by Dominic Wilkinson and Julian Savulescu
The case of Charlie Gard continues to attract intense public attention. It raises a number of challenging and important ethical questions.
The role of Practical Ethics in cases like this is to help clarify the key concepts, identify central ethical questions, separate them from questions of scientific fact and subject arguments to critical scrutiny. We have disagreed about the right course of action for Charlie Gard, but agree on the role of ethical analysis and the importance of robust and informed debate. Ethics is not about personal opinion – but about argument, reasons, and rational reflection.
We have collected together below some of the materials on the Charlie Gard case that we and others have written as well as some relevant resources from our earlier work. We will update this page as more material becomes available.
Legal material on the case
- High Court judgment
- Full collection of legal materials relating to the case (courtesy of Thaddeus Pope’s excellent website)
Blogs
- Burke, Briggs and Wills. Why we should not be afraid of the Charlie Gard judgment (Dominic Wilkinson 15/7/17)
- Burke and Wills, Bowen and Gard: The English Courts, Best Interests and Justice (Julian Savulescu 14/7/17)
- Gard legal decision questionable on secular ethical grounds (Julian Savulescu, Peter Singer 6/7/17)
- The sad case of Charlie Gard and the rights and *wrongs* of experimental treatment (Dominic Wilkinson 6/7/17)
- The moral of the case of Charlie Gard: give dying patients experimental treatment…early (Julian Savulescu 5/7/17)
- Agreement and disagreement about experimental treatment: the Charlie Gard appeal (Dominic Wilkinson and Julian Savulescu 22/5/17)
- Debate response: Charlie Gard, interests and Justice, an alternative view (Dominic Wilkinson 26/4/17)
- Debate: The fiction of an interest in death?
The views, opinions and positions expressed by these authors and blogs are theirs and do not necessarily represent that of the Bioethics Research Library and Kennedy Institute of Ethics or Georgetown University.