan Pugh The current UK approach to allocating limited life-saving resources is on the basis of need. Guidance issued by The General Medical Council states that all doctors must “Make sure that decisions about setting priorities that affect patients are fair and based on clinical need and the likely effectiveness
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Pandemic Ethics: Saving Lives and Replaceability
Written by Roger Crisp Imagine two worlds quite different from our own. In Non-intervention, if a person becomes ill with some life-threatening condition, though their pain may be alleviated, no attempt is made to save their lives. In Maximal-intervention, everything possible is done to save the lives of those with life-threatening conditions.
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Guest Post: Why Philosophers Should Write More Accessibly: Towards A New Kind of Epistemic (In)justice
Written by University of Oxford student Brian Wong Philosophy should, to some extent, be a publicly oriented activity: we hope to make sense of first-order questions concerning how we ought to live, what existence is, what we know, and also deeper questions concerning our methodologies and ways of thinking. Yet philosophical writing has long been
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Lessons for Philosophers and Scientists from Sherlock Holmes and Father Brown
By Charles Foster Arthur Conan Doyle’s estate has issued proceedings, complaining that Enola Holmes, a recently released film about Sherlock Holmes’ sister, portrays the great detective as too emotional. Sherlock Holmes was famously suspicious of emotions. 1 ‘ [L]ove is an emotional thing’, he icily observed, ‘and whatever is emotional is opposed to that true
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PRESS RELEASE: Racial Justice Requires Ending Drug War, Say Leading Bioethicists
PRESS RELEASE: Free all non-violent criminals jailed on minor drug offences, say experts Non-violent offenders serving time for drug use or possession should be freed immediately and their convictions erased, according to research published in the peer-reviewed The American Journal of Bioethics. More than 60 international experts including world-leading bioethicists, psychologists and drug experts have