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Should you be prosecuted for feeding junk food to your child?
By Charles Foster Fast food permanently reduces children’s IQ, a recent and unsurprising study reports. What should be done? The answer is ethically and legally simple. Parents who feed their children junk food, knowing of the attendant risks, are child-abusers, and should be prosecuted. If you hit a child, bruising it, you are guilty of
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What is the chance of an MP being wrong?
When MPs took a maths exam it showed that the members of parliament are pretty bad at elementary probability. When asked “if you spin a coin twice, what is the probability of getting two heads?” 47% of conservatives and 77% of the Labour MPs gave the wrong answer. About 75% of the MPs felt confident
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Driving Crazy
There has been discussion on a Polish news site about an extreme case of reckless driving. The discussion is not about the driver – his culpability and stupidity are in no doubt – rather, the discussion is about whether the passengers in the car should be punished in some way for the role they played;
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Magic tricks and moral fibre
By Charles Foster How well do you know yourself? Can you identify confidently your convictions on major moral issues? If you can, do you think you could change them in a moment, and argue robustly and with conviction for exactly the opposite position? Most people will say, unhesitatingly, ‘very well’, ‘yes’, and ‘of course not’.
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How to be a high impact philosopher, part II
In a previous post, I discussed how, as a philosopher, one should decide on a research areas. I suggested that one method was to work out what are potentially the biggest problems the world faces, work out what the crucial normative consideration are, and then work on those areas. Call that the top-down method: starting
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Does committing a murder make a 13-year-old an adult? In US courts it does…
Some days ago, two 13-year-old boys have been charged with first degree murder in Wisconsin (USA), as reported by the Daily News (New York). Allegedly, they went to one of the boy’s great-grandmother’s home, killed her using a hatchet and hammer, then stole her jewellery and her car – and went for a pizza afterwards.
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Are Open-ended Sentences Unjust?
The European Court of Human Rights recently ruled ‘arbitrary and unlawful’ the UK practice of indeterminate prison sentences for the protection of the public (IPPs). Currently more than 6,000 prisoners in this country are serving such sentences. The judges did not, however, rule the very idea of IPPs to be unlawful. What they quite rightly
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Focus on the important things: reforming medical trials
As Ben Goldacre reveals, the status quo in drug testing is nothing less than a scandal. Pharmaceutical companies are suppressing and blocking information, perfectly legally, that is causing adults and children to die. Reforming the system wouldn’t be too hard – a registry for all drug trials, before they begin, should be enough to get rid of
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Dangerous Doctors and Immoral Doctors
In general, if you know someone to be a danger to others you have a duty to do something about it. Exactly what you are obliged to do depends on the person, the situation and you. At the very least you ought to warn others. In general, and apart from such basic duties as not