Conscientious objection and withdrawal of life support
Are British doctors obliged to withdraw life support if requested by a patient? Are British doctors obliged to withdraw life support if requested by a...
UK Parliament to debate conscientious objection
A website, the Free Conscience Campaign, launched to back bill Baroness O'Loan, former Police Ombudsman in Northern Ireland A Northern Ireland peer has introduced a...
Rebuilding the tarnished image of utilitarianism
Oxford’s Uehiro Centre wants to show its saintly side How utilitarian are you? Leading bioethicists at Oxford University, including Julian Savulescu, have published a nine-question...
After 70 years, lessons from the Nuremberg Code
The medical profession must remain ever vigilant Karl Brandt, Hitler's personal doctor, on trial at Nuremberg On August 20, 1947, an international tribunal which investigated...
Should Facebook have its own chapter in a bioethics text?
Another challenge for justice and autonomyWhy hasn’t bioethics taken on the challenge of social media? After all, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and other products are changing...
New Hippocratic Oath for doctors approved
There are some subtle but significant differencesA modern successor to the Hippocratic Oath for physicians around the world has been approved by the World Medical...
Does Asia have a distinctive bioethics?
Families are much more importantThe Western concept of autonomy, which dominates in the Anglo-American world at the moment, needs to be adapted in Asia to...
‘Human dignity’ is not ‘useless’
Even if bioethicist object, patients complain that they are not treated with dignity. So it must mean something Few concepts are more disputed in bioethics...
If Trump moves on bioethics, what kind of commission should he create?
There are at least two different schools of thought: consensus commissions and non-consensus commissionsToday is October 14. Two hundred and sixty-seven days have passed since...
Religions and embryos
From ensoulment to reincarnationAn special feature in the journal Development lists the attitude of various religions towards human embryos. Author William Neaves writes “How religions...
HMS Bioethics Journal launched
Harvard Medical School gets into the gameHarvard Medical School has published the inaugural issue of a bioethics journal, called – wait for it! --- Bioethics...
Recovering a universal bio-ethic
Bioethics, the ethics of life, has bifurcated into medical ethics and environmental ethics. Can we reunite them?Etymologically, the word “bioethics” means the ethics of life....