World news: Ethics | theguardian.com

Forget funeral selfies. What are the ethics of tweeting a terminal illness? | Emma G Keller

Emma G Keller — Wed, 08 Jan 2014 18:40:03 GMT

Lisa Adams is dying of breast cancer. She has tweeted over 100,000 times about her journey. Is this educational or too much?

Lisa Bonchek Adams is dying. She has Stage IV breast cancer and now it's metastasized to her bones, joints, hips, spine, liver and lungs. She's in terrible pain. She knows there is no cure, and she wants you to know all about what she is going through. Adams is dying out loud. On her blog and, especially, on Twitter.

She has tweeted over 100,000 times about her health. Lately, she tweets dozens of times an hour. Her Twitter followers are a mixed bag. Some are also battling cancer or work in the medical field, others seem to follow Adams' life story like a Reality TV show. Here's a taste of what it's like:

Pain today is worst in days. Cannot get on top of it. I have 1)constant drip plus ability to do 2)on-demand drip, 3)emergency. All in use.
— Lisa Bonchek Adams (@AdamsLisa) January 8, 2014

But it radiates out to side of back ("radicular pain") and has nerve component of pain. Mixes with the lung pain/same side
— Lisa Bonchek Adams (@AdamsLisa) January 8, 2014

All morning docs and nurses go in and out so you may see answers to questions in spurts. I also sometimes nod off mid tweet...
— Lisa Bonchek Adams (@AdamsLisa) January 8, 2014

She has been scrupulous about keeping track of her seven year decline. Her journey began with six month routine postpartum checkup after the birth of her third child. You can read all about the details of her disease and treatment on her blog right up until about this morning, which is when she posted her latest entry, only a few hours after the previous one.

She begins each day with the same tweet:

Find a bit of beauty in the world today. Share it. If you can't find it, create it. Some days this may be hard to do. Persevere.
— Lisa Bonchek Adams (@AdamsLisa) December 27, 2013

Over the past few years she has tweeted more than 165,000 times (well over 200 tweets in the past 24 hours alone.) Her clear-eyed strategy of living with cancer for as long as she can has caught the attention of many women with breast cancer, several writers and thousands of fans from everyday lives all over the world. I heard about her in the process of organizing a Guardian US Living Hour chat on DNA and cancer tumors in early November. Before you knew it, she was in the chat having her tumor genome and her cancer trial discussed in detail. I never met her, but I swapped tweets and emails with her, and kept track of her health.

Which is why a few weeks ago I noticed she was tweeting a lot more and from a situation she described as agonizing. The clinical drug trial she was on wasn't working. Her disease seemed to be rampaging through her body. She could hardly breathe, her lungs were filled with copious amounts of fluid causing her to be bedridden over Christmas. As her condition declined, her tweets amped up both in frequency and intensity. I couldn't stop reading – I even set up a dedicated @adamslisa column in Tweetdeck – but I felt embarrassed at my voyeurism. Should there be boundaries in this kind of experience? Is there such a thing as TMI? Are her tweets a grim equivalent of deathbed selfies, one step further than funeral selfies? Why am I so obsessed?

Social media has definitely become a part of Adams' treatment (I wonder what her hospital, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, thinks about that.) Tweeting makes her less lonely, it gives her a purpose, it distracts her from her pain, and the contact it brings clearly comforts her. Adams has managed to keep her dignity and her deft sense of humor intact as she has charted her decline.

As she tweeted a few hours ago:

"Why is she tweeting if it hurts so much?" I am sure people ask. It helps to distract me especially when I am alone (it's 6 AM here)
— Lisa Bonchek Adams (@AdamsLisa) January 8, 2014

Adams is not alone in doing this. Journalist Xeni Jardin live tweeted her cancer diagnosis two years ago and the long treatment journey. Jardin told the Guardian last year that she wasn't sure if she would be quite as "sharey" if she could go back in time.

It's clear that tweeting as compulsively as Lisa Adams does is an attempt to exercise some kind of control over her experience. She doesn't deny that. She sees herself as an educator, giving voice to what so many people go through. And she is trying to create her own boundaries, flimsy as they might be. She'll tell you all about her pain, for example, but precious little about her children or husband and what they are going through. She describes a fantastic set up at Sloan-Kettering, where she can order what she wants to eat at any time of day or night and get as much pain medication as she needs from a dedicated and compassionate "team", but there is no mention of the cost. She was enraged a few days ago when a couple of people turned up to visit her unannounced. She's living out loud online, but she wants her privacy in real life.

In some ways she has invited us all in. She could argue that she is presenting a specific picture – the one she wants us to remember. "I do feel there will be lasting memories about me. That matters," she wrote to me in a direct message on Twitter.

The ethical questions abound. Make your own judgement.

Are those of us who've been drawn into her story going to remember a dying woman's courage, or are we hooked on a narrative where the stakes are the highest?

Will our memories be the ones she wants? What is the appeal of watching someone trying to stay alive? Is this the new way of death? You can put a "no visitors sign" on the door of your hospital room, but you welcome the world into your orbit and describe every last Fentanyl patch. Would we, the readers, be more dignified if we turned away? Or is this part of the human experience?

We've put together a condensed timeline of Lisa Adams' tweets. You can also read her entire feed.

Emma G Keller

Can you be too ethical? | Andrew Brown

Andrew Brown — Fri, 27 Dec 2013 09:00:03 GMT

Corporate smoke-screens, some Catholic bioethics … such problematic displays of 'ethicity' can easily confuse the issue

This may be the only question in this series to which the answer is "no".

It's not obvious that you can't have too many ethics. Like every other word, it's used to conceal the truth as well as to point towards it, and in some corporate meanings "ethical" is, and ought to be, a warning sign.

"Ethical" in the corporate sense is something much more like "pious", although without the Christian underpinning. Perhaps we need a word for the resulting vain self-satisfaction – ethicity, after the model of piety. This would cover fair trade, sustainability, the ostentatious avoidance of sweatshops and so on. It is the kind of thing of which oil companies boast, and Google.

This isn't actually always a bad thing. It's better than unbridled vice. The Scott Trust is an improvement on Richard Desmond, who famously said he had no idea what the word "ethics" means. But it is possible to have too much ethicity. Google is a pretty good example, as is much of the culture of Silicon Valley. Good behaviour isn't always something you can buy with money. Still less is it something you can buy with money you have made through ruthless libertarian selfishness.

