Rude Awakenings
Doubtless, everyone in the world has by now heard the story of the “sleeping Belgian”: Rom Houben was believed to have been in a coma for 23 years, but was actually fully conscious for all that time.  If the reports are to be believed, it would have potentially serious implications for the way we think about treating the seriously incapacitated.  (I don’t think that any normative lessons would follow automatically - whether or not someone is conscious is unlikely to be sufficient to swing the moral debate - but that’s for another time: I’ll try to cobble something together over the next f

Nursing by Degree
A couple of weeks ago, the government announced that, from 2013, all nursing staff would have to be graduates.  ”Degree-level education,” said Health Minister for England Ann Keen, will provide new nurses with the decision-making skills they need to make high-level judgements in the transformed NHS. I’m not so sure of this. There’s a whole raft of considerations that one might bring to the table here.  One is a question of why it is that graduatisation has to be seen as improving matters.  Perhaps the idea is that there’s a guarantee of

Conference report: Conscientious Objection Workshop
On the 23rd of October I attended a workshop at Keele University (where I am based) focused on the topic of Conscientious Objection. This is a topic which I have some interest in (in 2001 I wrote a short dissertation on the topic within the context of euthanasia) however this workshop interestingly picked up on the topic from within three distinct arenas. It first focused on Conscientious objection within warfare and in particular the historical tradition of conscientious within the UK. It then moved to the medical context and objection within and as part of professional practice. Finally the role of religion as a basis for objection was explored. While I knew

Does Medicine - and Medical Ethics - have a Pro-Life Bias?
There’s an essay by Diego Gracia called “Palliative Care and the Historical Background” that I frequently use in classes about Care ethics, and there’s a passage in it that always gets a fascinating reaction from students.  In this passage, Gracia claims that the true goal of medicine has always been curing, rather than taking care of the patient. Caring has never been the goal of medicine. In fact, in the context of palliative care, he takes this one step further: Thus, if the type of care specific to medicine is curing, then palliative care has nothing to do with medicine…

Knowing the Enemy in the “War on Drugs”
If you’re going to fight a war, you need to know whom you’re fighting.  You also could do with knowing when to stop fighting.  Johann Hari is eloquent in this piece on the so-called “war on drugs”: the time to stop is now. Yes, it is shocking that he was ditched for pointing out the mathematical truth that taking ecstasy is less dangerous than horse-riding and smoking cannabis is less harmful than drinking alcohol. But this is how the war on drugs has to be fought. The unofficial slogan of the prohibitionists for decades has been: The facts will only und