We are surrounded by many ethical issues, and their complexity makes it tempting to treat each in isolation. But we need to remember that to justify any position requires reference to universal principles, and these principles may well have implications in other areas we find uncomfortable. It’s also the case that thinking about one topic… Read More »Climate Change, Abortion, and Impersonality
Despite the protestations of those opposed to the use of animals in research, the fundamental differences between people over the treatment of animals seems to lie with the weight that we are prepared to give to animal suffering and death in the pursuit of human goods and interests. Very few, I would have thought, would give animal suffering no weight and similarly, very few would give animal suffering more weight than human suffering.
The struggle against child porn goes on. An Australian judge has ruled that a cartoon showing a character from The Simpsons engaged in sexual activity is child pornography. Australia is also trying to implement Internet filtering for the whole population, although the project has run into serious opposition. Meanwhile Wikipedia ended up 'censored' in the UK due to a page with the controversial cover of an album.
The most interesting aspect of the Wikipedia debacle is that the decision that led to the censorship was not made by any government authority but an industry-sponsored group, the Internet Watch Foundation. The IWF maintains a blacklist certain ISPs subscribe to, and users trying to reach a site on it will be sent a blank page. Is this censorship, and is this bad?
Last Sunday, 30th of November, Switzerland, by a
narrow majority, approved a constitutional modification doing away with any
statute of limitations for paedophile crimes. The initiative proposing that
modification had been opposed by the government and by most of the country’s
political parties, who supported instead the idea of maintaining the existing
statute of limitations of 15 years but making it start later than had so far
been the case (thus giving more time to the victims to decide whether or not to
take legal action). The surprise acceptance of the initiative in the popular
vote was criticized by much of the Swiss press as marking a triumph of
“emotion” over “reason” (see for instance here and here; in French). But leaving aside the question of what actually led most Swiss voters to
endorse the initiative, does the very idea of opposing a statute of limitations
for paedophile (and other equally serious) crimes necessarily lend itself to
such criticism? I want to suggest that this is not so.
Read More »Statutes of limitations for serious offences: why Europe needs a reform
On April 16 2007 a solitary gunman, Cho Seung-Hui, killed 32 of his fellow students at Virginia Tech, and injured many more http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/04/18/vtech.shooting/index.html . This came to mind again as I was listening to Radio 4’s Any Questions last Friday, when a questioner referring to the terrorist attacks in Mumbai asked whether we could ever put a stop to extremist violence. In the subsequent debate difference of opinion began to appear between the panellists who spoke about the need for security and intelligence gathering and military operation, and Caroline Lucas of the Green Party who insisted that terrorism could never be ended by these means, and said several times that we needed to get to the root cause of the problem. In starting to identify these root causes she mentioned the Palestinian situation, and the widespread feeling among Muslims that the so-called war on terror was really a war of the West against Islam. (You can check the detail by going to the BBC i-player: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/ .)
Viagra may not just be a performance enhancer in the bedroom, but also on the sports arena. Researchers are studying whether it helps dilate athlete’s blood vessels and improve their oxygen-carrying capacity. If it is found to improve performance it will likely be put it on the list of banned substances for athletes. But should it?
Read More »Keeping Viagra in the bedchamber and out of the arena?
Following
the announcement last week that Oxford University’s controversial Biomedical
Sciences building
is now complete and will be open for business in mid-2009, the ethical issues
surrounding the use of animals for scientific experimentation have been
revisited in the media—see, for example, here ,
here,
and here.
The number
of animals used per year in scientific experiments worldwide has been estimated
at 200 million—well in excess of the population of Brazil and over three times that of the United Kingdom. If we take the importance of an ethical issue
to depend in part on how many subjects it affects, then, the ethics of animal
experimentation at the very least warrants consideration alongside some of the
most important issues in this country today, and arguably exceeds them in
importance. So, what is being done to address
this issue?
Read More »Animal experimentation: morally acceptable, or just the way things always have been?
Why is there spam? The simple answer is that "there is a sucker born every minute" and email is cheap enough to reach millions of potential suckers who might want to buy Viagra, sure-fire investments and fake Rolexes. A new study has discovered that it is enough with one response to every 12.5 million emails sent is enough to be profitable. The most interesting about the study was how it was done: by hacking the spammers own network. But is it OK to hack in order to understand spam?
The idea of reproductive cloning can easily be perceived as offensive, as a practice that constitutes the dark side of cloning and should be prohibited under all circumstances, by contrast with therapeutic cloning, the benefits of which are increasingly acknowledged. However, such reactions typically assume that it is human cloning we are talking about. Regardless of how we should assess this latter practice, it seems difficult to make a plausible case for a complete ban on reproductive cloning of nonhuman animals. On the contrary, such a technique appears to open up exciting prospects. A group of Japanese scientists, as recently reported in the press (by the BBC and the Guardian, among other sources) have thus managed to produce clones from dead mice that had been frozen for 16 years. According to the aforesaid scientists, this achievement raises the possibility of re-creating extinct species such as mammoths from their frozen remains – a bit like what happens in Steven Spielberg’s movie Jurassic Park.
Read More »Re-creating mammoths and the family dog: two different cases
When election of public officials through
public voting was instituted in the US,the framers of the constitution
had no inkling about how large the voting public would one day become. Beside logistical problems that
accidentally enfranchise goldfish and the many issues surrounding voter
registration a growing concern is the reliability of electronic voting
machines. As electronic voting machines are being installed, concerns about their reliability are being raised and legal battles ensue. In a Finnish election the system lost 2% of
all electronic votes. About 60% of American votes are cast on
paper ballots, but it might increase locally after problems with voting machines. The real fear is not that people might misvote due to misunderstandings or that votes might be miscounted, but that the machines themselves might be biased or easily tampered with. Can we trust the machines? Or are elections by their nature too messy for these problems to matter?
Read More »Election ex machina: should voting machines be trusted?