Another form of too much ethics is shown by some forms of utilitarianism which proceed from apparently reasonable premises to obviously monstrous conclusions. The two Australian ethicists who in 2012 argued that there was nothing wrong in killing newborn babies if their existence inconvenienced their parents are a poster case for this. So is the reaction of the editor who published the paper:

"What is disturbing is not the arguments in this paper nor its publication in an ethics journal. It is the hostile, abusive, threatening responses that it has elicited. More than ever, proper academic discussion and freedom are under threat from fanatics opposed to the very values of a liberal society."

When "ethics" becomes a term for a style of reasoning about moral questions which leads its adepts to monstrous conclusions, yes, we can certainly have too much of it.

Much the same could be said for some forms of Roman Catholic bioethics. Beyond that is the general problem of pharisaism, where ethical reasoning comes to be a way of demonstrating the cosmic significance of the mote in your opponent's eye.

In all these cases it looks as if you can be entirely too ethical and anyone who complained of this would be instantly understood. But when you look at the complaint more closely, it actually means that someone has acted wrongly in their display of ethicity, or rule-based smugness – and to act wrongly is by definition unethical. So what looks like to much ethics is in fact too little.

This makes most sense in the context of Aristotelian reasoning about virtues, where the virtuous position is balanced between two vices, so that either too much or too little is a flaw in your character. The essence of virtue, then, is moderation, or perhaps just proportion. Framing it this way avoids the obvious retort – so often heard in discussion of ethics here – that you can have far too much moderation because you can't have too much justice. And neither, properly speaking, can we ever be too ethical. We're lucky if we can just be ethical enough.

Andrew Brown

Shia LaBeouf's plagiarism may be a case of cultural 'affluenza' | Sadhbh Walshe

Sadhbh Walshe — Wed, 18 Dec 2013 15:50:09 GMT

The accusation isn't LaBeouf's first. It seems his meteoric rise to stardom makes him think he can take whatever he wants

It's been a bad week for renowned actor and less renowned filmmaker Shia LaBeouf, and an even worse week for plagiarism. In a series of tweets, LaBeouf admitted on Tuesday that he "fucked up" by failing to acknowledge that the short film he passed off as an original work was actually inspired by, if not an entire rip off of, a graphic novella written by artist Daniel Clowes. By way of apology, LaBeouf tweeted that in his "excitement and naivete as an amateur filmmaker (he) got lost in the creative process and neglected to follow proper accreditation". Naivete and excitement may well have played their part in this fairly brazen breach of etiquette, but considering LaBeouf's previous run ins with plagiarism (even part of his twitterized apology seems to have been copied) it may be that the young actor has been afflicted with a bad case of cultural "affluenza".

I haven't seen the short film (Howard Cantour.com) at the center of the controversy because it was removed shortly after it was released online, on the shortoftheweek.com website, following Buzzfeed's report that it was uncomfortably similar to Clowes' 2007 comic, Justin M Damiano. But considering that Clowes' reps called it an almost direct adaptation of the work, and that LaBeouf made no attempt to deny the allegation and immediately apologized to "all who assumed I wrote it", it's reasonable to assume that there was some heavy lifting involved. Oddly, when the film debuted at Cannes over a year ago and no one noticed that the characters and dialog were not original, LaBeouf didn't feel any compulsion to undo the audience's assumption that he wrote the film. Could it be that he thought he could get away with it, or that he didn't realize there was anything to get away with?

As many critics and commenters pointed out in the past few days, this is not LaBeouf's first brush with plagiarism. Earlier this year, after creative differences (aka a spat with Alec Baldwin) prompted the young actor to withdraw from a Broadway production, he pasted whole chunks of an Esquire article titled "What is a Man?" into an email to his former co-star, without using quotation marks or acknowledging the author, Tom Chiarela. This wasn't that big of a deal – or at least it wouldn't have been – had LaBeouf not chosen to share the private email exchange with Baldwin and the play's director with the general public on twitter. LaBeouf messed up again when it emerged that his opening apology tweet on Tuesday was copied from the Yahoo Answers site.

Neither of these incidents are particularly significant of themselves. Using quotation marks when you're quoting someone is the polite thing to do obviously, especially if you're making a public statement, but It's not like LaBeouf profited in any direct way from passing off another person's words as his own – as he might have done with his short film. The more notable issue about these incidents, particularly the ill considered apology tweet, is that it fuels the speculation that he has a plagiarism problem: that he seems to think that if someone else's work speaks to him in some way, he's entitled to repurpose or repackage it at will.

This brings me to my diagnosis of cultural affluenza. The term "affluenza" first surfaced during the trial of Texas teenager Ethan Couch, who killed four people and paralyzed one in a drunk driving accident. He was sentenced to probation rather than prison after his defense team successfully argued that because of his parents' wealth, he had been brought up in a consequence-free environment. However crazy the judgement itself may have been, the idea that a person with excessive wealth and privilege might also have an inflated sense of entitlement does make a terrible sort of sense. It may be that LaBeouf's meteoric rise to stardom – and the privileged life that goes with such early success – might explain in some way his apparent inability to understand that he doesn't get to pass off a story written by someone else as his own, just because he likes it.

Or maybe I'm being too nice and he just tried to pull a fast one and didn't get away with it. Either way, he has been busted and is already learning that actions do have consequences. Clowes retains the copyrights to his work and his publisher, Fantagraphics, said in a statement that the artist is pursuing his legal options. The embarrassment surrounding the incident may cost LaBeouf more than any financial penalty, but hopefully he will learn to observe a few basic niceties like using quotation marks, thinking before he tweets, and not pretending to have written something he hasn't.

Sadhbh Walshe

The 'forced caesarian' case must lead to greater openness in the family courts | Joshua Rozenberg

Joshua Rozenberg — Tue, 17 Dec 2013 18:33:36 GMT

As Sir James Munby acknowledges, judges can change someone's whole life - we must have public confidence in the courts

The senior family judge in England and Wales has said that the recent "forced caesarian" case must lead to much greater transparency in the family courts and the court of protection.

Granting an order that the child's mother can be named as Alessandra Pacchieri but ordering that her 15-month-old daughter must not be identified, Sir James Munby said it was "hard to imagine a case which more obviously and compellingly requires that public debate should be free and unrestricted".

The baby girl has been placed with prospective adopters following an order made by a circuit judge in October. Munby said the child had a "compelling claim to privacy and anonymity".

"The mother has an equally obvious and compelling claim to be allowed to tell her story to the world," the judge continued. Courts should be very slow to prevent parents from expressing their views about what they saw as failings by courts and judges.

