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  • Guest Post: Must we throw out the brain with the bathwater? Marc Lewis on addiction

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    Written by Anke Snoek Macquarie University When neuroscience started to mingle into the debate on addiction and self-control, people aimed to use these insights to cause a paradigm shift in how we judge people struggling with addictions. People with addictions are not morally despicable or weak-willed, they end up addicted because drugs influence the brain

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  • Guest Post: Smart drugs, Smart choice

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    Written by Benjamin Pojer and Daniel D’Hotman Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Science, Monash University  Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, University of Oxford   A recent review published in the European Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology (1) on the efficacy and safety of modafinil in a population of healthy people has found that the drug

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  • Psychology is not in crisis? Depends on what you mean by “crisis”

    Brian D. Earp

    By Brian D. Earp @briandavidearp *Note that this article was originally published at the Huffington Post. Introduction In the New York Times yesterday, psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett argues that “Psychology is Not in Crisis.” She is responding to the results of a large-scale initiative called the Reproducibility Project, published in Science magazine, which appeared to

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  • The Ethics of Compulsory Chemical Castration: Is Non-Consensual Treatment Ever Permissible?

    Jonathan Pugh

    By Jonathan Pugh Tory Grant, the justice minister for New South Wales (NSW) in Australia, has announced the establishment of a task force to investigate the potential for the increased use of anti-libidinal treatments (otherwise known as chemical castration) in the criminal justice system. Such treatments aim to reduce recidivism amongst sexual offenders by dramatically

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  • Guest Post: Why Don’t We Do More to Help the Global Poor?

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    Simon Keller, Victoria University of Wellington Read more in the current issue of the Journal of Practical Ethics There is good reason to believe that people living comfortable lives in affluent countries should do more to help impoverished people in other parts of the world. Billions of people lack the nutrition, medicines, shelter, and safety

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  • Why ethicists should read Middlemarch and despise Simon Cowell

    Charles Foster

    There are a few ethicists who are interested in encouraging right behaviour, rather than simply discussing it. Here is something for them from A.L. Kennedy: ‘As Vonnegut mentioned, Nazi Germany trained a population to be blind to the dignity and humanity of some others. A diet of soft porn, cheap sentimentality and hate proved effective.

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  • Guest Post: JABBING, PLAYING, AND PAYING – HIGH SEASON ON ANTI-VAXXERS

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    Christopher Chew Monash University In the strange, upside-down world of the Southern Hemisphere, cold and gloomy Winter is quietly slinking away, and raucous Spring in all his glory begins to stir. Ah, Spring! The season of buds and blooms and frolicking wildlife. One rare species of wildlife, however, finds itself subject to an open hunting

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  • Vote Selling Versus Vote Swapping

    Joseph Bowen

    Joseph Bowen (@joe_bowen_1) Lets begin with a pair of cases: Pub Swap. Suppose Ann endorses Political Party A and Ben endorses Political Party B. Both would place Party C as their last choice. Ann lives in constituency 1 and Ben lives in constituency 2. In constituency 1 there is a close race between Party B

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  • Clone me up, Scotty: A brief satirical history of cloning and ethical progress

    Julian Savulescu

    Julian Savulescu @juliansavulescu The 90s was a terrifying decade. Boris Yeltsin with his finger on the button. Fortunately he was too drunk some of the time to move. The Spice Girls. And Y2K. I bought plenty of water. Civilisation came to the brink in 1997 when Ian Wilmut managed to play God and clone a

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  • Does it benefit a person to bring them into being?

    Roger Crisp

    Over the last four decades or so, philosophers have spent a good deal of time on this somewhat peculiar question. Why? After all, it’s not a question that people ordinarily ask, like ‘Do animals have rights?’ or ‘Is abortion permissible?’.

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