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The Tragedy of Moral Mistakes
A tragic case was recently reported of a man who died following botched care via the NHS’ telephone helpline. Suffering from blood poisoning, a series of errors, mis-recording and failure to listen meant that he was told simply to take the remedy ‘Gaviscon’. He died shortly afterwards. This was rightly widely reported in the press
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Neither God nor Nature: Could the doping sinner be an exemplar of human(ist) dignity?
Last week Pieter Bonte gave a St. Cross seminar titled “Neither God nor Nature. Could the doping sinner be an exemplar of human(ist) dignity?” The talk is online as a mp3. Here are some of my notes:
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Can we Have an Interest Theory of Rights for Animals, and a Will Theory for Humans?
By Luke Davies Follow Luke on Twitter. A recent article in the New York Times has advocated extending the notion of personhood, and the rights associated with that status, to dogs. Gregory Burns, the author of the article, argued for this position on the basis of the structural and functional similarity between the caudate nucleus of
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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