"If ever there was a case in which that right should not be curtailed it is surely this case. To deny this mother in the circumstances of this case the right to speak out – and, I emphasise, to speak out, if this is her wish, using her own name and displaying her own image – would be affront not merely to the law but also, surely, to any remotely acceptable concept of human dignity and, indeed, humanity itself."

Munby has never been a judge who minced his words. Giving his reasons on Tuesday afternoon for a ruling he delivered last week, the judge said that some reports of the case had been tendentious and too many had been inaccurate – though that was "not entirely the fault of the media".

He singled out for criticism a report in the Daily Mail on 3 December, which claimed he had "demanded to know [from social workers] why the girl should not be reunited with her mother".

"That was simply not so," Munby said. "I had directed no hearing. How could I?"

He continued: "All I had done was to direct that any further application was to be heard by me. In other words, if any application was made, either in the court of protection or in the family court, I would hear it. That was all. Unhappily this canard has been much repeated in the media."

The problem, as Munby acknowledged with "honesty and candour", was that when the story broke in the Sunday Telegraph on 1 December, "none of the relevant information was in the public domain in this country".

He asked: "How can the family justice system blame the media for inaccuracy in the reporting of family cases if for whatever reason none of the relevant information has been put before the public?"

His next comment went to the heart of the problem.

"This case must surely stand as final, stark and irrefutable demonstration of the pressing need for radical changes in the way in which both the family courts and the court of protection approach what, for shorthand, I will refer to as transparency. We simply cannot go on as hitherto. Many more judgments must be published. And, as this case so very clearly demonstrates, that applies not merely to the judgments of high court judges; it applies also to the judgments of circuit judges."

Munby is right. When I tried to follow up the Sunday Telegraph story on the day it was published, I could find no court rulings in the case online. It was obviously implausible that a judge had "given the social workers permission to arrange for the child to be delivered" by caesarean section, as the newspaper had reported. But it was not until 4 December that full facts emerged. As Mr Justice Mostyn then explained, the application for a caesarean delivery was made to him by doctors, not social workers. It was "supported by the clear evidence of a consultant obstetrician and the patient's own treating consultant psychiatrist, seeking a declaration and order that it would be in the medical best interests of this seriously mentally ill and incapacitated patient, who had undergone two previous elective caesarean sections, to have this birth, the due date of which was imminent (she was 39 weeks pregnant), in the same manner.

A QC appointed to represent the mother's interests agreed "that the proposed delivery by caesarean section was in the best interests of the patient herself who risked uterine rupture with a natural vaginal birth", Mostyn added.

Why was his judgment not published at the time it was delivered, in August 2012? First, of course, because it was delivered in the court of protection. Before Munby became president of the high court family division at the beginning of this year, judges who sat in the court of protection regarded themselves as dealing with matters that were essentially private.

In October, however, Munby said that reporters should be allowed into the court's hearings. In practice, reporters rarely get to know about urgent applications such as this and so are not likely to be in court. What's essential, therefore, is that judgments should be published in important cases – anonymised if necessary. But Mostyn's judgment, delivered off the cuff because the case was so urgent, was not even transcribed, let alone reported. Lawyers had not ordered a transcript because his ruling was never challenged on appeal. Nobody else knew about the case.

What Munby appears to be saying is that judgments must be transcribed and published unless they are unlikely to be of any public interest – for example, if the judge merely grants an adjournment. At least, that is what I hope he is saying.

Someone will have to meet the cost of the transcripts. But it's a small price to pay for greater public confidence in the family courts. And, as Munby himself acknowledges, when judges can change someone's whole life by a stroke of the pen, there is a pressing need for greater openness.

Joshua Rozenberg

The readers' editor on… the 'forcing' of a caesarean on a woman with mental health problems | Chris Elliott

Chris Elliott — Sun, 15 Dec 2013 19:00:00 GMT

However her medical condition is framed by the law, the mother has the right for her voice to be heard

It was never going to be an easy story to write; to convey the nuances of the complex and tragic medical case at its heart.

First reports on the weekend of 30 November and 1 December stated that an Italian woman had been forced to have a caesarean by social workers who had then taken her baby into care. It was suggested that the action had been taken as a result of "panic attacks" suffered by the woman, who had not been taking the medication she had been prescribed for a pre-existing bipolar condition.

The Guardian ran two stories online on 2 December ('Forced' caesarean case – Italian mother in talks with MP; Forced caesarean was carried out 'because of risks to mother and child') and a short item in the paper on 3 December (Council defends 'forced caesarean' decision, page 18). These were based on agency reports of the stories published at the weekend. Two Comment pieces were also published within the next couple of days.

However a different picture emerged late on 2 December, with a statement from Essex county council. The woman had been detained under section 3 of the Mental Health Act on 13 June 2012 and it was the Mid Essex NHS trust – not social workers – that applied to the court of protection on 23 August 2012 for permission to carry out a caesarean section on her.

As we explained in a subsequent correction published online on 4 December and in print on the 5 December, Essex county council's social services applied for an interim care order for the child on 24 August.

Further important background information to the decisions taken emerged on 4 December when Mr Justice Mostyn, who heard the application in the court of protection from the health trust, authorised a verbatim transcript of the private proceedings 15 months ago. This was released on 4 December 2013.

In his judgment he said: "The problem here is that as the mother has had two children by caesarean section before, it is the clear obstetric advice ... and, specifically in this case, that she should have an elective planned caesarean in order to avoid not only risks for the child but to herself of a ruptured womb."

During the proceedings Mr Justice Mostyn heard psychiatric evidence that a caesarean was "in her best interests, from a mental health point of view". He also said that he was satisfied that the woman, referred to as AA throughout the proceedings, "lacks capacity under the Mental Capacity Act", ie she is not in a position to give or withhold her consent, therefore he also authorised the use of reasonable restraint in order to achieve that operation safely and successfully.

Dr Evan Harris, as well as being a member of the Hacked Off group, is a long-standing member of the BMA's medical ethics committee. He has made several complaints to the Guardian regarding our coverage of the case – a letter from him was published on 9 December.

He objects to the use of the phrase forced caesarean and says it should be in quotation marks at the very least, because the woman is deemed incapable of giving or withholding her consent in law.

Anyone who reads the transcript of the proceedings in the court of protection, which in general is trying to open up its proceedings more fully to the press, would recognise that a sensitive process had gone on before orders – or permissions, as Harris would prefer – were granted. It is an extraordinarily difficult area of the law.

