In February 2020, the British Medical Association will be surveying members for their views on what the BMA’s position on physician-assisted dying should be. The BMA is currently opposed to physician-assisted dying in all its forms, a position that was agreed in 2006 at the annual representative meeting, the Association’s policy-making conference.1 As previously reported in Ethics briefing,2 the decision to survey members follows a motion passed at last year’s ARM which called on the BMA to “carry out a poll (...) of members to ascertain their views on whether the BMA should adopt a neutral position with respect to a change in the law on assisted dying”. The results from the survey will not determine BMA policy. Rather, the results be published ahead of this year’s ARM and provided to those attending to inform a debate and discussion on the BMA’s policy position. More information about the survey, including a briefing pack of useful information, and information for BMA members on how to participate can be found online at www.bma.org.uk/PAD. ### High Court rejects Judicial reviews on assisted suicide The High Court has refused permission for two separate challenges to the law on assisted suicide in the UK to proceed to a full hearing. In the first case, Phil Newby, who has motor neuron disease, applied for judicial review of the law on assisted suicide and asked for the court to carry out a detailed examination of what he termed “legislative facts” – that is, an examination of the existing evidence on the “costs, risks and benefits” of regulating assisted suicide – including a cross-examination of relevant expert witnesses.1 Handing down the judgement, Lord Justice Irwin and Mrs Justice May, held that assisted dying …. (shrink)

Freud's Mass Psychology examines one of the key concepts in the theory of the psyche. Surprenant treats it as an epistemological issue rather than exclusively as a socio-political issue. Focusing on this neglected concept enables the author to raise anew the question of the 'application' of psychoanalysis, beyond a mechanistic understanding of this term and of Freud's writings. This study brings together important topics associated with psychoanalysis, recent French philosophy, and political thought. The original arguments that it develops should (...) interest anyone preoccupied with the relevance of psychoanalytic concepts in philosophy and in related disciplines, notably in the field of literary studies. (shrink)

Among the scanty remains of poetry attributed to Eumelus of Corinth two lines 2 stand out as different from the rest, first because they are concerned not with the legendary past but with an actual, present occasion, and secondly because they are composed not for Corinthians but for Messenians. Our evidence comes from Pausanias and may be set out at the start.

These guide-lines were produced for the Social Concern Track at Lausanne II. Their aim is to enable people who are engaged in evangelism in social action ministries to write up their experiences so that they and others can reflect on the theology underlying their approach. The guide-lines have since been widely used by people in different parts of the world. The findings of the case studies at Lausanne II were published in Transformation, January 1990.

The combination of genuine ethical concerns and fear of learning to use germ-line therapy for human disease must now be confronted. Until now, no established techniques were available to perform this treatment on a human. Through an integration of several fields of science and medicine, we have developed a nine step protocol at the germ-line level for the curative treatment of a genetic disease. Our purpose in this paper is to provide the first method to apply germ-line therapy to treat (...) those not yet born, who are destined to have a life threatening, or a severely debilitating genetic disease. We hope this proposal will initiate the process of a thorough analysis from both the scientific and ethical communities. As such, this proposal can be useful for official groups studying the advantages and disadvantages of germ-line therapy. (shrink)

An invaluable work especially for professionals and students in health care, bioethics, humanities, cultural studies, and for the educated lay reader, this volume offers a critical reflection on cultural competence and awareness in health care, an arena where world views and values often collide.

In his Romanes Lecture of 1907, Lord Curzon emphasized the overwhelming influence of “natural” and “artificial” frontiers in the political history of the modern world. As Barry Smith has shown, the same could be said, more generally, of the natural and artificial boundaries that are at work in articulating every aspect of the reality with which we have to deal, not only in the world of geography, but the world of human experience at large. Moreover, once the natural/artificial distinction has (...) been recognized, it can be drawn across the board: not merely in relation to boundaries but also in relation to those entities that may be said to have boundaries. If something enjoys a natural boundary, its identity and survival conditions do not depend on us; it is a bona fide, mind-independent entity of its own. By contrast, if its boundary is artificial, then the entity itself is to some degree a fiat entity, a product of our worldmaking. Here I am interested in limit case: what if, pace Curzon and pace Smith, all entities turned out to be of the latter sort? (shrink)

There is a strong tendency in the scholarly and sub-scholarly literature on terrorism to treat it as something like an ideology. There is an equally strong tendency to treat it as always immoral. Both tendencies go hand in hand with a considerable degree of unclarity about the meaning of the term ‘terrorism’. I shall try to dispel this unclarity and I shall argue that the first tendency is the product of confusion and that once this is understood, we can see, (...) in the light of a more definite analysis of terrorism, that the second tendency raises issues of inconsistency, and even hypocrisy. Finally, I shall make some tentative suggestions about what categories of target may be morally legitimate objects of revolutionary violence, and I shall discuss some lines of objection to my overall approach. (shrink)

