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The Best Practical Ethics Books of the Year…
By the editors of the Practical Ethics blog. What is the best practical ethics book you read this year, and what is so good about it (in 1-3 sentences)? We asked this question to our colleagues at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics. To our surprise, not a single title received multiple votes. This
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When to eat the marshmallow: new perspectives on impulse control
In light of the fact that many readers will have an assortment of Christmas treats tempting them, I thought a post on impulse control would be timely. In the now paradigmatic Stanford marshmallow experiment, children were given an option – one marshmallow which they could have immediately, or two marshmallows, provided they could wait 15
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Turning the Camera Around: What Newtown Tells Us About Ourselves
On the morning of December 14th, 20-year old Adam Lanza opened fire within the halls of Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, killing 20 children and six adult staff members before turning his gun on himself. In the hours that followed, journalists from every major news station in the nation inundated the tiny town,
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Mind-controlled limbs and redefining the self
This week there were reports of the amazing advances being made in brain-computer interface (BCI) technology. Following just weeks of training, a 52-year old woman, paralysed from the neck down, was able to use her mind to control a robotic hand to pick up objects on a table, including cones, blocks and small balls, and
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Prank Calls and Moral Luck
An outburst of blame, vituperation, and indignation, including death threats from all over the world, has followed the sad suicide of a nurse who fell for a ‘prank call’ from two Australian DJs and unwittingly released confidential information about a member of the British royal family. Some criticism might well be made of any person who
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Sui generis, or generic gay? Pardoning Alan Turing
There is a new call for a pardon of Alan Turing, who in1952 was convicted of homosexuality. An earlier petition for a pardon was declined by the UK government (he got an apology instead 2009). Lord McNally stated in the House of Lords that: “A posthumous pardon was not considered appropriate as Alan Turing was
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Why a painting is as good as a photo on a passport
by Rebecca Roache Fredrik Saker, a Swedish artist, is in the news this week for having successfully applied for a driving licence using a photograph not of himself, but of a self-portrait painting. It is interesting to consider, in the light of this, what is so special about photographs. Why do agencies that issue documents
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Two Unhappy Lives
The Greek statesman and poet Solon, who lived in the sixth century BC, said “count no man happy until he be dead”. His thought seems to have been that a person’s luck can change at any time. Aristotle went further. He believed that things can happen after one’s death to affect whether one is happy.