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What is ‘Practical’ Ethics?
By Roger Crisp This is an exciting time for practical ethics in Oxford. The University has recently launched a new Masters in Practical Ethics, organized by the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and the Department for Continuing Education. Applicants are currently being assessed for admission, and the course begins in earnest in October. But
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Facebook, Big Data, and the Trust of the Public
By Mackenzie Graham Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg recently appeared before members of the United States Congress to address his company’s involvement in the harvesting and improper distribution of approximately 87 million Facebook profiles —about 1 million of them British— to data collecting app Cambridge Analytica. In brief, Cambridge Analytica is a British political consulting firm,
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Scrabbling for Augmentation
By Stephen Rainey Around a decade ago, Facebook users were widely playing a game called ‘Scrabulous’ with one another. It was pretty close to Scrabble, effectively, leading to a few legal issues. Alongside Scrabulous, the popularity of Scrabble-assistance websites grew. Looking over the shoulders of work colleagues, you could often spy a Scrabulous window,
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Tongue Splitting, Nipple Excision, And Ear Removal: Why Prosecute The Operator But Not The Customer?
By Charles Foster Image: ‘Split tongue: procedure, safety, result’: Tattoo World: Standard YouTube licence. The appellant in R v BM was a tattooist and body piercer who also engaged in ‘body modification’. He was charged with three offences of wounding with intent to do grievous bodily harm. These entailed: (a) Removal of an ear; (b) Removal of
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Guest Post: Cambridge Analytica: You Can Have My Money but Not My Vote
Emily Feng-Gu, Medical Student, Monash University When news broke that Facebook data from 50 million American users had been harvested and misused, and that Facebook had kept silent about it for two years, the 17th of March 2018 became a bad day for the mega-corporation. In the week following what became known as the Cambridge Analytica
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Harm, Interests and Medical Treatment. Where the Supreme Court Got it Wrong…
By Dominic Wilkinson @Neonatalethics In the latest case of disputed medical treatment for a child, the family of Liverpool toddler Alfie Evans yesterday lost their last legal appeal. The family had appealed to the European Court of Human Rights to examine whether the UK courts’ decision (to allow doctors to stop life support) was
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Guest Post: Consequentialism and Ethics? Bridging the Normative Gap.
Written by Simon Beard University of Cambridge After years of deliberation, a US moratorium on so-called ‘gain of function’ experiments, involving the production of novel pathogens with a high degree of pandemic potential, has been lifted [https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/who-we-are/nih-director/statements/nih-lifts-funding-pause-gain-function-research]. At the same time, a ground-breaking new set of guidelines about how and when such experiments can be
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Cross Post: Common Sense for A.I. Is a Great Idea. But it’s Harder Than it Sounds.
Written by Carissa Veliz Crosspost from Slate. Click here to read the full article At the moment, artificial intelligence may have perfect memories and be better at arithmetic than us, but they are clueless. It takes a few seconds of interaction with any digital assistant to realize one is not in the presence of a
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Announcement: Medical Ethics Symposium on Health Care Rationing – Oxford June 20th. Registration Now Open
Practical medical ethics: Rationing responsibly in an age of austerity Date: June 20th 2018, 2-5pm, includes refreshments Location: Ship Street Centre, Jesus College, Oxford Health professionals face ever expanding possibilities for medical treatment, increasing patient expectations and at the same time intense pressures to reduce healthcare costs. This leads frequently to conflicts between obligations to current patients, and others who might
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If You Had to Choose, Would You Say Chimpanzees Are Persons or Things?
In everyday speech, the term ‘person’ often means roughly the same thing as ‘human,’ which in turn refers to someone who belongs to the species Homo sapiens. However, in practical ethics and in philosophy more broadly, the term ‘person’ has a much more rich, and more complicated, history.