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Ethics

The Ethics of Gamification: Little Rewards for Everything

[note: the original version of this post contained some interactive code, which has been removed from the archives]

Notice that the first word of this post is red. Point your mouse cursor at the words as you read them, and each subsequent word will turn red as you read. You are now being graded on how quickly you read these words. And there’s a little visual reward in store for anyone who reads the first paragraph quickly. Now look to the right of this post, where it says ‘Top Posts’. One of the reasons we have that is to help readers to find the most popular posts on the blog. But another reason we have it is so that our contributors will be motivated to write more interesting and thought-provoking commentaries for the site. It is a high score table, and the winner is the philosopher with the most interesting post.

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Forgiveness: respect, autonomy and sovereignty

by Shlomit Harrosh

Five years ago Joanne Nodding was violently raped by a man she knew. As part of a restorative justice programme, she has recently met with the man at her own request and with his consent. Nodding told him of her experiences during the attack and of its effects on her family. The man offered what Nodding felt was a genuine apology. She chose to forgive him.

“I ended the meeting by telling him that I’d forgiven him and that I wanted him to forgive himself, if he hadn’t,” said Nodding, “because I wanted him to go on to have a successful life. Hatred eats you up, and you can’t change what’s happened.”

The subject of forgiveness has recently been addressed in an excellent piece by Charles L. Griswold. Griswold identifies the restoration of mutual respect as one of the goals of forgiveness. I want to further explore this idea, focusing on the way forgiveness can reorient a relationship compromised by grievous wrongdoing, like rape.

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Joking about ‘the Unluckiest Man in the World’

The BBC and the production company Talkback Thames, after receiving a letter of complaints from the Japanese embassy in London, issued a joint statement of apology about an episode of the popular comedy quiz show QI featuring Tsutomu Yamaguchi, who had survived the atomic bombings of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki and died last January at the age of 93. The QI host Stephen Fry introduced him as ‘the unluckiest man in the world’ and talked and joked about Yamaguchi’s experience with guest comedians. The news has sparked national outrage in Japan. The conservative Sankei newspaper said ‘any Japanese person would find this disturbing’.

The BBC is of course legally entitled to produce and show controversial programmes. But were they morally wrong to treat Yamaguchi’s story as they did? The answer is ‘yes, but’.

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How to feed people dioxin and get away with it

Earlier this month German authorities closed around 4,700 farms following the discovery that pigs and poultry had been given feed contaminated with dioxins, which are thought to be among the most carcinogenic environmental pollutants. Yesterday Russia banned the import of untested pork products produced in Germany after 1 November 2010. This follows earlier import bans on some German food products in Slovakia, China, Belarus and South Korea.

Evidently the North German firm Harles und Jentzsch added a contaminated oil, possibly intended for industrial paper production, to an ingredient for animal feed that was then sold to 25 different feed manufacturers. Tests showed that the oil contained dioxin at 77 times the permitted level. Around 150,000 tons of feed incorporating this oil was reportedly fed to poultry and pigs across Germany, and affected eggs were sold in Germany, The Netherlands and the UK.

Internal tests at the Harles und Jentzsch plant revealed elevated dioxin levels in feed ingredients as early as March last year, suggesting the possibility that the human food supply may have been contaminated for months. And of course, this is nothing new. There were similar dioxin scandals in Ireland and Italy in 2008, Belgium in 1999 and 2006, and Germany in 2003.

How can such practices go unnoticed so often and for so long?

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Stop that painting!

A painting thought to be by Peter Paul Rubens has been barred from export this week. The ban on selling it to a foreign buyer lasts until March, with the possibility of an extension, and is intended to give British museums a chance to raise the money to buy it. The committee which advises the government on which pieces of art should be barred from export must find a piece to be of high quality and to have a significant British connection, if it is to be barred. The British connection which allows this painting to qualify is that it has a wax seal on the back showing that it was in a British collection in the 1840s (it also has one showing it was in Venice in the early 1800s). Given that connection, how could Britain justify preventing the export of this painting?Read More »Stop that painting!

If North Africa Starves Next Year, I’ll be Rich!

Inflation is swinging upward in the UK and it will surely cause us some irritation soon in the supermarkets. But most of us do not have difficulty putting enough food on the table for our families, and it’s easy for us to forget that things are different elsewhere. During the past few years sharp rises in food prices have contributed to widespread hunger in the third world and to civic unrest, including the recent toppling of the government in Tunisia,  and riots in countries including all of these: Algeria, Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, the Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonsia, Kenya, Mozambique, Senegal, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen.

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On Forgiveness

by Charles L. Griswold

(This piece was originally published in “The Stone” series of the New York Times (on-line), on Dec. 26, 2010, and is also available here along with responses by readers.   Thanks to Roger Crisp for inviting me to post it here, and to the NYT for permission. Copyright held by the NYT.)

We are in a season traditionally devoted to good will among people and to the renewal of hope in the face of hard times.  As we seek to realize these lofty ideals, one of our greatest challenges is overcoming bitterness and divisiveness.  We all struggle with the wrongs others have done to us as well as those we have done to others, and we recoil at the vast extent of injury humankind seems determined to inflict on itself.  How to keep hope alive?  Without a constructive answer to toxic anger, addictive cycles of revenge, and immobilizing guilt, we seem doomed to despair about chances for renewal.  One answer to this despair lies in forgiveness.

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DIY enhancement: morphological freedom or self-harm?

by Anders Sandberg

Lepht Anonym is a DIY biohacker, extending her body and senses through implantation of home-made cybernetics in her own kitchen. (YouTube video of her lecture) Most of her work is about extending the sense of touch, using implanted magnets to acquire “magnetic vision” and (hopefully) an implanted version of the northpaw magnetic sense system besides the “usual stuff” of RFID implants.

She is critical of regular transhumanism, which she thinks is all talk. This is the real deal: “You just have to get deep enough to open a hole and put something in,” she says. “It’s that simple.” Of course, she has ended up in the hospital a few times. A new kind of self-harm all right-thinking people ought to save her from, or a valid form of self-expression that should be protected?
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Is it the thought that counts?

There was a jolly fire in the fireplace. The snow was falling outside the windows, to the delight of children and despair of transport planners. Aristotle sipped on the mulled wine, watching while Kant meticulously wrapped another jar of homemade mustard.

“Dear Immanuel, are you going to give all your friends mustard?”

“Everybody except Georg. He likes to mix it with ketchup; he says it makes a great synthesis. I don’t care much for that idea and I would hate to see it spread. He will get a writing style guide instead.”

“I guess for you it is the thought that counts, when it comes to Christmas presents.”

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