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Press Release: In Defence of Intersex Athletes
Julian Savulescu The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) has announced that multiple Olympic and World Champion runner Caster Semenya and other athletes with disorders of sex (DSD) conditions will have to take testosterone lowering agents in order to be able to compete in her events. Reducing the testosterone levels of existing intersex female athletes is
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Neurointerventions, Disrespectful Messages, and the Right to be Listened to
Written by Gabriel De Marco Neurointerventions can be roughly described as treatments or procedures that act directly on the physical properties of the brain in order to affect the subject’s psychological characteristics. The ethics of using neurointerventions can be quite complicated, and much of the discussion has revolved around the use of neurointerventions to improve
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Should Religious Homophobia be a Firing Offence?
By Doug McConnell It looks as if Isreal Folau will lose his job as a professional rugby player for expressing his apparently genuine religious belief that drunks, homosexuals, adulterers, liars, fornicators, thieves, atheists, and idolators are all going to hell. Morgan Begg, a research fellow at the Australian conservative think-tank, the Institute of Public Affairs,
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Should Meat Be Excluded From the UK’s Value Added Tax?
The idea of using a meat tax to improve human health and protect the environment has been getting a fair amount of attention from prominent scientists in the media. Professor Mike Rayner was quoted last year as saying, “I would like to see a tax on red meat and meat products. We need incentives to
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Medical Nihilism: When A Dose Of Scepticism Can Be Healthy
In his 2018 book, the philosopher of science, Jacob Stegenga defends the view “that we should have little confidence in the effectiveness of medical interventions.” (Stegenga 2018) On the face of it, he acknowledges, this position seems unreasonable: most of us can think of myriad ways in which modern medicine has improved – perhaps saved
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The Re-Greening of Abraham
By Charles Foster Some odd alliances are being forged in this strange new world, I well remember, a few years ago, the open hostility shown by dreadlocked, shamanic, eco-warriors towards the Abrahamic monotheisms. They’d spit when they passed a church. The rhetoric of their distaste was predictable. The very notion of a creed was anathema
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‘Now Is Not The Time’: Is It Wrong To Engage In Political Debate Following A Tragedy?
Written by Alexandra Couto and Guy Kahane In the days following the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in February 2018, many of the surviving students and staff gathered to demand immediate change to the gun laws that allowed Nicholas Cruz to kill so many of their friends and pupils. Many students held banners on which
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The Gulf Between Japanese and English Google Image Search
By Anri Asagumo, Oxford Uehiro/St Cross Scholar, (with input from Dr Tom Douglas and Dr Carissa Veliz) Trigger Warning: This article deals with sexual violence, which could be potentially upsetting for some people. Although Google claims in its policy that it restricts promotion of adult-oriented content, there is a district in the online world
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Entitlement
Written by Stephen Rainey It is often claimed, especially in heated Twitter debates, that one or other participant is entitled to their opinion. Sometimes, if someone encounters a challenge to their picture of the world, they will retort that they are entitled to their opinion. Or, maybe in an attempt to avoid confrontation, disagreement is
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The Ethics of Gently Electrifying Prisoners’ Brains
By Hazem Zohny and Tom Douglas Scientists who want to study the effects of passing electric currents through prisoners’ brains have a PR problem: it sounds shady. Even if that electric current is so small as to go largely unnoticed by its recipient – as in the case of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) –