In an interview with an Italian newspaper, the woman, whose two other children were taken into care, is reported as saying that she was made to have a caesarean, did not give permission for her child to be adopted and wanted her back.

However her medical condition is framed by the law, she has the right for her voice to be heard.

The issue of whether the words forced caesarean should be in quotes is not a matter of accuracy. Once again, recognising that she is legally incapable of giving or withholding consent does not negate her expressed feelings that she did not wish it.

However, I agree that the use of quotation marks would be fair. There is a danger that the use of the term forced caesarean without quotation marks may add to the idea that decisions taken were not in her best interest – the evidence suggests otherwise.

Chris Elliott

As engineers, we must consider the ethical implications of our work | Abbas El-Zein

Abbas El-Zein — Thu, 05 Dec 2013 13:45:00 GMT

Engineers are behind government spying tools and military weapons. We should be conscious of how our designs are used

One aspect of Edward Snowden's revelations in the Guardian about the NSA's surveillance activities has received less attention than it should. The algorithms that extract highly specific information from an otherwise impenetrable amount of data have been conceived and built by flesh and blood, engineers with highly sophisticated technical knowledge. Did they know the use to which their algorithms would be put? If not, should they have been mindful of the potential for misuse? Either way, should they be held partly responsible or were they just "doing their job"?

One could ask similar questions about engineers who build technologies of violence. Although in the west, we use the euphemism "defence" – and weapons often do serve this purpose – arms are just as likely to be used for furthering less-than-honourable goals, whether invading other countries, bombing rebellious populations or staging coups against democratically-elected governments. Engineers who see themselves as builders of the shelter and infrastructure for human needs also use their expertise in order to destroy and kill more efficiently.

When doctors or nurses use their knowledge of anatomy in order to torture or conduct medical experiments on helpless subjects, we are rightly outraged. Why doesn't society seem to apply the same standards to engineers? There is more than one answer to the question of course, but two points are especially pertinent: the common good we engineers see ourselves serving and our relationship to authority.

Health is an unambiguously positive social good that gives the medical profession a strong moral purpose. The same can be said of justice for practitioners of the law. Lawyers and doctors are expected to act in a particular way and, sometimes, to become the custodians of the social good their respective professions embody. Whether they do or not is a different matter.

Technology as a means of social progress is arguably the common good that engineers pursue. Modern engineering emerged in the 19th century, an age when technology was seen in almost unequivocally positive light. Engineers were to "[direct] the great sources of power in nature for the use and convenience of man", in the exultant words of the UK Institution of Engineers, written in 1828. The two World Wars, the gas chambers, the atomic bombs and agent Orange – the awfully destructive scope of technology – were yet to come.

Today, our profession seems to have preserved the sense that technology is almost by necessity a force for good. We are focused on the technical and managerial sides of technology – how to design algorithms; how to build machines – but not so much on the context of its deployment or its unintended consequences. We are not very interested in the politics and social dynamics.

Engineers need the resources of government and industry to do their work, far more than doctors do. Sometimes we are hired for a specific project, but more often, we sell our services wholesale as paid employees. We do not make weapons for a specific war or algorithms for a specific surveillance activity. As a result, engineers who build these devices usually operate at one remove from the consequences of their actions.

In the US, freelance consultant engineers – who appear to have controlled the American Society of Civil Engineers in the late 19th century, and created a strong and autonomous professional identity – were swept away by a corporate model in which most engineers became paid employees of industry. Today, engineering in the English-speaking world largely sees itself as a tool of industry. There are many advantages to this of course, including more resources at our disposal to do our work. But one major drawback is that engineers, as a result, have far less intellectual and practical autonomy than they should.

Our ethics have become mostly technical: how to design properly, how to not cut corners, how to serve our clients well. We work hard to prevent failure of the systems we build, but only in relation to what these systems are meant to do, rather than the way they might actually be utilised, or whether they should have been built at all. We are not amoral, far from it; it's just that we have steered ourselves into a place where our morality has a smaller scope.

There have been encouraging attempts in the engineering profession aiming for a bigger, less reductionist vision of engineering: some mission statements have been written, codes of ethics redrafted and engineering curricula redesigned. However, we are still essentially producing what industry requires: engineers able to carry out technically complex projects, rather than professionals with an in-depth understanding of the social complexity of technology. In fact, we need both. We have very little appetite for engaging with social and political sciences that have something valuable (and sometimes unpleasant) to say about science and technology, including the roles, prejudices and vested interests of scientists and engineers. The cultural shift has simply not happened.

Engineers have, in many ways, built the modern world and helped improve the lives of many. Of this, we are rightfully proud. What's more, only a very small minority of engineers is in the business of making weapons or privacy-invading algorithms. However, we are part and parcel of industrial modernity with all its might, advantages and flaws, and we we therefore contribute to human suffering as well as flourishing.

While there are no easy answers to the questions raised here, we can certainly do better. We can claim, and live up to, our role as social custodians of technology, conscious of its strengths and dangers, capable of navigating its technical, ecological, political and social dimensions alike – even if this might require more years of study for engineering University degrees.

John Rogers, a materials engineer at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, invented a brilliant epidermal electronic medical device and reported it in the journal Science. In a recent feature article about him in the New Yorker magazine, he was asked whether his invention is for the better or whether it will turn us into soulless robots. His answer was:

[P]eople should think about it. But I'm just an engineer, basically.

It will be a bright day for our profession when we start producing more engineers who, while just as smart as Rogers, have the will and the intellectual capacity to engage with bigger questions about the ethics, politics and social ramifications of their inventions.

Author's note: the opinions expressed in this article are his own and not those of the University of Sydney.

Abbas El-Zein

The essential cases every law student should know | Birju Kotecha

Birju Kotecha — Wed, 04 Dec 2013 09:00:06 GMT

From the longest case in English legal history to Lord Denning's rulings, judicial decisions are a law student's bread and butter

Cases capture human stories, shape public debate and establish new expectations of the state. Their wider effect can reflect society's consciousness but often lead to new laws. Cases and judges' decisions are a law student's bread and butter. Here are a few you will come across:

Care for thy neighbour:

In 1932 Mrs Donoghue launched the modern law of negligence, after finding her ginger beer less than appealing. Known to generations of law students as the "snail in the bottle" case, it is best known for Lord Atkin's famous neighbour principle. In declaring we should take reasonable care to avoid harm to those we foresee can be affected, he established when we owe duties to each other. Accidents and injuries were forever to be reshaped into claims and compensation.

