Movie: You Don’t Know Jack
April 14, 2015
“A look at the life and work of doctor-assisted suicide advocate Jack Kevorkian.”
Category: Ethics
Stigma Around Physician-Assisted Dying Lingers
March 23, 2015
“But in the realms of politics, medical ethics, religion and technological innovation, the reality is that death is far, very far, from nothing at all. It is the source of challenging legal and moral questions, perhaps none more searing than whether doctors ought to be permitted to usher incurably ill patients into that next room. Should they be able to help sufferers end their lives by supplying medication that would make looming death come faster?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/23/us/stigma-around-physician-assisted-dying-lingers.html?_r=0
New York Times Euthanasia topic archive
What scares the new atheists: The vocal fervour of today’s missionary atheism conceals a panic that religion is not only refusing to decline – but in fact flourishing
March 17, 2015
“For secular thinkers, the continuing vitality of religion calls into question the belief that history underpins their values. To be sure, there is disagreement as to the nature of these values. But pretty well all secular thinkers now take for granted that modern societies must in the end converge on some version of liberalism. Never well founded, this assumption is today clearly unreasonable. So, not for the first time, secular thinkers look to science for a foundation for their values.”
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/03/what-scares-the-new-atheists
The Secret God of the Secularists
March 17, 2015
“The English philosopher John Gray, himself an atheist, says today’s evangelical New Atheists have far more in common with the religionists they despise than they think they do. In a rich, rewarding essay in the Guardian, Gray says that an earlier generation of modern atheists worshiped Science, which in their reasoning made them supporters of eugenics … until Nazism showed where that led. It is today conveniently forgotten, says Gray, that those who preached Science as the foundation for modern political life were, in the pre-Nazi 20th century, the most avid promoters of eugenics”
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/the-secret-god-of-the-new-atheists-secularists/
Why Our Children Don’t Think There Are Moral Facts
March 15, 2015
“What would you say if you found out that our public schools were teaching children that it is not true that it’s wrong to kill people for fun or cheat on tests? Would you be surprised?
“I was. As a philosopher, I already knew that many college-aged students don’t believe in moral facts. While there are no national surveys quantifying this phenomenon, philosophy professors with whom I have spoken suggest that the overwhelming majority of college freshmen in their classrooms view moral claims as mere opinions that are not true or are true only relative to a culture.”
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/02/why-our-children-dont-think-there-are-moral-facts/
Offering a Choice to the Terminally Ill
March 15, 2015
“Severely crippled by Parkinson’s disease, his only option for ending the suffering was to stop eating and drinking. Physicians in most states, including Maryland, where he lived, are barred from helping terminally ill patients who want to die in a dignified way.”
Parents’ Beliefs vs. Their Children’s Health
March 12, 2015
“The spread of measles has called attention to parents who don’t vaccinate children because of religious beliefs. New York City is accommodating an Orthodox Jewish circumcision practice that can infect babies with herpes. Some states even let believers in faith healing deny life-saving medical care to their children.
Should parents’ religious beliefs allow them to refuse medical care for their children or avoid standard medical practices?”
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/03/10/parents-beliefs-vs-their-childrens-health
My right to death with dignity at 29
March 11, 2015
“In April, I learned that not only had my tumor come back, but it was more aggressive. Doctors gave me a prognosis of six months to live.
Because my tumor is so large, doctors prescribed full brain radiation. I read about the side effects: The hair on my scalp would have been singed off. My scalp would be left covered with first-degree burns. My quality of life, as I knew it, would be gone.”
http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/07/opinion/maynard-assisted-suicide-cancer-dignity/
How hard is it to clean up the scientific literature?
March 10, 2015
“Because the goal is supposed to be a body of reliable knowledge upon which the whole scientific community can draw to build more knowledge, it’s especially problematic when particular pieces of the scientific literature turn out to be dishonest or misleading. Fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism are varieties of dishonesty that members of the scientific community look upon as high crimes. Indeed, they are activities that are defined as scientific misconduct and (at least in theory) prosecuted vigorously.”
http://scienceblogs.com/ethicsandscience/2010/03/27/how-hard-is-it-to-clean-up-the/
A Bittersweet Bow for the Elephant Ringling Brothers Will Retire Its Elephants, and an American Tradition
March 8, 2015
“ON Thursday, Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus announced that its 13 traveling elephant performers would retire by 2018, ending a storied tradition for the Greatest Show on Earth.”
TOK Topics 