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The Doctor-Knows-Best NHS Foundation Trust: a Business Proposal for the Health Secretary
By Charles Foster Informed consent, in practice, is a bad joke. It’s a notion created by lawyers, and like many such notions it bears little relationship to the concerns that real humans have when they’re left to themselves, but it creates many artificial, lucrative, and expensive concerns. Of course there are a few clinical situations
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Video Interview: Jesper Ryberg on Neurointerventions, Crime and Punishment
Should neurotechnologies that affect emotional regulation, empathy and moral judgment, be used to prevent offenders from reoffending? Is it morally acceptable to offer more lenient sentences to offenders in return for participation in neuroscientific treatment programs? Or would this amount too coercion? Is it possible to administer neurointerventions as a type of punishment? Is it
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Press Release: Tafida Raqeeb, International Disagreement and Controversial Decisions About Life Support
by Dominic Wilkinson @Neonatalethics This week the legal case around medical treatment for five-year old Tafida Raqeeb has begun in the High Court. She sustained severe brain damage from bleeding in the brain seven months ago. Her parents wish to take her to a hospital in Italy for further treatment, while the doctors at
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The Ethics of Social Prescribing: An Overview
Written by Rebecca Brown, Stephanie Tierney, Amadea Turk. This post was originally published on the NIHR School for Primary Care Research website which can be accessed here. Health problems often co-occur with social and personal factors (e.g. isolation, debt, insecure housing, unemployment, relationship breakdown and bereavement). Such factors can be particularly important in the context of non-communicable
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Conscientious Objection, Professional Discretionary Space, and Good Medicine
By Doug McConnell Some argue that good medicine depends on physicians having a wide discretionary space in which they can act on their consciences (Sulmasy, 2017). Interestingly, those who are against conscientious objection in medicine make the exact opposite claim – giving physicians the freedom to act on their consciences will undermine good medicine.
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Religion, War and Terrorism
In a fascinating, engaging, and wide-ranging talk in the New St Cross Special Ethics Seminar series, Professor Tony Coady provided several powerful arguments against the increasingly widespread assumption that religion, and religions, have a tendency to violence, particularly through war or terrorism.
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Planting Trees, Search Engines, and Climate Change
Written by César Palacios-González The other day I went down an internet rabbit hole when researching about planting trees and climate change. I came out the other side concluding (among other things) that there were good reasons to change my search engine to Ecosia[1]. So I did, and, other things being equal, you should too.
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Japan to Allow Human-Animal Hybrids to be Brought to Term
By Mackenzie Graham The article was originally published at the Conversation Around the world thousands of people are on organ donor waiting lists. While some of those people will receive the organ transplants they need in time, the sad reality is that many will die waiting. But controversial new research may provide a way to
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Making Ourselves Better
Written by Stephen Rainey Human beings are sometimes seen as uniquely capable of enacting life plans and controlling our environment. Take technology, for instance; with it we make the world around us yield to our desires in various ways. Communication technologies, and global transport, for example, have the effect of practically shrinking a vast world,