Currently viewing the category:
"Bioethics"
As a professional nerd, I’ve got to keep expanding my knowledge base. My current projects:
An Australian man who had sex with a sixteen year old and was convicted as a sex offender is being denied the opportunity to use IVF treatment to reproduce. Here is the thing: sex offender laws are wildly disproportionate to the crime committed. Let me be clear: rape and harassment are traumatic and horrific behaviors. [...]
The advent of artificial wombs makes it such that women never have to gestate children again. In fact, artificial wombs are deemed safer and result in healthier babies. As a result females undergo surgery at a young age to render them infertile without compromising natural hormone balance or causing other side effects. Parenthood is only possible with [...]
I often wonder if I’m skirting the edges of professionalism with some of my writing. I have a free and open tone. I let my nuances of voice creep into my sentence construction. But the discussion between Wesley J. Smith and Geoff Metcalf (of WND) from 2001 is an amazing insight into the self-caricaturing [...]
The Irish Council for Bioethics has a well designed and marvelously informative pdf entitled “Euthanasia: Your Body, Your Death, Your Choice?” It’s one of the most lucid explanations of the big questions in three pages I’ve seen. A sample:
I’ve piqued the attention of Summer Johnson McGee over at bioethics.net with my discussion of Steve Roger’s questionable enlistment and experimentation. Seems she’s as excited as I am for this one.
Ross Douthat expresses the “right to die” side of the paradox of natural death nicely in his rejoinder to Kevin Drum.
Well, yes: The slippery slope that I discussed in the column doesn’t amount to much if you don’t disapprove at all of people deciding to take their own lives. Absent that disapproval (and an [...]
Joshua Knobe wonders at our personal mythologies of the true self. His work experimental philosophy shows that very often our judgment of the “true self” in another person is whatever version of that person best aligns with our own values. Philosophers and the laity alike have trouble with identifying real core desires:
If we [...]
Bill Moyers interviews Goodall and ask about human aggression. She deftly reassures him:
Some people have reached the conclusion that war and violence are inevitable in ourselves. I reach the conclusion that we have brought aggressive tendencies with us through our long human evolutionary path. I mean, you can’t look around the world and [...]
About
Pop Bioethics, written by Kyle Munkittrick, is an effort to study the ethics of the continuing evolution of the human species via the lens of pop culture and be somewhat entertaining in the process.
Kyle's writing can also be found at Discover's The Crux, Slate's Future Tense, and at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. For questions or comments: comments [at] popbioethics [dot] com
All opinions, ideas, and words either explicit or implicit found within this website are my own and represent no other person, organization, or group.Categories
