Death is in the air. To stop us being engulfed by the ‘silver
tsunami’, Martin Amis urges the
construction of euthanasia booths, and encourages the elderly to go to them for
a martini, a medal and a pharmaceutical nudge into the void. Terry Pratchett
talks cosily about ‘shaking death by the hand’ as he sits on his lawn, Tallis
on his IPod, drinking some modern Socratic hemlock washed down with vintage
brandy. He and his backers in the euthanasia industry shrewdly propose death
tribunals who, having heard evidence about individual cases, would sign or
withhold a death warrant. Such tribunals, they say, would obviate the risk that
vulnerable people might opt unacceptably for euthanasia. The opinion polls
consistently indicate considerable public support for a change in the law
against assisted suicide. The opponents of assisted dying are caricatured as
reactionary bigots, probably fuelled by otiose, antediluvian religious
prejudice: people who care more about some dogma of the sanctity of life than
about pain, fear, despair and autonomy. The crusade for assisted dying is a
campaign by the modern and enlightened against the mediaeval and benighted.
Continue reading "Easing the passing: Death booths, misrepresentations and the 'Ugh factor'" »
You’ve stumbled upon a group of beings. For all you can tell, these beings are self-aware, intelligent, have emotions, solve complex problems, and call each other by name. They have thoughts and feelings and probably experience life in a way that is very similar to your own. Are they persons? And do you have moral obligations towards them?
Thomas White, Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, has made news claiming that we have found such a group of beings. In fact, we’ve been living alongside them for a while now. They’re dolphins, and they’re people too. At an upcoming AAAS conference in San Diego, White will be arguing that dolphins deserve the status of “nonhuman persons”. The research in marine science now overwhelmingly shows that dolphins have a highly sophisticated type of consciousness and inner world – and their cognitive capacity is second only to humans (yes, they beat chimps). With such high intellectual and emotional abilities, White claims they are entitled to special moral status and protections. The implications for current practices involving dolphins (in the context of fishing, entertainment, research and the military) are serious, since they would be considered chillingly unethical if they involved human persons.
Continue reading "Persons of the Sea?" »
The days following the devastating
earthquake in Haiti
saw a surge in fundraising efforts from organizations all over the world. In
this charitable climate, the atheist scientist Richard Dawkins set up an aid
campaign of his own: Non-Believers
Giving Aid. Why donate through his group? In addition to rallying fellow
non-believers, Dawkins claims this offers a chance to “counter the scandalous
myth that only the religious care about their fellow-humans.” There are a host
of issues that could be discussed in relation to the aid effort and belief –
why we feel compelled to help distant strangers, the problem of suffering, the
idea of natural disasters as divine punishment – but I’ll concentrate on two
main objections to Dawkins.
One objection would be that the
entire project is simply a shameless propaganda scheme to get more “data” on charity
giving among non-believers. Its purpose is to give the non-believers some
numbers to point to, some “proof” that they give lots of money to charity. And
for that reason, it is just an opportunistic ploy that is deeply inappropriate in
a time of real crisis and tragedy.
Continue reading "Aid Beyond Belief" »
Is the traditional jury system in trouble? The first crown court criminal trial in England and Wales without a jury in 350 years is being held right now, dealing with the Heathrow robbery of 2004. The Guardian discusses the problem of keeping potentially prejudicial Internet information from modern juries. Are we seeing an erosion of having fair trials by one's peers, or the start of updating an old system to modern standards?
Continue reading "The judge is out on juries" »
In a recent article, “Sure, It’s Treatable. But Is It a Disorder?” the New York
Times warns its readers to “brace yourselves for P.E. – shorthand for premature
ejaculation”. If the pharmaceutical industry is to be believed, that may not be
bad advice, since according them, “One in three men actually have
the condition.” But the advice is not meant to be taken literally. What the
reporter really meant was, “brace yourselves for
‘P.E.’ – shorthand for ‘premature ejaculation’”. According to the article, just as the makers
of Viagra have in recent years introduced into the popular lexicon the name of
a “modern man’s malady” and it’s acronym – ‘erectile dysfunction’, or ‘E.D.’,
we can expect a similar effect as a result of the development and marketing of Priligy: a new pill for “men who ejaculate before
copulating or within seconds of beginning.”
The interesting thing about drugs like these is that the condition that
they address may not be recognized as a “disease” or “medical disorder” until
the drug companies set out to market a “cure” for it. And medicalizing the
issue is an essential part of the drug marketing strategy.