Foreign detainees

Known as the Belmarsh decision, there is no modern case that better sets the boundary between national security and civil liberties. Decided by a panel of nine law lords, the 2004 decision became an important milestone in judges protecting both the rule of law and human rights. In a challenge to the Labour policy of indefinitely detaining foreign terrorist suspects without charge, the majority declared the British state acted illegally and in a discriminatory way. In his powerful rejection, Lord Hoffman stated "The real threat to the life of the nation… comes not from terrorism but from laws such as these."

Spanish fisherman

Providing the legal backdrop to a decade of EU-scepticism is the 1991 case of Factortame, this case on the rights of Spanish fisherman to fish in British waters is a mainstay on any public law course. It confirmed the priority of European laws over UK acts of parliament and thus struck a blow against parliament's legal supremacy. In so doing it provoked much constitutional debate about the extent of EU legal powers - and Britain's relationship with Europe as a whole.

McLibel

Officially the longest case in English legal history, this ten year David v Goliath libel battle exposed the price of justice when corporations take on individuals. The fast food giant sued green campaigners David Morris and Helen Steel for libel over a stinging pamphlet criticising the their ethical credentials. McDonalds walked away with both a win and a PR disaster. The European court of human rights later declared in 2005 that the pair, who were unfunded and were representing themselves, had been denied their right to a fair trial.

Jodie and Mary

In the year 2000 the plight of conjoined twins made front page news. The question was whether it was justified to separate and knowingly "kill" the weaker Mary in order to save her stronger sister Jodie, given both were destined for a premature death. In spite of parents favouring non-separation, doctors wanted a declaration that such an operation would be lawful. In a maze of ethical and legal conflicts, Lord Justice Ward rather hollowly declared that "this is a court of law, not a court of morals."

After admitting to sleepless nights, the judges allowed the doctors to separate. Lord Justice Brooke declared the situation as one of necessity, allowing the option of a lesser evil. The stronger twin survived and made a full recovery. The thankfully rare case, otherwise found in philosophy debates, demonstrates the relationship between law and morality, perhaps one of the first questions on a legal theory course.

Domestic abuse

A year after marital rape was declared rape in 1991, came the case of Kiranjit Ahluwalia, who had been abused for over a decade by a violent husband. She was convicted of murder after setting her husband alight as he slept. In recognising long-term domestic abuse and the possibility of a slow-burn anger that led to her snapping, the case was a cause célèbre for feminist and domestic abuse groups. Though finally the decision in the end was based on diminished responsibility, it was seen as a benchmark for tackling the gender bias in the criminal law and raising public awareness of domestic abuse. Ahluwalia's conviction was reduced to manslaughter, and she was freed.

Pinochet

International human rights law received a global TV audience in 1998 after former Chilean dictator General Pinochet was arrested in London. Under the rules of universal jurisdiction, he was detained following a Spanish extradition request facing charges of crimes against humanity. The law lords declared that there could be a limit to the immunity enjoyed by heads of states. Though Pinochet was never extradited, the case sent out a strong message about accountability for leaders who commit human rights abuses,before the international criminal court was established.

The case is also well known among lawyers when after the first hearing it was disclosed that that one of the ruling law lords, Lord Hoffmann, was a director of Amnesty International, a party to the cases. The entire hearing had to be repeated to show that "justice must not only be done but be seen to be done."

The internet age

Injunctions, twitter, privacy and the extra marital activities of footballers were all the rage in early 2011. Nothing struck up more attention than the application for an injunction by Ryan Giggs against the Sun. His name was widely tweeted and the situation became more farcical when MP John Hemming revealed his name in the House of Commons. The debate forced the law to react to an age of the internet and social media. The case followed a long line of celebrity court battles in the 2000's, and became another marker in the debate between balancing freedom of expression and the right to a private life.

Roe v Wade

From across the Atlantic arguably no case better demonstrates the political and social impact of judicial decisions. The landmark decision in 1973 upheld a woman's right to an abortion. Synonymous with abortion in the USA. Hundreds of thousands march on the US supreme court on the anniversary of the decision each year.

Any of Denning's cases

In our common law system, many judges leave their mark on a particular area of law. However clichéd, no judge will live longer in the memory of law students than the controversial Lord Denning. He demonstrates the power of personality in a subject that is often seen technical, dry and rule-based. In the words of Lord Irvine, "the word Denning became a byword for the law itself." Denning reminds us that all cases are eventually decided by individuals who are made up of values and personal perspectives that make them who they are. Students, you are encouraged to think, debate and learn the law in the same spirit. Good luck.

Are there any need-to-know cases missing from this list? Add them in the comments below.

Birju Kotecha

Is the use of unmanned military drones ethical or criminal? - video debate

Seumas Milne, Phil Maynard, Ken Macfarlane — Mon, 02 Dec 2013 08:30:00 GMT

Columnist Seumas Milne and Peter Lee, a military expert at Portsmouth University, discuss the moral and political questions raised by drones

Seumas Milne

Phil Maynard

Ken Macfarlane

This column will change your life: why are ethicists so unethical?

Oliver Burkeman — Sat, 16 Nov 2013 09:00:00 GMT

'Does an overdeveloped sense of morality make you less likely to act ethically in real life?'

Ethical philosophy isn't the most scintillating of subjects, but it has its moments. Take, for example, the work of the US philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel, who's spent a large chunk of his career confirming the entertaining finding that ethicists aren't very ethical. Ethics books, it turns out, are more likely to be stolen from libraries than other philosophy books. Ethics professors are more likely to believe that eating animals is wrong, but no less likely to eat meat. They're also more likely to say giving to charity is a moral obligation, but they were less likely than other philosophers to return a questionnaire when researchers promised to donate to charity if they did. Back when the American Philosophical Association charged for some meetings using an honesty system, ethicists were no less likely to freeload.

One take on this is that ethicists are terrible hypocrites. As Schwitzgebel points out, that's not necessarily as bad as it sounds: if philosophers were obliged to live by their findings, that might exert a "distortive pressure" on their work, tempting them to reach more self-indulgent conclusions about the moral life. (And there's a case to be made, after all, that it's better for people to preach the right thing but not practise it than to do neither.) But another possibility bears thinking about. It's plausible to suggest that ethicists have an unusually strong sense of what's right and wrong; that's what they spend their days pondering, after all. What if their overdeveloped sense of morality – their confidence that they know what's what, ethically speaking – makes them less likely to act ethically in real life?

