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The automated boycott
The dating site OKCupid displays a message to visitors using the web browser Firefox asking them to change browser, since “Mozilla’s new CEO, Brendan Eich, is an opponent of equal rights for gay couples”. The reason is that Eich donated $1,000 to support Proposition 8 (a California ban on same sex marriages) six years ago.
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Things I’ve learned (so far) about how to do practical ethics
By Brian D. Earp Follow Brian on Twitter by clicking here. Things I’ve learned (so far) about how to do practical ethics I had the opportunity, a few months back, to look through some old poems I’d written in high school. Some, I thought, were pretty good. Others I remembered thinking were good when I
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Giving alcohol to alcoholics: not as controversial as it seems
A Dutch program pays chronic alcoholics in beer for cleaning the streets and parks. A Canadian homeless shelter provides their alcohol clients with six ounces of white wine every 90 minutes. Giving alcohol to alcoholics, it seems counterproductive from a ‘just say no’ perspective, but I would like to argue that it makes sense on
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Computer vision and emotional privacy
A study published last week (and summarized here and here) demonstrated that a computer could be trained to detect real versus faked facial expressions of pain significantly better than humans. Participants were shown video clips of the faces of people actually in pain (elicited by submerging their arms in icy water) and clips of people
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The future of punishment: a clarification
By Rebecca Roache Follow Rebecca on Twitter here I’m working on a paper entitled ‘Cyborg justice: punishment in the age of transformative technology’ with my colleagues Anders Sandberg and Hannah Maslen. In it, we consider how punishment practices might change as technology advances, and what ethical issues might arise. The paper grew out of a blog
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Can solitary confinement be justified?
This month an article published in the American Journal of Public Health (AJPH) outlined the results of a study on self-harm amongst jail inmates in New York City. Data on all jail admissions between January 2010 and October 2012 was analysed and the authors noted the following: “We found that acts of self-harm were strongly
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Uses and Abuses of the Holocaust
Follow Dave on twitter https://twitter.com/DavidEdmonds100 At my advanced age, I can perhaps be forgiven for getting irritated by many things in life. But few exasperate me more than an argument or claim that draws a risible parallel to the Nazi era and/or the Holocaust.
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Brain training in schools?
Neurofeedback works like this: you are hooked up to instruments that measure your brain activity (usually via electroencephalography or functional magnetic resonance imaging) and feed it back to you via auditory or visual feedback. The feedback represents the brain activity, and gives you a chance to modulate it, much as you might modulate the movements
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How much transparency?
By Dominic Wilkinson (Twitter: @Neonatalethics) There are reports in the press this week that the remains of 86 unborn fetuses were kept in a UK hospital mortuary for months or even years longer than they should have been. The majority were fetuses less than 12 weeks gestation. According to the report, this arose because of
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Reconsidering the Ethics of Enhanced Punishment
Last summer, on this blog, Rebecca Roache suggested several ways in which technology could enhance retributive punishment—that is, could make punishment more severe—without “resorting to inhumane methods or substantially overhauling the current UK legal system.” Her approbation of this type of technological development has recently been reported in the Daily Mail, and reaffirmed in an