Continue reading "The Disease Industry" »
In the
headlines this week is the tragic story of Frances Inglis, whom a jury at the Old Bailey found guilty of murdering her disabled son Tom
and sentenced to nine years in jail. Tom Inglis had been left severely
braindamaged after falling from a moving ambulance in 2007, throwing his mother
in a state of deep distress. She refused to believe an (apparently isolated)
encouraging prognosis from one of the doctors at the hospital, and concluded
that it was her duty to release her son from the “living hell” in which he found himself. Horrified on learning that the only legal way of
allowing her son to die was an application to the High Court for Tom’s food and
water to be withdrawn, Frances Inglis decided to take action on her own. After
a first unsuccessful attempt 14 months earlier, she took her son’s life by
injecting him with a lethal dose of heroin in November 2008.
Continue reading "Killing is killing - or is it?" »
The outrage provoked by Professor Anthony Mathur’s suggestion that patients should sometimes be obliged to enrol in clinical trials (discussed already on this blog by Steve Clarke: 11 December) continues to rage on. Armies of shrill autonomists tell us that all our worst nightmares are real: that Mengele walks again.
Continue reading "We're all guinea pigs, and it's not so bad" »
By: David Edmonds
The
current British inquiry into the Iraq war – led by Sir John Chilcot – is a
cathartic exercise. No issue since New
Labour was elected in 1997 has been so divisive. The war split friends, families and
political parties. While the
catastrophic impact of the war is still being felt in Iraq, in Britain the
inquiry - it is hoped - will bring some closure.
Many
critics of the war are looking for one finding.
They don’t want to hear that the former Prime Minister Tony Blair
miscalculated. They want to have
confirmed their belief that he intentionally misled – even that he lied. Oddly, a verdict of ‘lie’ would be regarded
as incomparably more serious than a verdict of ‘miscalculation’. The ‘Liar’ headline would curdle the
nation’s blood.
Continue reading "LIES AND THE IRAQ WAR" »
The health care reform bill currently being debated in the United
States has re-ignited controversy there over abortion, and in
particular over the availability of federal government funding to pay
for the procedure. Earlier this month, the House of Representatives
version of the health care bill passed narrowly, and with a last minute
amendment that will restrict provision of abortions. The so-called
“Stupak amendment” says that no health care plans receiving any subsidy from the
federal government may offer abortions, except in the case where
abortion is the result of rape, incest, or to save the woman’s life,
and it maintains this restriction even if the government subsidies are
kept separate from the private payments made into the plans, and no government subsidy is ever used to pay for abortions. The Stupak
amendment represents a tightening over existing policy, according to
which the federal government is prohibited from directly funding the
provision of abortions, but may provide funds for hospitals, for
example, that also provide abortions – so long as the hospitals pay for the abortions themselves by some other means.
The
argument for Stupak’s additional restrictions on abortion funding is
supposed to be that since money is fungible, the old prohibition does
not really work to prevent federal funds indirectly playing a role in
providing for abortions. Whatever the merits of this argument, it’s
worth noting that many of its proponents in congress make it
hypocritically; they are more than willing to accept generous campaign
contributions drawn from the profits of health insurance companies that
provide insurance for abortions as a component of their plans. But I
want to focus here on the question of having any restriction of this
kind at all. Can the federal government legitimately be prohibited from funding
abortion?
Continue reading "A controversial use of taxpayer funds " »
In a report expressing concern about the increasing use of
biometric information to protect security and privacy, the Irish Council for
Bioethics (ICB) claimed earlier this month that “an individual’s biometric
information is an intrinsic element of that person”. Such claims are quite
commonly made in relation to genetic information, though the ICB’s extension of
the concept to other forms of biological information, such as that acquired from
fingerprinting, voice recognition software, and gait analysis, may be novel.
The claim that biometric information is an ‘intrinsic element of
the person’ seems designed to invoke powerful intuitions about our ownership of
our own body parts: we own our biological information just like we own our
kidneys. Indeed, the ICB go on to say that “the right to bodily integrity.... should
apply not only to an individual’s body, but also to any information derived
from the body, including his/her biometric information”. But both the
metaphysical claim that biometric information is an intrinsic element of the
person,and the moral claim that it is covered by rights to bodily integrity
are highly problematic.
Continue reading "Is your fingerprint part of you?" »
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