This would be an intriguing twist on "moral licensing", the deep-seated human tendency that leaves us feeling entitled to do something bad because we've already done something good. It explains why people give up plastic bags, then feel justified in taking a long-haul flight, obliterating the carbon savings. It's also why, if you give people a chance to condemn sexist statements, they'll subsequently be more likely to favour hiring a man in a male-dominated profession. Could it be that merely doing the mental work of figuring out what's right ticks an internal "morality" box, so licensing "moral" people to act as badly as anyone else? (Or worse: remember those library books.) This is speculation, but if it's right, the implications would reach beyond philosophers. Smugness might not just be annoying to others; it could actively make smug people less moral.

The broader peril here – that we might fail to do what we ought to do because we know we ought to do it – threatens to undermine personal happiness, too. Consider this extreme example: about a decade ago, the multimillionaire banker Rajat Gupta gave a speech about the dangers of becoming super-rich. "You have to watch out for it," he said. "Because the more you have, the more you get used to comforts [and] big houses and vacation homes, and going and doing whatever you want. So it is very seductive." He knew the unrestrained pursuit of material wealth wasn't the path to happiness. But last year Gupta was convicted of conspiracy and fraud in the Galleon hedge fund case, the biggest insider trading scandal in US history. You can't really say he should have known better: clearly he did. Was it his confidence in his knowledge that caused him to forget himself? Was knowing better the problem?

oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com

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Oliver Burkeman

Should a death row inmate be allowed to donate his organs? | Paul C McLean

Paul C McLean — Fri, 15 Nov 2013 13:15:00 GMT

Organ transplant is humanity at its best only when the organs are procured in a moral way and recipient selection is just

By decree of the governor of Ohio, Ronald Phillips is alive today. He also remains in full possession of his organs.

Phillips' execution has been delayed until the summer of 2014 so that Ohio can decide whether he can donate his heart to his sister, a kidney to his mother, and possibly tissues and other organs to others.

This is a complex trauma and tragedy for an American family, and if the mother and sister are eligible for new organs, and rise to the top of their respective need-based transplant lists in a system of scarcity-imposed rationing, I hope they get them. But those organs should not come from Ronald Phillips.

Organ donation needs to be voluntary, and to take organs from a prisoner is almost by definition coercive. Is autonomous choice even a rational consideration for a man on death row?

Ohio should not harvest a man's organs before it kills him. Whether the state should kill Phillips is a separate question. It is the more important question. But to remove the heart and a kidney of a man on death row would taint a system of transplantation that does not need that burden.

For the men, women and children whose lives have been saved and prolonged, transplant is miraculous, an extraordinary gift of contemporary medicine. The science and compassionate care that make it possible are humanity at its best. And yet organ transplantation is an ethically, politically and socially volatile practice. Like the transplant itself, decisions about donors and recipients require surgical and ethical precision.

Transplant is humanity at its best only when the organs are procured in a morally and ethically appropriate way and recipient selection is just and equitable.

Consider this: Phillips' execution would render his organs unusable. So they would have to be harvested prior to his execution, or as part of that act. How is this appropriate?

Four primary principles guide medical ethics: do no harm, do good, respect autonomy, and act justly. How is removing Phillips' organs, even at his request, not harmful? What good would it do, other than for the man's conscience? Autonomy is absurd – the man is a prisoner facing a death sentence.

And then comes justice.

In 1995, a death row prisoner in Delaware, his brother already executed for their collaborative crime, was allowed to donate a kidney to his mother. That troubles me as well, but at least with a kidney, the donor survives the harvest.

Not so with a heart.

Removing Ronald Phillips' heart would make an executioner of a transplant surgeon.

Phillips' public defender argues the right thing would be to "ensure that as many people as possible will benefit from the gift of life that Ron is so generously willing to bestow as his own life approaches its end".

But Phillips' life will not end naturally. His death will occur according to the governor's calendar. He is to be executed by the state of Ohio as punishment for the rape and murder of a child.

So, why not let him give his organs to whomever he wishes, since we are killing him anyway? Is that the right question?

Perhaps the governor of Ohio might look inside his own metaphorical heart and wonder whether the question is not whether we should take organs from prisoners, but whether we should be executing prisoners in the first place.

The Ohio governor is staunchly pro-life. Should he think twice about the execution of prisoners in his state, then Ronald Phillips will have accomplished his act for good.

Paul C McLean

Paying late: an ethical business issue

Wed, 06 Nov 2013 12:35:00 GMT

Late payments exemplify how rotten corporate ethics can erode company culture from inside, writes Philippa Foster Back

Imagine this: It's payday, but instead of your usual envelope containing your payslip, you receive an email. "Dear employee," it reads. "Looking for your payslip? Afraid we've changed our payment terms. You'll be being paid every six weeks from now on. Hope you don't mind. If you do, of course, we can always find someone else to do your job."

But what about the mortgage? And your train fare? And the car tax, the gas bill, the water rates? How will these monthly outgoings be paid if you suddenly don't get paid? Does this sound improbable and outrageous?

And yet it is the situation in which many small and medium-sized businesses find themselves because customers pay late, or insist upon punishingly long payment terms, or change payment terms retrospectively.

SMEs report that this is the most important issue for them after access to finance. Data from BACS – the bank automated clearance scheme – shows that the average SME was owed over £31,000 in April 2013. That translates to over £30bn across the UK economy. Evidence from the Federation of Small Businesses indicates that more than half of small businesses are not paid promptly by large companies with the average payment time of 58 days, nearly double normal contract terms. And the situation has got worse in the current economic climate.

Paying suppliers late is an ethical issue that doesn't receive the column inches of Libor Fixing or phone hacking, and yet it is a scandal that affects the lives of many. Late payments, for no valid or legitimate reason, are unethical. They are an abuse of "power" and in essence bullying behaviour by customers who hold all the cards. Small businesses are reluctant to use legislation, or they agree to punishingly long payment terms, for fear of losing contracts with bigger businesses on which they are often reliant.

The ethical principle underlying any contract is trust. And trust comes from fairness, honesty and mutual benefit. A reputation for trustworthiness can provide sustainable competitive advantage – it enables the organisation to attract and retain top talent and establish effective business partnerships and a loyal customer base.

But when the customer abuses a contract by late paying of invoices or changing payment terms, trust is quickly broken. In reality, suppliers, especially SMEs, are rarely in a position to challenge their customers for fear of damaging the business relationship. Small businesses are often unable to walk away and look for another customer, especially if an existing one owes them significant money; and charging interest on the outstanding balance rarely works.

