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Winchester Lectures: Kamm and Permissibility
In her first Winchester Lecture, ‘Who Turned the Trolley?’, presented in Oxford on 21 October, Frances Kamm discussed some of the recent views of Judith Thomson on so-called trolley cases.
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Winchester Lectures: Kamm’s Trolleyology and Is There a Morally Relevant Difference Between Killing and Letting Die?
The Winchester Visiting Lecturerships were established in 1995 for the purpose of inviting visiting lecturers in the fields of International Relations, History, Philosophy, Religion, Theology or Law. We are grateful to the committee for this opportunity to bring Professor Frances Kamm to Oxford for this series of two lectures October 21 – 22, 2013. …
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Thorpe Park’s ‘Asylum’ maze is unrealistic. Does this make it more or less inappropriate?
There has been much discussion this week about whether Thorpe Park’s ‘Asylum’ maze perpetuates the stigma that sometimes surrounds mental illness. The live action horror maze is an attraction that has opened for Halloween for the last eight years. Replete with special effects, its interior is set up to look like the intermittently-lit corridors of…
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Should athletes be allowed to use performance enhancing drugs?
Press Release: British Medical Journal Head to Head: Should athletes be allowed to use performance enhancing drugs? Stories about illegal doping in sport are a regular occurrence. On bmj.com today, experts debate whether athletes should be allowed to use performance enhancing drugs. Professor of ethics Julian Savulescu, from the University of Oxford, argues that rather than…
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Podcast: Ethics and Expectations, Seth Lazar
Imagine you have been set the following trolley problem by a villain. There is a central track, called CONTINUE. If you do nothing, the trolley will continue down this track, and kill whomever is at the end of it, then stop. Part way along the line, there is a junction, with a lever. If you…
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Things look really good…if all you care about is money
Are things really getting better? Well, the answer is a resounding ‘yes’ if you’re a monetary consequentialist (i.e., think all that matters is maximizing the amount of monetary resources in the world). A group of 21 economists plus one Bjørn Lomborg have a new book coming out soon that will survey 10 pressing global problems…
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Can a person in a vegetative state get married?
By Luke Davies Follow Luke on Twitter. Recently in Illinois, a woman, Colette Purifoy, has been denied a marriage license because her fiancé, John Morris, who is in a vegetative state, cannot sign the marriage form and consent (Find the story here, here, here, and here). In 2009, just before the surgery during which his…
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Electroceuticals and Mind Control
“Electroceuticals”, or therapies utilising electricity, are nothing new and range from the widely accepted defibrillator/ pace makers to the more controversial electric shock therapies like ECT sometimes employed to treat severe depression. But a recent article in Nature argues that these are just a small, crude sample of what electroceuticals may be able to offer…
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Abortion ‘on grounds of gender’: Like it or not, the DPP was right
There has been a recent storm over the DPP’s decision not to prosecute two doctors in relation to their referral of two women for abortion. The cases were widely represented as cases of abortion on grounds of gender. They came to light in the course of an undercover investigation by the Daily Telegraph of practice…
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‘Trust Me, I’m a Doctor’: On the Unnecessity of Some Necessary Post-Mortems
Having a post-mortem (henceforth PM) carried out on a recently deceased loved one can be hugely distressing for those left behind. The procedure involves a detailed examination of the body after death, and requires what some would deem to be a violation of the deceased’s bodily integrity. For obvious reasons, the subject of the PM…