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Naughty words What makes swear words so offensive? It’s not their meaning or even their sound. Is language itself a red herring here?
Dr Rebecca Roache, former Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics staff member, and lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London, has recently published an essay on swearing in the online Aeon Magazine. To read the full article and join in the conversation please follow this link: https://aeon.co/essays/where-does-swearing-get-its-power-and-how-should-we-use-it. Dr Roache has previously spoken on this topic, as
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Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics: Should We Take Moral Advice From Our Computers? written by Mahmoud Ghanem
This essay received an Honourable Mention in the undergraduate category of the Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics. Written by University of Oxford student, Mahmoud Ghanem The Case For Computer Assisted Ethics In the interest of rigour, I will avoid use of the phrase “Artificial Intelligence”, though many of the techniques I will discuss, namely statistical
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Announcement: 2nd Annual Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics: Finalists and Honourable Mentions
The 2nd Annual Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics was announced on this blog on the 11th November 2015. By the 25th January 2016 a large number of high quality essays had been submitted and the judges had a difficult time narrowing the field down to 5 finalists and 6 Honourable Mentions, which are now
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Response to Fergus Peace
Author: Neil Levy, Leverhulme Visiting Professor Podcasts of Prof Levy’s Leverhulme Lectures can be found here: http://media.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/uehiro/HT16_LL_LEVY1.mp3 and http://media.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/uehiro/HT16_LL_LEVY2.mp3 Fergus Peace’s responses to my lecturers are interesting and challenging. As he notes, in my lectures I focused on two questions: (1) are we (those of us with egalitarian explicit beliefs but conflicting implicit attitudes) racist?
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Why it matters if people are racist: A Response to Neil Levy’s Leverhulme Lectures
Author: Fergus Peace, BPhil student, University of Oxford Podcasts of Prof. Levy’s Leverhulme lectures are available here: http://media.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/uehiro/HT16_LL_LEVY1.mp3 and http://media.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/uehiro/HT16_LL_LEVY2.mp3 It’s only a little more than forty years ago that George Wallace won the contest for Governor of Alabama by running ads with slogans like “Wake up Alabama! Blacks vow to take over Alabama” and “Do
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Video Series: Walter Sinnott-Armstrong on Moral Artificial Intelligence
Professor Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (Duke University and Oxford Martin Visiting Fellow) plans to develop a computer system (and a phone app) that will help us gain knowledge about human moral judgment and that will make moral judgment better. But will this moral AI make us morally lazy? Will it be abused? Could this moral AI take
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Does the desire to punish have any place in modern justice?
Professor Neil Levy, visiting Leverhulme Lecturer, University of Oxford, has recently published a provocative essay at Aeon online magazine: Human beings are a punitive species. Perhaps because we are social animals, and require the cooperation of others to achieve our goals, we are strongly disposed to punish those who take advantage of us. Those who
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The Allure of Donald Trump
The primary season is now well underway, and the Trump bandwagon continues to gather pace. Like most observers, I thought it would run out of steam well before this stage. Trump delights in the kinds of vicious attacks and stupidities that would derail any other candidate. His lack of shame and indifference to truth give
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A jobless world—dystopia or utopia?
There is no telling what machines might be able to do in the not very distant future. It is humbling to realise how wrong we have been in the past at predicting the limits of machine capabilities. We once thought that it would never be possible for a computer to beat a world champion in