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Guest Post: Why Don’t We Do More to Help the Global Poor?
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
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
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 (@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 @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?
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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Guest Post: No fortune of birth
Nick Shackel Cardiff University Suppose you are born with valuable talents or to wealthy parents. What is added if we say that your talents or wealth are a fortune of birth? I say, nothing! This is merely a misleading way of repeating that you were born with good possessions. It is misleading because it seeks…
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Brain in a Vat: 5 Challenges for the In Vitro Brain
Julian Savulescu @juliansavulescu In Roald Dahl’s short story, William and Mary, William dies of cancer. But a novel procedure allows his brain, with one eye attached, to be kept functioning in a clear plastic vat. His wife convinces William’s neurosurgeon to allow her to take William (or rather his brain and eye) home with her.…
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Facebook and political polarization.
There has been a lot of concern expressed about the role that social media might play in political polarization. The worry is that social media users might only expose themselves to news stories with which they agree and have friends that reinforce their own views, and thereby become more extreme in their views and less…
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Solving the Organ Crisis Ethically
Julian Savulescu and William Isdale An editorial in the Lancet earlier this month report on the first fall in UK organ transplants in a decade. Key statistics included that “the number of people who chose or were able to donate their organs in 2014 fell, and that 224 fewer people in the UK received an organ transplant…