Emma Bullock

A natural approach to justifying the coercive administration of morally enhancing neurointerventions is to appeal to a principle of moral paternalism. This chapter outlines the factors that need to be taken into account in order for a principle of moral paternalism to morally justify coercively administering neurointerventions. First, the author argues that the moral paternalist must take special care to ensure that the interventions will improve moral character. Second, she outlines the potential costs that the moral paternalist needs to address before a moral paternalistic interference is justified. The author argues that whilst the moral paternalistic administration of a neurointervention may have more kinds of cost to consider than other forms of moral paternalistic interference, this does not mean that such interventions cannot be justified under the principle.

A governing principle in medical ethics is respect for patient autonomy. This principle is commonly drawn upon in order to argue for the permissibility of assisted dying. In this paper I explore the proper role that respect for patient autonomy should play in this context. I argue that the role of autonomy is not to identify a patient’s best interests, but instead to act as a side-constraint on action. The surprising conclusion of the paper is that whether or not it is in the best interests for the patient to die is a morally objective matter. This allows for the possibility that it can be in the best interests of the patient to die even if she autonomously considers it to be in her best interest to continue living. I argue that concerns about ‘mandatory’ euthanasia can be met when patient autonomy is respected as a side-constraint on action. Ultimately, this means that assisted dying is permissible, not because the autonomous patient views her suffering to be unbearable, but because it is in her objective best interests and she permitted it via her consent.

Medical practitioners are duty-bound to tell their patients the truth about their medical conditions, along with the risks and benefits of proposed treatments. Some patients, however, would rather not receive medical information. A recent response to this tension has been to argue that that the disclosure of medical information is not optional. As such, patients do not have permission to refuse medical information. In this paper I argue that, depending on the context, the disclosure of medical information can undermine the patient’s ability to exercise her autonomy or have therapeutically detrimental effects. In the light of these insights I go on to develop a context-sensitive approach to medical disclosure. The advantage of this account is that it addresses concerns on both sides of the debate; whilst it acknowledges that patients do not have an exercisable ‘right not to know,’ it allows that in some cases medical information ought to be withheld.

This article traces a concern with excess and waste, landscape and identity in a town on the western periphery of Tasmania. Queenstown’s bald hills have been a popular tourist drawcard since the turn of the century, sold in travel guides and brochures as a spectacular ‘moonscape’. A combination of a severe bushfire in 1896 and the emission of sulphurous gases from the pyritic smelting process at the Mt Lyell Copper Mine have resulted in Queenstown’s weird denuded landscape. But the locals have grown attached to the hills and want to preserve their baldness. Here, the impulse to preserve a grotesque landscape registers a culture surviving on desecration to stave off its own disappearance.

This article discusses the semiotic and affective affordances of a regional museum on the west coast of Australia’s only island state, Tasmania. Shorty’s Private Collection is a small museum displaying items collected from around the region, with a focus on resuscitated mining materials. The owner also creates figures derived from popular culture from these items. The article uses the methodology of creative non-fiction in order to situate the museum within the marginal community that it engages with, and discusses the museum in terms of Bakhtin’s theory of the grotesque and its potential to both establish and challenge dominant conceptions of the local and the limits of semiotic representation.