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Happiness, meaning and well-being
If someone were to ask you what you want from life, how would you reply? Plausible answers might include: ‘to be happy’, ‘to be successful’, ‘to make a difference’, or perhaps ‘to experience as much as possible’. Whatever these aspirations mean in their detail, they capture various implicit assessments of what we think it means
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Pursuing your dreams when drunk
For a long time I wanted to go to Indonesia on a holiday, to see the rice fields, the buffalo’s and the wayang puppets. But for some reason it took me actually years to realize this. The reason why I didn’t go had nothing to do with practical difficulties: I had money, time, a travel
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Should exceptional people receive exceptional medical treatment?
There are approximately 150,000 human deaths each day around the world. Most of those deaths pass without much notice, yet in the last ten days one death has received enormous, perhaps unprecedented, attention. The death and funeral of Nelson Mandela have been accompanied by countless pages of newsprint and hours of radio and television coverage.
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Professor Tim Scanlon: When Does Equality Matter?
2013 Uehiro Lectures by Professor Tim Scanlon (Department of Philosophy, Harvard University) We are very grateful to Professor Tim Scanlon (Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity, Harvard University) for delivering the 10th Annual Uehiro Lectures in December 2013, entitled “When Does Equality Matter?” Lecture 1: “Equal Treatment” AUDIO Lecture 2:”Equal Status”
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Podcast: Genetic Parenthood, Assisted Reproduction, and the Values of Parental Love
On the evening of Thursday 28 December, Prof. Justin Oakley, Deputy Director of the Centre for Human Bioethics at Monash University, gave a fascinating and suggestive lecture on whether there is reason for the state to broaden access to IVF treatment for childless people as well as facilitating adoption.
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Podcast: Is Networking Immoral?
Guest Post: Ned Dobos, University of New South Wales This post is a summary of a talk presented by Dr. Dobos at the University of Oxford. Listen to the Podcast Despite being ubiquitous in both the public and private sectors, “networking” has largely escaped ethical scrutiny. But is it the perfectly innocuous business and career-advancement strategy
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Get your nasty Platonic hands off my kids, Mr. Gove
My book of the year, by a very wide margin, is Jay Griffiths’ splendid ‘Kith: The Riddle of the Childscape’ (Hamish Hamilton, 2013). Amongst her many virtues is a loathing of Plato’s Republic. Here she is, in typically swashbuckling style: ‘Excessive laughter is banned and so is the liquid superfluity of metaphor. Plato would rid
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Is it morally permissible for parents to encourage their children to play high-impact sports?
Concussions are prevalent in high-impact and much-beloved sports such as American and Australian football, rugby, and hockey. Concussions are harmful – recent studies link repeated concussions to degraded cognitive performance along a number of measures (Randolph et al. 2013), as well as an increased risk of neurodegenerative conditions such as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (McKee et
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Beyond 23andMe’s Shutdown: The Role of the FDA in the Future of Direct-to-Consumer Genetic Testing
Kyle Edwards, Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and The Ethox Centre, University of Oxford Caroline Huang, The Ethox Centre, University of Oxford An article based on this blog post has now been published in the May – June 2014 Hastings Center Report: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/hast.310/full. Please check out our more developed thoughts on this topic there!