Customers are paying their suppliers late to ease their own cash flow problems, pushing the financial risks onto their suppliers, which is unfair and an abuse of trust. There is a natural tension between a customer and a supplier which can result in the emergence of innovative solutions and mutual benefits. Far better for customers and suppliers to work together, to share the risk, to be truthful and honourable in their undertakings.

Paying suppliers late reflects the leadership and prevailing culture in the organisation. When it comes to business ethics, companies focus on employees potentially doing "bad" things – fraud, bribery, corruption. When in reality, it is the seemingly little things which show the true colours of a company's culture.

Strategic decisions such as changing contractual terms, not paying on time, "losing invoices" or not passing invoices for payment or actioning requests for purchase orders, may seem to be "victimless crimes". But during the 2008 recession it is estimated that 4,000 businesses failed as a direct result of late payments.

The decision to not pay promptly begins at company board level where the strategy is set, and ripples throughout an organisation until it reaches the accounts staff who press the payment button. A culture of late payments is an example of how rotten corporate ethics can erode company culture from the inside. Because if suppliers are not treated with respect, then other stakeholders – customers, employees, investors, society at large – are not likely to be either.

An organisation with an ethical approach to business practice will consider prompt payment of suppliers as an essential element of doing business ethically. To do so shows respect for the supplier relationship and is an example of the company's fairness.

Business ethics is not rocket science: it can be summed up simply as "being nice to one another". In today's world, it is easy to become detached from the lives we are connected to by the click of a button. Suppliers are not a number – that company has a name, with livelihoods attached to it. Late payments are not a victimless crime, but they are a preventable one.

Philippa Foster Back is the director of the Institute of Business Ethics

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Judges can sidestep religion, but they can't avoid morality | Andrew Brown

Andrew Brown — Tue, 05 Nov 2013 08:00:00 GMT

A speech by Sir James Munby suggests judges should no longer privilege Christian values. But that doesn't mean they're in the business of enforcing morality

Sir James Munby gave a speech last week saying that judges no longer concerned themselves with the promotion of virtue and the discouragement of immorality – and nor should they: Britain is now a secular society, he said, and religion has no special privilege beyond what it is granted by human rights legislation. This was widely reported as claiming that the law no longer has any business enforcing morality. I have now read his speech carefully and I am not at all certain that this is what he said – and if it's what he meant he is clearly wrong and his own speech proves it. Judges, he thinks, are very much in the business of enforcing morality, and so they ought to be. The confusion, and it's a very important one, arises from supposing that morality now means what it meant in respectable circles 100 years ago – a form of 19th-century Protestantism.

Much of his argument is wonderfully clear and, more importantly, right. Within living memory many influential judges did assume that morality was largely concerned with sexuality and the application of biblical standards of patriarchy in so far as this was possible. All this has gone. "Judges are no longer custos morum of the people, and if they are they have to take the people's customs as they find them, not as they or others might wish them to be," said Munby.

"And if they are" – that's where the argument shifts, because, as will become apparent, he does believe judges are the custodians of morality to some extent. I suspect that any other view is incoherent, or at least wicked. The burden of his talk is an attack on religious privilege. It seems odd to suppose that this must also be an attack on morality.

For Munby's claims about what has replaced morality are themselves profoundly moral ones. They have to be. Look at his praise of tolerance.

He wants to live in "a tolerant society, increasingly alive to the need to guard against the tyranny which majority opinion may impose on those who, for whatever reason, comprise a small, weak, unpopular or voiceless minority".

This seems to me an entirely and unavoidably moral desire. What justification is there for not imposing our views on a small, weak, unpopular or voiceless minority? You can't answer the question without using moral concepts. What amoral reason could there be not to impose our views on the minority? Only that we might fail in the attempt and that's not often a serious danger.

Similarly, his argument against privileging religion is not based on the idea that we can sidestep morality, but on the belief that our idea of morality is better and truer than Lord Denning's was in 1957. Munby said that "Reliance upon religious belief, however conscientious the belief and however ancient and respectable the religion, can never of itself immunise the believer from the reach of the secular law." I don't think many people would disagree with this – I certainly wouldn't. But the question then becomes how to draw the line, and the answer most certainly involves moral judgment and reasoning, as he goes on to recognise.

"Where precisely the limits are to be drawn is often a matter of controversy. There is no 'bright-line' test that the law can set. The infinite variety of the human condition precludes arbitrary definition."

Even when Munby has recourse to European human rights law, he remains enmeshed in the problem: he points out that the European Convention on Human Rights "forbids the state to determine the validity of religious beliefs" but that prohibition depends on a very narrow definition of validity and religious beliefs. What he means, clearly, is that the state has no business with the truth claims of religious mythologies: the state should have no opinion on whether Jesus rose from the dead, or if Muhammad really heard the angel Gabriel. But in other respects the convention positively demands that we determine the validity of religious beliefs. Are they, for instance, "worthy of respect in a democratic society"? Are they "compatible with human dignity"? These, again, are moral judgments, which society cannot avoid and should not try to.

Munby's easy acceptance that morality means what Lord Denning thought it did abandons a very necessary battlefield and hands victory there either to religious conservatives who claim that morality must have a supernatural sanction, or to the kind of market fundamentalists who claim that morality is unnecessary or unproblematic. Humanists need to do better than that.

Andrew Brown

The dark side of psychology in abuse and interrogation | Chris Chambers

Chris Chambers — Tue, 05 Nov 2013 07:00:16 GMT

Chris Chambers: A new report reveals the role of US psychologists in the torture of prisoners

Chris Chambers

CIA made doctors torture suspected terrorists after 9/11, taskforce finds

Sarah Boseley — Mon, 04 Nov 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Doctors were asked to torture detainees for intelligence gathering, and unethical practices continue, review concludes

Doctors and psychologists working for the US military violated the ethical codes of their profession under instruction from the defence department and the CIA to become involved in the torture and degrading treatment of suspected terrorists, an investigation has concluded.

The report of the Taskforce on Preserving Medical Professionalism in National Security Detention Centres concludes that after 9/11, health professionals working with the military and intelligence services "designed and participated in cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment and torture of detainees".

Medical professionals were in effect told that their ethical mantra "first do no harm" did not apply, because they were not treating people who were ill.

The report lays blame primarily on the defence department (DoD) and the CIA, which required their healthcare staff to put aside any scruples in the interests of intelligence gathering and security practices that caused severe harm to detainees, from waterboarding to sleep deprivation and force-feeding.

