Bio-Ethics Bites

Feb 03 2012 18 mins 3.9k

Bio-Ethics Bites Podcast artwork

Bioethics is the study of the moral implications of new and emerging medical technologies and looks to answer questions such as selling organs, euthanasia and whether should we clone people. The series consists of a series of interviews by leading bioethics academics and is aimed at individuals looking to explore often difficult and confusing questions surrounding medical ethics. The series lays out the issue in a clear and precise way and looks to show all sides of the debate.

Subscribe on Podcast Addict

Neuroscience Can Tell Us About Morality

Feb 03 2012 19 mins

What can science tell us about morality? Many philosophers would say, 'nothing at all'. Facts don't imply values, they say. you need further argument to move from facts about us and about the world to conclusions about what we ought to do. For example, most humans are altruistic - they genuinely care about the well-being of friends and family and to a lesser extent even of stranger

Brain Chemistry and Moral Decision-Making

Jan 04 2012 16 mins

Answers to moral questions, it seems, depend on how much serotonin there is flowing through your brain. In the future might we be able to alter people's moral behaviour with concoctions of chemicals? A train is hurtling towards five people; it's out of control. You are standing on a footbridge, standing next to a very obese man. The only way to save the five is to push the man over

Responsibility

Dec 01 2011 16 mins

If someone caught me shoplifting, and I was later diagnosed with kleptomania, should I be held responsible? Should I be blamed? There's a growing body of knowledge in psychiatry and neuroscience about why people think and behave the way they do. And according to one school of thought, as our knowledge expands, so the space for responsibility contracts. Hanna Pickard is not from tha

Selling Organs

Nov 01 2011 18 mins

Everyday people die in hospitals because there aren't enough organs available for transplant. In most countries of the world - though not all - it is illegal to sell organs. Governments insist that the motive for donating organs has to be altruistic, it can't be financial reward. The idea of being able to sell body parts makes many people uneasy. But is it time for a policy change:

Bio-Ethics Bites

Oct 03 2011 20 mins

Demand for health care is infinite, but money is finite. So how should we distribute resources? Whom should we help, and why? Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/

Trust

Sep 01 2011 18 mins

Radically new techniques are opening up exciting possibilities for those working in health care - for psychiatrists, doctors, surgeons; the option to clone human beings, to give just one example. Who should determine what is allowed and what prohibited? And what sort of consent should doctors have to have from patients before treatment. Is the trend towards consent forms helpful? O

Status Quo Bias

Aug 01 2011 19 mins

Suppose a genetic engineering breakthrough made it simple, safe and cheap to increase people's intelligence. Nonetheless, if you asked the averagely-intelligent person on the Clapham Omnibus whether we should tamper with our genes to boost our brains, he or she might recoil at the notion. Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, suspects that

Life and Death

Jul 04 2011 16 mins

If a patient decides she doesn't want to live any longer, should she be allowed to die? Should she be allowed to kill herself? If a patient is in no position to decide - perhaps she's in a coma - then should somebody else be able to decide to kill her? Who? Is there a moral difference between killing and allowing someone to die? And is the role of the doctor always to prolong life?

Moral Status

May 31 2011 18 mins

A stone on the beach, we assume, has no moral status. We can kick or hammer the stone, and we have done the stone no harm. Typical adult human beings do have moral status. We shouldn't, without a very good reason, kick a man or woman. Often, contentious moral issues, such as embryo research, or abortion, or whether to turn off a life-support machine, turn on disagreement about mora

Designer Babies

May 31 2011 21 mins

The term 'designer baby' is usually used in a pejorative sense - to conjure up some dystopian Brave New World. There are already ways to affect what kind of children you have - most obviously by choosing the partner to have them with. But there are others too: a pregnant mother can improve her baby's prospects by not smoking, for instance. With advances in genetics, however, there