Our life with art is suffused with trust. We don’t just trust one another’s aesthetic testimony; we trust one another’s aesthetic actions. Audiences trust artists to have made it worth their while; artists trust audiences to put in the effort. Without trust, audiences would have little reason to put in the effort to understand difficult and unfamiliar art. I offer a theory of aesthetic trust, which highlights the importance of trust in aesthetic sincerity. We trust in another’s aesthetic sincerity when (...) we rely on them to fulfill their commitments to act for aesthetic reasons — rather than for, say, financial, social, or political reasons. We feel most thoroughly betrayed by an artist, not when they make bad art, but when they sell out. This teaches us something about the nature of trust in general. According to many standard theories, trust involves thinking the trusted to be cooperative or good-natured. But trust in aesthetic sincerity is different. We trust artists to be true to their own aesthetic sensibility, which might involve selfishly ignoring their audience’s needs. Why do we care so much about an artist’s sincerity, rather than merely trusting them to make good art? We emphasize sincerity when wish to encourage originality, rather than to demand success along predictable lines. And we ask for sincerity when our goal is to discover a shared sensibility. In moral life, we often try to force convergence through coordinated effort. But in aesthetic life, we often hope for the lovely discovery that our sensibilities were similar all along. And for that we need to ask for sincerity, rather than overt coordination. (shrink)

Should laws about sex and pornography be based on social conventions about what is disgusting? Should felons be required to display bumper stickers or wear T-shirts that announce their crimes? This powerful and elegantly written book, by one of America's most influential philosophers, presents a critique of the role that shame and disgust play in our individual and social lives and, in particular, in the law.Martha Nussbaum argues that we should be wary of these emotions because they are associated in (...) troubling ways with a desire to hide from our humanity, embodying an unrealistic and sometimes pathological wish to be invulnerable. Nussbaum argues that the thought-content of disgust embodies "magical ideas of contamination, and impossible aspirations to purity that are just not in line with human life as we know it." She argues that disgust should never be the basis for criminalizing an act, or play either the aggravating or the mitigating role in criminal law it currently does. She writes that we should be similarly suspicious of what she calls "primitive shame," a shame "at the very fact of human imperfection," and she is harshly critical of the role that such shame plays in certain punishments.Drawing on an extraordinarily rich variety of philosophical, psychological, and historical references--from Aristotle and Freud to Nazi ideas about purity--and on legal examples as diverse as the trials of Oscar Wilde and the Martha Stewart insider trading case, this is a major work of legal and moral philosophy. (shrink)

Germ-line therapy has long been regarded with great caution both by scientists and by ethicists. Even those who do not reject germ-line therapy in principle have tended to reject it in practice as carrying unacceptable risks in our current state of knowledge. For this reason, a recent paper by Rubenstein, Thomasma, Shon, and Zinaman is unusual in putting forward a serious proposal for the use of germ-line therapy in the foreseeable future.

Psychopathology is the science of what mental illnesses are. Affective psychopathology – or, alternately, the ‘psychopathology of affectivity’ – is the branch of psychopathology devoted to the study of mental disorders that implicate mental states associated with moods and emotions and what used to be called ‘passions’. Some segments of the history of affective psychopathology have been skillfully traced. However, there is one episode in that history that has not received the attention it deserves. It concerns medical writers in France, (...) England, and Scotland, during the latter half of the eighteenth century. The issue at stake is whether affective psychopathology should include or exclude questions of morality. (shrink)

