The virtues and the vices of the outrageous
A Norwegian bioethicist, Anna Smajdor, recently set out a case for “Whole Body Gestational Donation” – using the wombs of brain-dead women as surrogate mothers...
Should bioethicists hold a conference in Qatar?
FIFA’s choice of Qatar for the 2022 World Cup sparked huge ethical controversies. What about its abominable record on migrant workers? What about its record...
Bioethicist protests that ‘whole body gestational donation’ is misunderstood
Bioethicists have chosen a lonely and disheartening profession. Locked away in an office, they pound out publications which only a few hundred of people –...
Promises to keep: medical graduates and their oaths
A survey of oaths taken by medical students in the United States and Canada in 2014 and 2015 suggests that doctors are beginning their career...
What the world needs now is more bioethicists. Or not?
In a recent issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, one of America’s leading voices in bioethics, Emanuel J. Ezekiel, said that Covid had...
Medical students need to hear both sides of the abortion debate, says pro-abortion bioethicist
Something odd seems to be going on in the abortion debate in universities. In many places there isn’t one, complains Ezio Di Nucci, of the...
The lasting anguish of moral injury
On a Sunday evening in September 1994, David Peters drove to a church service in Beckley, West Virginia, as the sun set over the horizon....
Bioethics after Ukraine
In a thoughtful essay in The Hastings Center blog, Jonathan Moreno, a leading bioethicist, reflects on how bioethics will change after the war in Ukraine....
Bioethics must repudiate its white past to confront racism
The Black Lives Matter movement has exposed a crisis in bioethics, argues Camisha Russell, of the University of Oregon, in the American Journal of Bioethics....
‘Shit-stirring’ discredits utilitarianism, bioethicist argues
Utilitarianism has an image problem. Whether or not you agree with them, utilitarian arguments are widely used and need to be discusses seriously. However, some...
Does transgender medicine have a sound philosophical foundation?
There are many angles from which to study the phenomenon of the transgender movement – psychological, sociological, historical, medical, political … -- but surely the...
Bioethics commission sets out game plan for creating consensus
Rapid innovation in the wake of the development of the CRISPR gene editing technology has not caught the US Presidential Commission for the Study of...