“Apparently a patient can be dead in one country, but still alive in another, under the same circumstances,” writes Dr. Erwin Kompanje of Rotterdam, The Netherlands, in his essay “How dead is a brain dead patient?” BONUS (for philosophers): The Shrödinger’s Cat paradox is not exactly analogous to this, but also is not exactly not.
Tag: ethics
Dead co-authors (1)
The Anole Annals (which are ‘written and edited by scientists who study Anolis lizards’) posed an intriguing question: “how far one could take posthumous co-authorship. What’s stopping me from including Darwin as a co-author on my next manuscript?” In the paper that triggered this dilemma — Poe et al. (2009) — Poe and his still living co-author […]
Do ethicists steal more books (and stuff)?
“One might suppose that ethicists would behave with particular moral scruple,” begins the little monograph, looking you straight in the eye while snorting and grinning, textily. The two co-authors, philosophy professors who specialise in ethics, thus embark on what they call a “preliminary investigation” of their fellow ethics experts. Eric Schwitzgebel of the University of […]
The ethics of eating a drug-company donut
Philosophy and medicine join forces because of a donut, in the study: “The ethics of eating a drug-company donut,” Karl Broznitsky, Canadian Medical Association Journal, 1996 March 15; 154(6): 899–900. It concludes with this passage: “He bit into the donut, as content with his rationalization as his staffmen were with theirs. A blob of grape […]