The two-year review by the 19-member taskforce, Ethics Abandoned: Medical Professionalism and Detainee Abuse in the War on Terror, supported by the Institute on Medicine as a Profession (IMAP) and the Open Society Foundations, says that the DoD termed those involved in interrogation "safety officers" rather than doctors. Doctors and nurses were required to participate in the force-feeding of prisoners on hunger strike, against the rules of the World Medical Association and the American Medical Association. Doctors and psychologists working for the DoD were required to breach patient confidentiality and share what they knew of the prisoner's physical and psychological condition with interrogators and were used as interrogators themselves. They also failed to comply with recommendations from the army surgeon general on reporting abuse of detainees.

The CIA's office of medical services played a critical role in advising the justice department that "enhanced interrogation" methods, such as extended sleep deprivation and waterboarding, which are recognised as forms of torture, were medically acceptable. CIA medical personnel were present when waterboarding was taking place, the taskforce says.

Although the DoD has taken steps to address concerns over practices at Guantánamo Bay in recent years, and the CIA has said it no longer has suspects in detention, the taskforce says that these "changed roles for health professionals and anaemic ethical standards" remain.

"The American public has a right to know that the covenant with its physicians to follow professional ethical expectations is firm regardless of where they serve," said Dr Gerald Thomson, professor of medicine emeritus at Columbia University and member of the taskforce.

He added: "It's clear that in the name of national security the military trumped that covenant, and physicians were transformed into agents of the military and performed acts that were contrary to medical ethics and practice. We have a responsibility to make sure this never happens again."The taskforce says that unethical practices by medical personnel, required by the military, continue today. The DoD "continues to follow policies that undermine standards of professional conduct" for interrogation, hunger strikes, and reporting abuse. Protocols have been issued requiring doctors and nurses to participate in the force-feeding of detainees, including forced extensive bodily restraints for up to two hours twice a day.

Doctors are still required to give interrogators access to medical and psychological information about detainees which they can use to exert pressure on them. Detainees are not permitted to receive treatment for the distress caused by their torture.

"Putting on a uniform does not and should not abrogate the fundamental principles of medical professionalism," said IMAP president David Rothman. "'Do no harm' and 'put patient interest first' must apply to all physicians regardless of where they practise."The taskforce wants a full investigation into the involvement of the medical profession in detention centres. It is also calling for publication of the Senate intelligence committee's inquiry into CIA practices and wants rules to ensure doctors and psychiatrists working for the military are allowed to abide by the ethical obligations of their profession; they should be prohibited from taking part in interrogation, sharing information from detainees' medical records with interrogators, or participating in force-feeding, and they should be required to report abuse of detainees.

Sarah Boseley

Is the fur trade sustainable?

Tansy Hoskins — Tue, 29 Oct 2013 12:42:00 GMT

CEO of International Fur Trade Federation argues fur is natural and durable, while the World Bank ranks it as one of world's worst industries for toxic-metal pollution

In the UK fur has suffered a fall from grace. Rejected by high profile stores like Selfridges, condemned by designers like Stella McCartney and Vivienne Westwood, and with fur farming in England and Wales officially outlawed as cruel since 2000.

But in order to tap into increasing consumer desire for things labelled as ethical and green, there are ongoing attempts by the fur industry to brand fur as 'sustainable'. The British Fur Trade Association (BFTA) describes the wares of its members as "a natural, renewable and sustainable resource that is kind to the environment and respectful of animals' welfare". But does this claim stand up to scrutiny?

The CEO of the International Fur Trade Federation (IFTF), of which the BFTA is a member, is former Liberal Democrat MP Mark Oaten. "It's a very natural product because it's an animal product and something which lasts for many decades," he says, describing how fur is "often passed down from grandmother to mother to grandchild".

But because fur comes from animals, it has the cycle of decay built into it. Fur straight off a dead animal will rot, so manufacturers fight off decay through the application of a plethora of chemicals designed to prevent putrefaction. The main processing chemicals used are formaldehyde (linked to leukaemia) and chromium (linked to cancer). Not an attractive prospect either for wearers of fur or for the workers in processing plants.

This hazardous process has led to fur dressing being ranked as one of the world's five worst industries for toxic-metal pollution – not by animal rights groups, but by the World Bank. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the US has previously fined six fur processing plants for causing high levels of pollution and for using solvents in fur dressing that "may cause respiratory problems, and are listed as possible carcinogens". When such chemicals leak into waterways – as they often do – the results are devastating. Mark Oaten argues that fur manufacturers "are meeting all of the legal obligations when it comes to environmental standards regarding chemicals".

Some 80-85% of the global fur trade's products are industrially produced on fur farms. China produces 20m mink pelts a year and other mass producers include Denmark, Finland, Poland and the USA.

Stomach-turning scenes have been filmed at fur farms across the world, with overcrowded cages, crazed terrified animals and routine killing methods that include suffocation, electrocution, gassing, and poisoning. On mink farms, caged female minks are bred once a year, they produce a litter or three or four kits which are killed aged around six months old. Between 40-80 mink are needed to make a full length coat.

The BFTA's Origin Assured label was established to provide assurances that the fur has come from "a country where welfare regulations or standards governing fur production are in force". Yet legislation covering animal welfare on fur farms, of which China has none, does not tackle the moral issue of whether it is even right to breed and kill animals for fashion.

The battle has long raged between advocates of fur and those advising consumers to wear fake-fur instead. In the early 2000's the fur industry turned the pollution argument on its head and attempted to smear faux-fur as the unethical choice. In 2004, Teresa Platt, executive director of America's Fur Commission, announced that one gallon of oil was needed to make three faux-fur jackets. Faux fur is indeed made from textiles like nylon and polyester which take hundreds of years to biodegrade, and produce pollutants on an industrial scale.

Yet an oft-cited 1979 study by the University of Michigan found that despite the environmental cost of faux-fur, it still takes 20 times more energy to produce a farmed-fur coat. PETA points to a 2011 study by a Netherlands consultancy firm CE Delft which compared the impact of fur production with common textiles on 18 different environmental issues such as climate change, ozone pollution, soil acidification and water and land use. "For 17 of the 18 issues, fur was found to be much more harmful than common textiles," says Ben Williamson, a spokesperson for PETA.

"The idea that fur is in any way 'green' is pure fiction. In fact, several countries, including Belgium and Canada, have banned advertising claims to that effect peddled by the fur industry."

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Tansy Hoskins