By Nathaniel Counts [Part I is here.] First, let us consider whether opting for end of life care is morally problematic on its own, without reference to its resource costs. Certainly wanting to live longer on its own is not morally problematic in our society – we do not consider exercise or healthy eating wrong…
By The Petrie-Flom Center You’ll spend over 80,000 hours of your life working—you should make the most of them. But if you want to make a difference, what should you do? Work for nonprofits? Try to change policy? Find a malaria vaccine? Go into finance and give it all away? Which Careers Do the Most…
By Matthew L Baum “Examining the intersection of law and health care, biotech & bioethics” – the subtitle of the Bill of Health blog. I approach this intersection like many of my fellow students: outfitted with the tools and spectacles of a specific discipline. Whether that is health law, policy, medicine, engineering, philosophy, genetics, or…
By Nathaniel Counts Professor M. G. Marmot et al. conducted two studies, Whitehall I and Whitehall II, in which they studied morbidity and mortality in the British civil service sector in the 1960s and the 1980s. British civil servants are under the same plan with the National Health Service, so the studies controlled for access…
By The Petrie-Flom Center Want to know more about the ethics of aid? Want to hear the inspiring talk that’s convinced students across the northeast to take global poverty seriously? Join Harvard High-Impact Philanthropy for our first talk of the semester with ethicist Larry Temkin! RSVP here for Global Poverty: Why Should We Care? a talk by…
By Dov Fox So asks medical historian Nathaniel Comfort in today’s Scientific America, echoing Ross Douthat’s New York Times inquiry into Eugenics, Past and Future. Comfort and Douthat are skeptical of the view, articulated by an emerging class of academics, that individual parents should use reproductive technologies to select or enhance certain genetic traits in their children. “Hitler gave eugenics a bad…
By Jeffrey Skopek Last month, two federal agencies took steps that together may come close to ending research on chimpanzees in the United States. First, the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) proposed to list all chimpanzees, including those in captivity, as endangered. (Currently, only wild chimpanzees are listed as endangered, while captive chimpanzees are listed…
By I. Glenn Cohen Like most people, I am both amused and shocked by the latest Anthony Weiner sexting revelations and scandal. It is like a car crash where it is hard to look away even though you know you should. Most germane to Bill of Health’s readership, I am fascinated by the “medicalization” of…
By Christopher Robertson On June 13, 2013 Dr. Edmund Pellegrino died at the age of 92. (Obituaries are available here and here.) For bioethicists this is a time to reflect, but in particular affiliates of the Petrie Flom Center will recall that one of the very first events that that the PFC hosted was a distinguished panel to…
By William MacAskill In this guest post series, I’ll write about ethical career choice. Within law school, students often face a dilemma about which field to go into. On one hand, one could go into an ‘ethical’ field, such as a district attorney or public defense job — and, for the readers of this blog,…
