Bruce P. Blackshaw

• PhD Student at University of Birmingham

Pascal’s wager uses decision theory to argue that it is rational to attempt to nurture belief in God, based on the expected utility of believing (infinite happiness) compared to not believing (at best, only finite happiness). A belief in an eternal conscious torment in hell (infinite suffering) for non-believers makes the differences in expected ut...

The development of artificial womb technology is continuing to proceed and raises important ethical and theological questions for Christians. Whilst there has been extensive secular discourse on artificial wombs in recent years, there has been minimal Christian engagement with this topic. There are broadly two primary uses of artificial womb techno...

Jecker et al. discuss principles for international bioethics conferencing that purportedly seek to make bioethics more global in scope. In particular, they address what they have perceived to be Islamophobia within bioethics. We agree that anti-discrimination and inclusivity should serve as core commitments for the field. Yet, we also see the need...

The impairment argument claims that abortion is immoral, because it results in a greater impairment to a fetus than other actions that are clearly immoral, such as inflicting fetal alcohol syndrome. Alex Gillham argues that the argument requires clarification of the meaning of greater impairment. He proposes two definitions, and points out the diff...

Kyle van Oosterum and Emma Curran have recently argued that the impairment argument against abortion is weak and accomplishes little. They also claim that impairment fails to explain what makes giving a child fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) immoral, which is an important premise of the argument. Here, I explain that the impairment argument is not as w...

Don Marquis’ future-like-ours account argues that abortion is seriously immoral because it deprives the embryo or fetus of a valuable future much like our own. Marquis was mindful of contraception being reductio ad absurdum of his reasoning, and argued that prior to fertilisation, there is not an identifiable subject of harm. Contra Marquis, Tomer...

Alicia Hersey, Jai-Me Potter-Rutledge and Benjamin Brown have outlined a proposed ethical framework for assessing abortion policies that locates the effect of government legislation between the provider and the patient, emphasising its influence on interactions between them. They claim that their framework offers an alternative to the personal mora...

It is widely agreed that possession of consciousness contributes to an entity's moral status. Therefore, if we could identify consciousness in a machine, this would be a compelling argument for considering it to possess at least a degree of moral status. However, as Elisabeth Hildt explains, our third person perspective on artificial intelligence m...

Heartbeat bills are laws prohibiting abortion in most circumstances once a fetal heartbeat can be detected, and are common in US states. They have been criticised as poorly designed and disingenuous. In this letter to the editor I examine these criticisms.

Opponents of abortion are commonly said to be inconsistent in their beliefs or actions, and to fail in their obligations to prevent the deaths of embryos and fetuses from causes other than induced abortion. We have argued that these ‘inconsistency arguments’ conform to a pattern which is susceptible to a number of objections, and that consequently...

Charles Camosy’s Losing Our Dignity is a concise and disturbing account of how our long held understanding of human equality, largely inherited from Christianity, is gradually being undermined by the application of secular ethics to healthcare. Camosy’s book is a clarion call to take action to reverse this trend. This is not an academic tome, but r...

A COVID-19 vaccine mandate is being introduced for health and social care workers in England, and those refusing to comply will either be redeployed or have their employment terminated. We argue that COVID-19 vaccination should not be mandatory for these workers for several reasons. First, it ignores their genuine concerns, and fails to respect the...

A response to William Simkulet's criticism of our paper 'If fetuses are persons, abortion is a public health crisis'.

Recently, the substance view of persons has been heavily criticized for the counterintuitive conclusions it seems to imply in scenarios such as embryo rescue cases and embryo loss. These criticisms have obscured the considerable success of the substance view in supporting other intuitions that are widely shared, and that competing accounts such as...

Prolife theorists typically hold to the claim that all human beings possess equal moral status from conception and consequently possess a right to life. This, they believe, entails that abortion is impermissible in all circumstances. Critics characterize this as an extreme anti-abortion position, as it prima facie allows no exceptions, even in case...

According to the psychological account of personal identity, our identity is based on the continuity of psychological connections, and so we do not begin to exist until these are possible, some months after conception. This entails the psychological account faces a challenge from the non-identity problem—our intuition that someone cannot be harmed...

William Simkulet has recently criticised Colgrove et al ’s defence against what they have called inconsistency arguments—arguments that claim opponents of abortion (OAs) act in ways inconsistent with their underlying beliefs about human fetuses (eg, that human fetuses are persons at conception). Colgrove et al presented three objections to inconsis...

The 14-day rule restricts the culturing of human embryos in vitro for the purposes of scientific research for no longer than 14 days. Since researchers recently developed the capability to exceed the 14-day limit, pressure to modify the rule has started to build. Sophia McCully argues that the limit should be extended to 28 days, listing numerous p...

The debate regarding the role of conscientious objection in healthcare has been protracted, with increasing demands for curbs on conscientious objection. There is a growing body of evidence that indicates that in some cases, high rates of conscientious objection can affect access to legal medical services such as the abortion—a major concern of cri...

