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“The Best Interests of the Family”: Parents v Baby?
There is much that is good to be said about Dominic Wilkinson’s new book Death or Disability? The ‘Carmentis Machine’ and decision-making for critically ill children. My favourite part of the book is how Dominic confronts head on the issue of the best interests of the family in relation to care, and withdrawal of medical treatment,…
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Live from the shooting gallery: what price impact safety?
As I am writing this post, asteroid 2012 DA14 is sweeping past Earth, inside the synchronous orbit (in fact, I am watching it on live webcast). Earlier today, an unrelated impactor disintegrated above Chelyabinsk, producing some dramatic footage and some injuries from shattered glass due to the sonic boom. It might have been the largest…
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Book announcement: Death Or Disability? by Dominic Wilkinson
We are pleased to announce that Dr. Dominic Wilkinson, the previous blogmaster for the Practical Ethics blog, has just launched his book: Death or Disability? The ‘Carmentis Machine’ and decision-making for critically ill children. The book, published by Oxford University Press, deals with advances in brain scans and other technologies, and their influence on decisions about…
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On being private in public
We all know that we are under CCTV surveillance on many occasions each day, particularly when we are in public places. For the most part we accept that being – or potentially being – watched in public places is a reasonable price to pay for the security that 24-hour surveillance offers. However, we also have…
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Too long in gestating: an overdue inquiry into the Abortion Act
Whatever your view of abortion, there are too many abortions, and too many of them are too late. Even abortion’s fiercest advocates don’t pretend that it’s a Good Thing – just the lesser of two evils. In 2010 there were 189,574 abortions in England and Wales – an 8% increase in a decade. The tightly…
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Jeff McMahan on What Rights Can be Defended by Means of War
On the evening of Thursday 7 February, Jeff McMahan, Honorary Fellow of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and Professor Philosophy at Rutgers University, delivered an insightful and fascinating Astor Lecture at the University of Oxford. McMahan’s topic was the relatively underdiscussed question of the extent to which states are morally entitled to resist…
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Yet Another Reason to Legalise Doping in Sport: Organised Crime
Unsurprisingly, the Australian Crime Commission has found widespread use of performance enhancing drugs in sport in Australia and the involvement of organized crime in its distribution. I have given many arguments for why it would be better for athletes, spectators and sport to liberalise laws currently banning performance enhancing drugs. I have also argued that…
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The double standard of objections to drone strikes against US citizens
On Monday, NBC News released a bombshell memo from the US Department of Justice justifying the killing of American citizens who are believed to be senior al-Qaida leaders. That in itself is not necessarily news – the US famously used a drone strike to kill its own citizens, Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, in 2011.…
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Alexandre Erler – ‘Sleep and Opportunity for Well-Being’ – Talk Podcast
Many of us are guilty of sleeping more than we really need to. Moreover, some people just need more sleep than others. In this talk, (which you can listen to here) Alexandre Erler argues that this means that many of us (who sleep excessively) are severely restricting our opportunities for well-being, and that the unfortunate…
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Anthony Skelton: ‘Two Conceptions of Children’s Welfare’ – Talk Podcast
In the latest St. Cross Ethics Seminar (which you can listen to here) Anthony Skelton investigates how we should construct an adequate theory of welfare for children.