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Holidays in Death Camps
The paradox of tragedy, one that has puzzled philosophers for over two millennia, is that people like to go to watch tragedies at the theatre – and tragedies are depressing. How can one enjoy being miserable? This weekend I went as a tourist around Sachsenhausen, a vast complex just outside Berlin. Sachsenhausen was one of
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The real scandals in organ donation consent
Headlines in a number of newspapers in the last day or two have claimed scandalous failures in organ donation consent in the UK. According to ‘Sky News’, organs were “taken without consent”, while the Sun claims that “NHS doctors took the wrong organs from the bodies of donors”. But it is important to put these
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The Christian Right is Wrong
An interesting document has just dropped into my in-box. It is a ‘Declaration of Christian Conscience’, to be found at www.westminster10.org.uk It is signed by a number of Christian leaders, all of them noted for their theological conservatism. Christians across the land are being urged to sign the declaration to demonstrate the demographic power of
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Experience and self-experimentation in ethics
The Guardian has an article about student use of cognition enhancers. It is pretty similar to many others and I have already discussed my views on the academic use of cognition enhancers ad nauseam on this blog. However, it brings up something I have been thinking about since I was last in the media about
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Is Morality Flimflam?
Michael Ruse begins a recent short essay on what Darwin might teach us about morality with a striking question and an even more striking answer: ‘God is dead, so why should I be good? The answer is that there are no grounds whatsoever for being good. There is no celestial headmaster who is going to
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Climate scientists behaving badly? Part 6: Conclusion
One of the consequences of the epistemic corruption of the climate issue is that by criticising the failings in epistemic duty of these scientists I will be seen as having taken a side. But there are no sides on factual issues: there are just the facts. Once we see a factual question in terms of
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Should the NHS pay for homeopathic remedies?
Homeopathy is form of alternative medicine which was first developed in the late 18th Century and has been hovering on the fringes of medicine ever since. Homeopathic remedies are prepared by a process of extreme dilution of a harmful substance and it is claimed by homeopaths that a substance taken in very small
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Choose Your Sex: Male, Female or Neither … or Both
In Australia, Norrie is understood to be the world’s first person to have ‘Sex Not Specified’ on their birth certificate. The NSW government has legally recognised that Norrie is neither male nor female. “Norrie, 48, was born in Scotland and registered as male at birth. At age 23 Norrie commenced sex and gender conversion to
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‘Happiness is not the only thing’
Over at the New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert discusses some new books on the policy implications of so-called 'positive psychology'. Positive psychologists set out to use scientific methods to study, not suffering, depression and psychopatholoy, but the good things in life: what makes people happy, and what doesn't. The most remarkable set of findings of this
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Should parents be allowed to pick their children’s sex for non-medical reasons?
Once upon a time, there were a queen and a king who had three children, all of them boys. They both loved their children dearly and made sure they had everything they might need to flourish. Nevertheless, the queen and her husband still felt that their family was incomplete without a daughter. They had hoped