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The No harm principle, an ethical principle for economic policy advisors?
In a recent article in the New York Times, Harvard economics professor Gregory Mankiw points out that economic policy advice always relies on political-philosophical standpoints and, inspired by medical ethics, suggests that economists that give policy advice should apply the No harm principle rather than promote policy based on uncertain predictions and political-philosophical convictions. By
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Conference: Experiments and Ethics, Oxford
On June 6th and 7th, 2014 the Ertegun Graduate Scholarship Programme in the Humanities will host “Experiments and Ethics,” an interdisciplinary conference at the University of Oxford. The conference aims to foster dialogue and explore connections among various empirical and theoretical approaches to ethics. Practical Ethics speakers include Guy Kahane, Janet Radcliffe Richards, and Regina
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Living near a busy road can kill you
Early April saw some unusually smoggy days across much of Western Europe, resulting in widespread media attention to air pollution. (See, for example, here, here and here.) On one day, air quality in some parts of London was worse than in Beijing. Further attention has been drawn to the issue by a number of recent
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Call for Registration – GOOD DONE RIGHT: a Conference on Effective Altruism
7-9 July 2014, All Souls College, Oxford Speakers include: Derek Parfit (Oxford), Thomas Pogge (Yale), Rachel Glennerster (MIT Poverty Action Lab), Nick Bostrom (Oxford), Norman Daniels (Harvard), Toby Ord (Oxford), William MacAskill (Cambridge), Jeremy Lauer (WHO), Larissa MacFarquhar (the New Yorker), Nick Beckstead (Oxford), Owen Cotton-Barratt (Oxford). For further information and registration, please visit www.gooddoneright.com. Effective
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Cricket and mental illness
There is a lively debate in the philosophy of psychiatry over what makes a condition a disease. The debate is particularly heated with regard to addiction: it is a moral failing, a brain disease or something else altogether? People who hold that addiction is a brain disease often claim that their view is more humane,
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Trouble Brewing? The Ethical Significance of Synthetic Yeast
Back in 2010, I blogged about Craig Venter’s creation of the first synthetic organism, Synthia, a bacteria. Now, in 2014, the next step has been made by a team at John Hopkins University, the use of synthetic biology in yeast, which, whilst still a simple organism, has a similar cell structure to humans (and other
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Neil Levy on Addiction
In a fascinating paper presented at the St Cross Ethics Seminar in Oxford, on 27 March 2014, Professor Neil Levy (Oxford and Melbourne) sought to solve the following puzzle about addicts: on the one hand, addicts are thought to lack control, but on the other they appear to engage in the kind of reason-responsive behaviour