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Ethics

Gender Competition Preserves Natural Traits of Competitive Sports

Written by Roman Gaehwiler In western communities the degree of gender equality and emancipation represents an important indicator to level sophistication and liberalism. In sports, however, sexual discrimination is taken for granted. As a result of strict sex segregation, there’s no opportunity for women to measure their abilities with male opponents. Consequently, either sport seems… Read More »Gender Competition Preserves Natural Traits of Competitive Sports

The cost of living and the cost of dying

X, a patient with reliably diagnosed PVS, lies in a hospital bed for years, fed via a nasogastric tube. He has not, and by definition never will have, any capacity for pain, pleasure or any sort of sensation. Devoted family members come each day to sit by his bedside, but he has no idea that they are devoted, or that they exist.
It is expensive to keep him alive. He occupies a bed and consumes a good deal of nursing time.
The NHS Trust responsible for his care has a limited budget. It decides that the money spent on maintaining his merely biological life would be better spent on dialysis machines. It can, and does, justify its decision in purely utilitarian terms. It writes in the minutes of the relevant committee meeting: ‘For the money we spend keeping X alive, we can save the lives of 10 kidney patients, each of whom will have a good quality of life for many years. The QALY arithmetic makes X’s continued existence nonsensical.’Read More »The cost of living and the cost of dying

Cabs, censorship and cutting tools

The smith was working hard on making a new tool. A passer-by looked at his work and remarked that it looked sharp and dangerous. The smith nodded: it needed to be very sharp to do its work. The visitor wondered why there was no cross-guard to prevent the user’s hand to slide onto the blade, and why the design made it easy to accidentally grip the blade instead of the grip. The smith explained that the tool was intended for people who said they knew how to use it well. “But what if they were overconfident, sold it to somebody else, or had a bad day? Surely some safety measures would be useful?” “No”, said the smith, “my customers did not ask for them. I could make them with a slight effort, but why bother?”

Would we say the smith was doing his job in an ethical manner?

Here are two other pieces of news: Oxford City Council has decided to make it mandatory for taxicabs in Oxford to have CCTV cameras and microphones recording conversations of the passengers. As expected, many people are outraged. The stated reason is to improve public safety, although the data supporting this decision doesn’t seem to be available. The surveillance footage will supposedly not be made available other than as evidence for crimes, and not stored for more than 28 days. Meanwhile in the US, there are hearings about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act, laws intended to make it easier to block copyright infringement and counterfeiting. Besides concerns that critics and industries most affected by the laws are not getting access to the hearings, a serious set of concerns is that they would make it easy to censor websites and block business on fairly loose grounds, with few safeguards against false accusations (something that occurs regularly), little oversight, few remedies for the website, plus the fact that a domestic US law would apply internationally due to the peculiarities of the Internet and US legal definitions.

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Holier and happier than thou?

Are ethical people happier? Many philosophers have claimed this, from Plato and Aristotle onwards. A new study claims it is empirically true, or more exactly that ethical people are more satisfied with life.

The 2009 study looked at cross-country data from the World Values Survey from the US, Canada, Mexico and Brazil. It looked at  people who agreed with the view that it is never justifiable to engage in ethically questionable behaviours like avoiding fares on public transports, cheating on taxes or taking bribes (35%) compared the rest. Controlling for things like gender, income, age, health, being married etc. the study found being ‘ethical’ by this standard increased the likeliehood of being very satisfied with life fairly significantly. The effect size is like a modest increase in income. A good reason to try to become a better person, or (as the paper suggests) for governments that are trying to increase subjective well being to do it by improving moral conduct… or is it?

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Killing With Drones, Proportionality, and Trolley Problems

Reports of killing by drones are increasing. Initially they were exceptional, now they are commonplace. Every few weeks there is a report of another killing, invariably by the US, in some far off country. With the rapid pace of technological development, the investment being made into more and more autonomous systems, and little sign of this trend being checked, it can only continue. The ethicality and legality of such practices outside international armed conflict is extremely dubious. In the context of international armed conflict the practice is checked only by the concept of ‘proportionality’, a concept that is problematic generally, and is almost entirely unable to discharge the heavy burden that is imposed on it by the practice of drone killing.Read More »Killing With Drones, Proportionality, and Trolley Problems

Gaddafi is dead—but don’t cheer

By Brian Earp

Gaddafi is dead. Dragged from a concrete drain pipe, the loathed Libyan dictator—crying, according to reports, “Don’t shoot!”—was executed by rebel soldiers today before a baying crowd. His bloody corpse, manhandled, paraded, and filling up cell phone video frames, now stars in newsy apparitions across the internet.

So cue the celebrations. Bloomberg relates:

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My son’s dyslexic, and I’m glad

By Charles Foster

My son is dyslexic, and I’m glad.
Most people think that I am deranged or callous. But I have two related reasons, both of which seem to me to be good.
The first is that his dyslexia is an inextricable part of him. I can’t say: ‘This is the pathological bit, which I resent’, as one might say of a tumour. Take away his dyslexia, and he wouldn’t be the same person, but able to read and write. He wouldn’t be him. That would be far too high a price for me to pay. And for him to pay? Well, there you run into Parfit’s non-identity problem.

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Are Dopers better Sports(wo-)men?

by Roman Gaehwiler The crusade against artificial performance enhancement in sports is varicoloured and almost exhaustively debated. Nevertheless, there are still several approaches from the athlete’s perspective which are worth to consider. On the one hand, there is the noble and doubtlessly essential pedagogic approach fostering the educative aspect implying that the misapplication of pharmaceuticals… Read More »Are Dopers better Sports(wo-)men?

Don’t be objective about your subjectivity

“Morality is just social convention, so torture isn’t wrong.” Hearing that thought was a sobering recent experience, especially when you’re trying to get people to care and worry about existential risks. But that’s just a vivid and extreme example of a more commonly expressed sentiment:

P: “If there is no objective morality, then anything goes.”

Now, call those who express that sentiment P-expressers. Who are these people? In my experience, these are individuals who have subjectivised their ethics, but not their meta-ethics, and ended up nihilists as a result.

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