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Three Ethical Ways to Increase Organ Donation in Australia
Authors: William Isdale & Julian Savulescu An edited version of this post was published by The Conversation Last week the Federal Government announced that there would be a review of Australia’s tissue and organ transplantation systems. The impetus for the review appears to be continually disappointing donation rates, despite the adoption of a national reform agenda in
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Anorexia Nervosa and Deep Brain Stimulation: Philosophical Analysis of Potential Mechanisms
By Hannah Maslen, Jonathan Pugh and Julian Savulescu According to the NHS, the number of hospital admissions across the UK for teenagers with eating disorders has nearly doubled in the last three years. In a previous post, we discussed some ethical issues relating to the use of deep brain stimulation (DBS) to treat anorexia
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Guest Post: Why isn’t the world going vegan?
Written by Catia Faria Universitat Pompeu Fabra Last month, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, one of the world’s most influential organizations in its field, published an updated version of a paper concluding that animal-free diets are absolutely healthy (Cullum-Dugan & Pawlak 2015). The article presents the official position of the Academy on this topic,
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Catholic Identity and Strong Dissent—How Compatible?
Written by Professor Tony Coady University of Melbourne In a previous Uehiro blog[1] I offered a number of fairly radical criticisms of church disciplinary practices, and of several prevailing “official” teachings of the Church, such as on artificial contraception, abortion and much else in the area of sexual and reproductive ethics. Subsequently, several people put
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What to do with Google—nothing, break it up, nationalise it, turn it into a public utility, treat it as a public space, or something else?
Google has become a service that one cannot go without if one wants to be a well-adapted participant in society. For many, Google is the single most important source of information. Yet people do not have any understanding of the way Google individually curates contents for its users. Its algorithms are secret. For the past
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Guest Post: Why it might be good to pamper terrorists
Written By Anders Herlitz Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey One of the most heated debates in “Western” countries these days concerns how to deal with individuals who either have traveled or consider traveling to Syria or Iraq in order to join Daesh and return to a “Western” country in which they are citizens.
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Do I have a right to access my father’s genetic account?
Written By: Roy Gilbar, Netanya Academic College, Israel, and Charles Foster In the recent case of ABC v St. George’s Healthcare NHS Trust and others,1 [http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/QB/2015/1394.html] a High Court judge decided that: (a) where the defendants (referred to here jointly as ‘X’) knew that Y, a prisoner, was suffering from Huntingdon’s Disease (‘HD’); and (b) X
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Guest Post: Volunteer Service
Written By Seth Lazar Australian National University Earlier this year, the British Army Reserves launched a recruitment drive, emphasising the opportunities that volunteering affords: world travel, professional training, excitement and comradeship.[1] In this sense it was typical. Military recruitment tends not to mention the possibility of being complicit in murder. But those who are considering
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Guest Post: New Tools for Bioethics Education and Public Engagement
Written by Johann Ahola-Launonen University of Helsinki How should bioethical discussion be? The academic debate entails a tension between different parties, which often are difficult to compare. To mention some, for example, some draw from the tradition of liberal consequentialism and demand for rationalism and the avoidance of lofty moral arguments. Others descend from the
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Guest Post: The Millennium Development Goals and Peter Singer’s new book on Effective Altruism
Written by William Isdale, of The University of Queensland As many readers will be aware, this year will mark the conclusion of the Millennium Development Goals. For some of these goals, expectations have been exceeded; for instance, the goal of halving global poverty (defined as living on less then US$1.25 a day) was achieved back