Pro- life advocates commonly argue that fetuses have the moral status of persons, and an accompanying right to life, a view most pro- choice advocates deny. A dif-ficulty for this pro- life position has been Judith Jarvis Thomson’s violinist analogy, in which she argues that even if the fetus is a person, abortion is often permissible be-cause a pr...

With Perry Hendricks, I recently outlined a strengthened version of the impairment argument (SIA) for the immorality of abortion. Alex Gillham has argued that our use of Don Marquis' deprivation of a 'future-like ours' account entails we were merely restating Marquis' argument for the immorality of abortion. Here, I explain why SIA is more than jus...

Opponents of abortion are often described as ‘inconsistent’ (hypocrites) in terms of their beliefs, actions and/or priorities. They are alleged to do too little to combat spontaneous abortion, they should be adopting cryopreserved embryos with greater frequency and so on. These types of arguments—which we call ‘inconsistency arguments’—conform to a...

Perry Hendricks' original impairment argument for the immorality of abortion is based on the impairment principle: if impairing an organism to some degree is immoral, then ceteris paribus, impairing it to a higher degree is also immoral. Since abortion impairs a fetus to a higher degree than fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) and giving a fetus FAS is im...

The rapid development of artificial womb technologies means that we must consider if and when it is permissible to kill the human subject of ectogestation—recently termed a ‘gestateling’ by Elizabeth Chloe Romanis—prior to ‘birth’. We describe the act of deliberately killing the gestateling as gestaticide, and argue that there are good reasons to m...

Conscientious objection in healthcare has come under heavy criticism on two grounds recently, particularly regarding abortion provision. Firstly, critics claim conscientious objection involves a refusal to provide a legal and beneficial procedure requested by a patient, denying them access to healthcare. Secondly, they argue the exercise of conscie...

One of the most influential philosophical arguments in favour of the permissibility of abortion is Judith Jarvis Thomson’s violinist analogy, presented in ‘A Defense of Abortion’. Its appeal for pro-choice advocates lies in Thomson’s granting that the fetus is a person with equivalent moral status to any other human being, and yet demonstrating—to...

Perry Hendricks’ impairment argument for the immorality of abortion is based on two premises: first, impairing a fetus with fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) is immoral, and second, if impairing an organism to some degree is immoral, then ceteris paribus, impairing it to a higher degree is also immoral. He calls this the impairment principle (TIP). Sinc...

Joona Räsänen has proposed a concept he calls Schrödinger’s Fetus as a solution to reconciling what he believes are two widely held but contradictory intuitions. I show that Elizabeth Harman’s Actual Future Principle, upon which Schrödinger’s Fetus is based, uses a more convincing account of personhood. I also argue that both Räsänen and Harman, by...

Prabhpal Singh has recently defended a relational account of the difference in moral status between fetuses and newborns as a way of explaining why abortion is permissible and infanticide is not. He claims that only a newborn can stand in a parent-child relation, not a fetus, and this relation has a moral dimension that bestows moral value. We chal...

Jeremy Williams has argued that if we are committed to a liberal pro-choice stance with regard to selective abortion for disability, we will be unable to justify the prohibition of sex selective abortion. Here, I apply his reasoning to selective abortion based on other traits pregnant women may decide are undesirable. These include susceptibility t...

Rob Lovering has developed an interesting new critique of views that regard embryos as equally valuable as other human beings: the moral argument for frozen human embryo adoption. The argument is aimed at those who believe that the death of a frozen embryo is a very bad thing, and Lovering concludes that some who hold this view ought to prevent one...

To determine when the life of a human organism begins, Mark T. Brown has developed the somatic integration definition of life. Derived from diagnostic criteria for human death, Brown’s account requires the presence of a life-regulation internal control system for an entity to be considered a living organism. According to Brown, the earliest point a...

A response to Henrik Friberg-Fernros' commentary on ‘The Ethics of Killing: Strengthening the Substance View with Time-relative Interests’.

Perry Hendricks has recently presented the impairment argument for the immorality of abortion, to which I responded and he has now replied. The argument is based on the premise that impairing a fetus with fetal alcohol syndrome is immoral, and on the principle that if impairing an organism is immoral, impairing it to a higher degree is also—the imp...

Eric Vogelstein has defended Don Marquis' ‘future‐like‐ours' argument for the immorality of abortion against what is known as the Identity Objection, which contends that for a fetus to have a future like ours, it must be numerically identical to an entity like us that possesses valuable experiences some time in the future. On psychological accounts...

In this brief reply to Ashley’s rebuttal concerning the gatekeeping of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) for transgender people, we address some of the criticisms made of our original response to Ashley. We first re-examine Ashley’s attempted analogy between abortion and HRT for gender dysphoria and find it wanting. Our argument that it is reasonab...

The substance view is an account of personhood that regards all human beings as possessing instrinsic value and moral status equivalent to that of an adult human being. Consequently, substance view proponents typically regard abortion as impermissible in most circumstances. The substance view, however, has difficulty accounting for certain intuitio...

