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Anti Addict Mummy Money
A US group that pays drug addicts to undergo sterilisation visits the UK this week, having recently paid its first British client for undergoing a vasectomy. “Project Prevention” claims that its goal is to make addicts and alcoholics use long-term birth control until they can care for the children they conceive. Founder Barbara Harris has…
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Kidneys and the Ultimatum Game
Frequently in life there is some good available if you and I can agree on some split of that good between us. If we cannot agree the good never comes into existence. This fact can be modelled by what is called the ultimatum game. In the ultimatum game somebody offers us £100 to split between
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Is the Rescue of the Chilean Miners a Miracle?
A number of clerics of various Christian denominations are claiming that the recent rescue of 33 Chilean miners was a miracle and, therefore, evidence in favour of the particular version of Christianity that they respectively represent. How are we to decide if this, or any other event is a miracle? The first issue to be
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Free speech in the marketplace of ideas.
In a couple of weeks, the verdict in the case against Geert Wilder’s for inciting hatred will be announced. Wilders is charged under laws that have been enacted in many jurisdictions, but which are controversial. I don’t know whether these laws are good or bad. Here I just want to address one argument in favour
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Is it legitimate to ask opponents of embryonic stem cell therapy whether they support IVF?
by Dominic Wilkinson In the news this week is the first US officially-sanctioned human trial of embryonic stem cells. A patient with spinal cord injury has received an injection of embryo-derived stem cells. Predictably, the news has not been received positively by those who are opposed to research with embryonic stem cells. The development, however,
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Sam Harris, the Naturalistic Fallacy, and the Slipperiness of “Well-Being”
This post is about the main argument of Sam Harris’s new book The Moral Landscape. Harris argues that there are objective truths about what’s morally right and wrong, and that science can in principle determine what they are, all by itself. As I’ll try to demonstrate here, Harris’s argument cannot succeed. I call the argument
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Individual privacy and the conduct of web users
From October the 12th to the 14th London will host the RSA conference, which gathers together information security experts from across the world to discuss the most pertinent emerging issues in information security. The safeguarding of users’ privacy is one of the most important and frequently discussed issues in the field of information security, and
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Benefit cuts for large, workless families
The UK's culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, has suggested that the state should limit the provision of social security benefits to large, unemployed families. Hunt said last week that The number of children that you have is a choice and what we're saying is that if people are living on benefits, then they make choices but
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Should I love you as you are?
Last Saturday I attended an interesting conference about "Reason, Theology and the Genome " organized by the McDonald centre for theology, Ethics and Public Life in Oxford. I noticed that there was a general agreement, among speakers, about the intrinsic moral value of unconditional love of parents toward their children. Apparently parental unconditional love is
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Virtue is back, and I’m worried about my mortgage
Patients want wise, kind, good, trustworthy, empathetic people around them when they are in pain or dying. For most patients, an ethically good decision will be one made in conversation with such a person. The real business of ethics, then, is not to determine whether Kant would frown on a particular decision, but to determine…