Can we still watch Woody Allen's movies? Can we still laugh at Bill Cosby's jokes? Woody Allen, Kevin Spacey, Dave Chappelle, Louis C. K., J.K. Rowling, Michael Jackson, Roseanne Barr. Recent years have proven rife with revelations about the misdeeds, objectional views, and, in some instances, crimes of popular artists. Spurred in part by the #metoo movement, and given more access than ever thanks to social media and the internet in general, the public has turned an alert and critical eye (...) upon the once-hidden lives of previously cherished entertainers. But what should we members of the public do, think, and feel in response to these artists' actions or statements? It's a predicament that many of us face: whether it's possible to disentangle the deeply unsettled feelings we have toward an artist from how we respond to the art they produced. As consumers of art, and especially as fans, we have a host of tricky moral question to navigate: do the moral lives of artists affect the aesthetic quality of their work? Is it morally permissible for us to engage with or enjoy that work? Should immoral artists and their work be "canceled"? Most of all, can we separate an artist from their art? In Drawing the Line, Erich Hatala Matthes employs the tools of philosophy to offer insight and clarity to the ethical questions that dog us. He argues that it doesn't matter whether we can separate the art from the artist, because we shouldn't. While some dismiss the lives of artists as if they are irrelevant to the artist's work, and others instrumentalize artwork, treating it as nothing more than a political tool, Matthes argues both that the lives of artists can play an important role in shaping our moral and aesthetic relationship to the artworks that we love and that these same artworks offer us powerful resources for grappling with the immorality of their creators. Rather than shunning art made by those who have been canceled, shamed, called out, or even arrested, we should engage with it all the more thoughtfully and learn from the complexity it forces us to confront. Recognizing the moral and aesthetic relationships between art and artist is crucial to determining when and where we should draw the line when good artists do bad things. (shrink)

Technical, ethical, and social questions of germ-line gene interventions have been widely discussed in the literature. The majority of these discussions focus on planned interventions executed on the nuclear DNA (nDNA). However, human cells also contain another set of genes that is the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). As the characteristics of the mtDNA grossly differ from those of nDNA, so do the social, ethical, psychological, and safety considerations of possible interventions on this part of the genetic substance.

Technical, ethical, and social questions of germ-line gene interventions have been widely discussed in the literature. The majority of these discussions focus on planned interventions executed on the nuclear DNA (nDNA). However, human cells also contain another set of genes that is the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). As the characteristics of the mtDNA grossly differ from those of nDNA, so do the social, ethical, psychological, and safety considerations of possible interventions on this part of the genetic substance.

On 26 February 2019, the Organ Donation Bill completed its passage through the Westminster Parliament, creating the legislative basis to introduce an opt-out system for organ donation in England. The Bill now awaits Royal Assent, following which it is anticipated that the new system will come into effect in spring 2020. In the intervening period, there will be a significant publicity campaign to inform the public about the change in the law and the options open to them, which are to: (...) The family will continue to be consulted and as an additional safeguard, will be able to provide information about any unregistered objections held by the individual before they died. The legislation follows a similar model to that which was introduced in Wales on 1 December 2015. While it is too early to draw firm conclusions from the experience in Wales, the early signs are positive. The latest full-year data show an increase from 61 to 74 deceased donors over the previous 12 months;1 and in the first three-quarters of 2018/2019, there have been 72 deceased donors.2 Given the number of donors is small and subject to natural variation year-on-year, National Health Service Blood and Transplant has been analysing cumulative data to identify …. (shrink)

It is a pleasure for me to give this opening address to the Royal Institute of Philosophy Conference on ‘Explanation’ for two reasons. The first is that it is succeeded by exciting symposia and other papers concerned with various special aspects of the topic of explanation. The second is that the conference is being held in my old alma mater , the University of Glasgow, where I did my first degree. Especially due to C. A. Campbell and George Brown there (...) was in the Logic Department a big emphasis on absolute idealism, especially F. H. Bradley. My inclinations were to oppose this line of thought and to espouse the empiricism and realism of Russell, Broad and the like. Empiricism was represented in the department by D. R. Cousin, a modest man who published relatively little, but who was of quite extraordinary philosophical acumen and lucidity, and by Miss M. J. Levett, whose translation of Plato's Theaetetus formed an important part of the philosophy syllabus. (shrink)

This paper criticizes Jerome Wakefield’s harmful dysfunction analysis of disorder by arguing that the conceptual linkage it establishes between the medical concepts of health and disorder and the prudential notions of well-being and harm makes the account inapplicable to nonsentient organisms, such as plants, fungi, and many invertebrate animals. Drawing on a previous formulation of this criticism by Christopher Boorse, and noting that Wakefield could avoid it if he adopted a partly biofunction-based account of interests like that often advocated in (...) the field of environmental ethics, I argue that integrating such an account of interests into the HDA would generate serious concerns. Specifically, it would make dysfunction sufficient for disorder and so reestablish between dysfunction and disorder precisely the kind of sufficiency relation that harm-requiring accounts of disorder strive to avoid; blur the line between the HDA’s dysfunction and harm components and, in so doing, deprive the HDA of its alleged main advantage over monistic dysfunction-based accounts of disorders like Boorse’s; and tie the HDA to an understanding of harm that is in itself problematic. I argue that these three concerns, and the dilemmas they generate, rob the HDA of much of its prima facie appeal, ultimately indicating that a satisfactory account of disorder should most likely eschew all references to prudential notions of well-being and harm. (shrink)