Joona Räsänen has argued that pro‐life arguments against the permissibility of infanticide are not persuasive, and fail to show it to be immoral. We responded to Räsänen’s arguments, concluding that his critique of pro‐life arguments was misplaced. Räsänen has recently replied in ‘Why pro‐life arguments still are not convincing: A reply to my criti...

Florence Ashley has argued that requiring patients with gender dysphoria to undergo an assessment and referral from a mental health professional before undergoing hormone replacement therapy (HRT) is unethical and may represent an unconscious hostility towards transgender people. We respond, first, by showing that Ashley has conflated the self-repo...

Book review. Civil dialogue on abortion. By Bertha Alvarez Manninen, Jack Mulder, Jr.

A substantial proportion of human embryos spontaneously abort soon after conception, and ethicists have argued this is problematic for the pro-life view that a human embryo has the same moral status as an adult from conception. Firstly, if human embryos are our moral equals, this entails spontaneous abortion is one of humanity’s most important prob...

In his recent article Perry Hendricks presents what he calls the impairment argument to show that abortion is immoral. To do so, he argues that to give a fetus fetal alcohol syndrome is immoral. Because killing the fetus impairs it more than giving it fetal alcohol syndrome, Hendricks concludes that killing the fetus must also be immoral. Here, I c...

Background Animal-derived constituents are frequently used in anaesthesia and surgery, and patients are seldom informed of this. This is problematic for a growing minority of patients who may have religious or secular concerns about their use in their care. It is not currently common practice to inform patients about the use of animal-derived const...

In ’Abortion and deprivation: a reply to Marquis’, Anna Christensen contends that Don Marquis’ influential ’future like ours’ argument for the immorality of abortion faces a significant challenge from the Epicurean claim that human beings cannot be harmed by their death. If deprivation requires a subject, then abortion cannot deprive a fetus of a f...

Benjamin Zolf, in his recent paper ‘No conscientious objection without normative justification: Against conscientious objection in medicine’, attempts to establish that in order to rule out arbitrary conscientious objections, a reasonability constraint is necessary. This, he contends, requires normative justification, and the subjective beliefs tha...

Ectogenesis, or the use of an artificial womb to allow a foetus to develop, will likely become a reality within a few decades, and could significantly affect the abortion debate. We first examine the implications for Judith Jarvis Thomson’s violinist analogy, which argues for a woman’s right to withdraw life support from the foetus and so terminate...

Background Moral distress can be broadly described as the psychological distress that can develop in response to a morally challenging event. In the context of healthcare, its effects are well documented in the nursing profession, but there is a paucity of research exploring its relevance to healthcare assistants. Objective This article aims to ex...

It is commonly argued that a serious right to life is grounded only in actual, relatively advanced psychological capacities a being has acquired. The moral permissibility of abortion is frequently argued for on these grounds. Increasingly it is being argued that such accounts also entail the permissibility of infanticide, with several proponents of...

In 'Pro-life arguments against infanticide and why they are not convincing' Joona Räsänen argues that Christopher Kaczor's objections to Giubilini and Minerva's position on infanticide are not persuasive. We argue that Räsänen's criticism is largely misplaced, and that he has not engaged with Kaczor's strongest arguments against infanticide. We rep...

This article will explore and summarise the four main ethical theories that have relevance for healthcare assistants. These are: utilitarianism, deontology, virtue ethics and principlism. Understanding different ethical theories can have a number of significant benefits, which have the potential to shape and inform the care of patients, challenge b...

At previous EDOCs (1997, 1999), the author presented papers that examined the suitability of CORBA for building enterprise-level distributed systems. Weaknesses were pointed out, such as the lack of ubiquitous transactional support, lack of portability, and minimal persistence support. However, the author was optimistic that influences such as the...

A previous paper by B.P. Blackshaw and J.R. Ellwood (1997) examined the suitability of CORBA for building enterprise level distributed systems. A number of areas of concern were discussed, and the paper concluded that at the time of writing, mid-1997, CORBA was not sufficiently mature for the job, However optimism was expressed that within 2-3 year...

Mincom, a successful Australian software company, markets an enterprise product known as the Mincom Information Management System, or MIMS. MIMS is an integrated suite of modules covering materials, maintenance, financials, and human resources management. MIMS is an on-line transaction processing (OLTP) system, meaning it has special requirements i...

Online transaction processing (OLTP) applications have special requirements in the areas of scalability and performance. Mincom currently markets a successful product, MIMS (Mincom Information Management System), which is a large, integrated OLTP system consisting of about 16,000 KLOC (kilo-lines of code), mostly COBOL. Our research group is develo...

The multimedia computer package DIAGNOSIS provides a training aid to students of crop protection for pest and disease diagnosis. The program simulates field and laboratory scenarios, in which students must actively seek clues and interpret observations on the cause of plant problems. Output may consist of text, graphics and video. The software allo...