Should parents be asked to consent for life-saving paediatric interventions?

Conscience and Vaccines: Lessons from Babylon 5 and COVID-19

Babylon 5, like other great sci-fi franchises, touched on important ethical questions. Two ethical conundrums relating to the series' main characters included providing life-saving treatment to a child against their parents' wishes and potential involvement with a highly beneficial but morally dubious medication. I use these cases to discuss some aspects of the COVID-19 vaccines' development and roll-out, demonstrating that people (be it patients or clinicians) might object to some vaccines due to reasonable ethics and safety-based concerns rather than due to an anti-vaxxer mind-set. I highlight that it would be disingenuous to lump these two groups of objections together for not all objections to specific vaccines are objections to vaccination in general. Rather, governments and pharmaceutical companies should seriously engage with the concerns of reasonable objectors to provide citizens with the appropriate products and ensure large vaccination uptake - in the case of COVID-19 this should include giving patients the choice of the product they will be inoculated with.

The rule of right vs might: a reply to Wischik's 'Nazis, teleology, and the freedom of conscience'

Wischik presents an extensive reply to our paper on conscientious objection, which explores the implications of distinguishing 'medical acts' from 'socioclinical acts'. He provides an extensive legal analysis of the issues surrounding conscientious objection, drawing on the concepts of professional practice and consequentialism. Invoking some of these concepts, we respond and demonstrate that Wischik does not seriously engage with our argument. Instead, he merely proffers his preference for legal positivism, which - when viewed as the fount of justice (as Wischik seems to hold) instead of a tool in its service - necessarily bases rightness on might rather than truth. We also argue that in several important areas, Wischik is factually mistaken.