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Welfare 2.0? Abbott, Forrest and the “Healthy Welfare Card”
A recently released review by Australian mining magnate Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest (news article available here, full report available here) investigating training and employment for Indigenous Australians has made a controversial recommendation for the introduction of a “Healthy Welfare Card” for all recipients of welfare assistance in Australia, except for those on aged or veteran’s pensions.
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Being ethically responsible to see ethical complexities: What Israel can teach us about ethics
As I write this, at least 1,474 people have died in the recent outburst of violence in Gaza. A vast majority (1,410) of those are Palestinians. Throughout the last weeks, those of us who are open-minded enough to consume different types of news will have read very, very different assessments of what is happening. Some
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Lord Falconer’s Assisted Dying Bill: Is Slow Assisted Dying Legal?
In 2005, the NZ Herald reported. “A man with motor neurone disease plans to starve himself to death rather than wait to die. “Thirty-nine-year-old Andrew Morris of Hamilton has limited movement and can barely speak. He has gone public with his decision because he wants law changes to allow voluntary euthanasia.” Such cases occur not
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Carbon caps and IVF
by Dominic Wilkinson @NeonatalEthics Over on the Journal of Medical Ethics blog are a couple of posts that might be of interest to Practical Ethics readers. Last week, the journal published online an article by Cristina Richie on carbon caps and IVF. She argues that the environmental costs of reproduction should lead to carbon caps
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Evolutionary psychology and multidisciplinary challenges
Evolutionary Psychology has recently gained some public attention in Finland, as the University of Turku has announced that it will establish the discipline as a permanent study module from the beginning of autumn 2014. University of Turku reports itself to be among the first universities in Europe to provide studies in this discipline[1]. Evolutionary psychology
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Geoengineering: Lessons from Human Bioengineering
[W]e have no non-radical solutions left to deal with climate change… either we face a radical climate catastrophe or we must radically shift our economy and modes of social organisation away from the current fossil fuel economy That was the message given by David Spratt, author of Climate Code Red, and Ian Dunlop, who formerly
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The Indignity of Imprisonment
Do we need to radically rethink the practice of imprisonment of criminals – not in the direction of novel forms of punishment, but rather in the form of vastly reducing punitive imprisonment altogether? While prisons are integral to modern criminal justice system, a report from the British Academy earlier this month puts serious pressure
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A Wrong Turn, A Hundred Years Ago
Just over a hundred years ago, a car took a wrong turn. It happened to stop just in front of Gavrilo Princip, a would-be assassin. Princip took out his gun and shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife from point blank range. This triggered a chain of events that would soon lead to the Great
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Principles for the Legalization of Trade in Rhino Horn
Last Wednesday night in Kenya, on a private ranch near Nanyuki, armed gangs killed four rhinoceroses for their horns. According to a representative from the Kenyan Wildlife Service, this could be the worst rhino-poaching incident the country has seen in 25 years. 22 rhinos have been poached in Kenya this year. There are only 1,037