On the basis of previous work regarding military medical ethics, I was invited to participate in an edited volume regarding the moral obligations that archaeologists have vis-a-vis advisory roles to the military.  The catalyst for this project was whether archaeologists were implicitly endorsing the Iraq war by telling coalition forces what should be protected in Iraq; some 5,000 sites were identified as having cultural and/or historical significance.  The idea would presumably be that the archaeologists who provided this list were effectively lowering the moral collateral of the invasion by allowing the coalition to move forward in a more discriminating way.  Suffice it to say that I think this is a bad argument and, more specifically, I don’t think that archaeologists evince any sort of moral failing by identifying these sites.  (Rather, on the assumption that the invasion would have proceeded regardless, they are doing us a moral service.)

I hadn’t even known people were doing work in this area at all, so it was exciting to work with some of these ideas.  I commend to you my essay, “Physicians at War:  Lessons for Archaeologists?”, as well as the complete volume, Peter G. Stone (ed.), Cultural Heritage, Ethics, and the Military (Woodbridge, UK:  The Boydell Press, 2011).

Over the past few months, I’ve been building a medical humanities workgroup at WMU; with the School of Medicine coming by Fall 2013, there’s a lot of energy on campus for this sort of initiative.  (In addition to the website, this flyer provides a good summary of what we’re doing.)  If anyone wants to contribute or talk more about it, please email me or my Associate Director, Dave Charlton.

I’ve just gotten arrived back in Canberra, Australia for a month’s stay at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at The Australian National University, where I am a Senior Research Fellow.  This is my fifth “summer” in Canberra, and it’s really good to be back!   The plans for the next month are to proofread the copy-edited manuscript for Terrorism, Ticking Time-Bombs, and Torture, as well as to write a paper that’s an off-shoot of that project; I’m now thinking more generally about the use of thought experiments in ethics.

During each of WMU’s two summer sessions, I’m teaching Biomedical Ethics (Phil 3340) online.  If you’re interested, have a look at the course syllabus; feel free to email me with questions!  Here’s the description:

Biomedical ethics is composed of two separate fields:  bioethics and medical ethics. Bioethics is the study of the ethics of life (and death), and includes familiar topics such as abortion, cloning, stem cell research, allocation of scarce medical resources, and euthanasia.  We shall spend approximately the first two-third of the course on these issues.  For the last third of the course, we shall discuss topics in medical ethics, which is concerned with “micro” issues such as the moral underpinnings of doctor-patient relationships as well as “macro” issues such as the structures of medical institutions or the duties that societies have to provide health care for those in need.  No previous coursework in philosophy is required for this course and fundamental concepts in moral philosophy (e.g., consequentialism and deontology) will be explained as they become relevant.  This is a course on theoretical (as opposed to clinical) bioethics.