New Zealand river declared a legal person
Dispute with Maori settled after 140 years In the latest wrinkle in debates over personhood, a Māori iwi (tribe) in New Zealand has succeeded in...
A halfway house in the conscientious objection debate
Conscientious objection? "We'll call it a draw", says one academic. Conscientious objection has come under fire recently, and several leading bioethics journals have published articles...
Trust me, I’m a doctor
Is trust morally inferior to belief on evidence? Ever since the Enlightenment, unbelievers have rubbished the notion of trusting faith as grounds for belief. “Faith...
Terrorism and triage
Should wounded terrorists be treated according to the conventions of medical triage? Imagine that you are a doctor responding to an emergency in Israel. A...
Peter Singer interviewed about, well, everything
Excerpts from a great interview in the Journal of Practical Ethics The Journal of Practical Ethics recently posed 20 hardball questions to Peter Singer about...
How to fill the bioethics void in Trump’s presidency
What we need is a populist bioethics commission, says Wesley Smith This time back in 2008, the transition team of Barack Obama was running a...
Will Donald Trump make bioethics great again?
It's hard to know what direction the President-elect will take Donald Trump was elected President of the United States this week on a platform of...
The battle over conscientious objection continues
Leading editor responds to his critics The issue of whether conscientious objection should be allowed in the Canadian health system after the legalisation of euthanasia...
A speed hump on the road to evidence-based bioethics
An evolutionary argument for bad science There have been calls to base bioethics more firmly on empirical analysis “to promote more balanced, and evidence-based, bioethics”....
Are tribunals the solution to disruptive conscientious objectors?
They need to give reasons for their refusals While some bioethicists believe that conscientious objection has no place in modern medicine, others feel that they...
Is voting for The Donald unethical?
... especially for bioethicists? Is it ethical for bioethicists to support Donald Trump? Without actually naming him, Wayne Shelton, of the Alden March Bioethics Institute...
Leading bioethics editors attack conscientious objection
The editors of two major bioethics journals calling for strict limits on “conscientious objection at the bedside”. The debate over conscientious objection is continuing, with...