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The Weaponization of Bullshit

The Weaponization of Bullshit

by Neil Levy

It’s not often that philosophers come to broader public attention, but Harry Frankfurt managed it with his 2005 book On Bullshit. The book made the best-seller lists and led to a Daily Show appearance. On Bullshit had a more recent resurgence with the advent of the Trump presidency, as people sought to understand the Trump phenomenon and make sense of his constant stream of garbage.

Trump seemed to embody Frankfurtian bullshit. According to Frankfurt, bullshit is distinguished from lying centrally by the intention of the bullshitter. The liar wants you to believe something that is false; the bullshitter doesn’t care about the truth either way. The bullshitter may not know whether what they’re saying is true or false, and sometimes it will in fact be true. It’s indifference to truth, not deceptiveness, that is characteristic of bullshit, according to Frankfurt.Read More »The Weaponization of Bullshit

Awareness of a Nudge is not Required for Resistance of a Nudge

 

Written by Gabriel De Marco and Thomas Douglas

This blog post is based on our forthcoming paper: “Nudge Transparency is not Required for Nudge Resistibility,” Ergo.

 

Consider the following cases:

Food Placement. In order to encourage healthy eating, cafeteria staff place healthy food options at eye-level, whereas unhealthy options are placed lower down. Diners are more likely to pick healthy foods and less likely to pick unhealthy foods than they would have been had foods instead been distributed randomly.

Default Registration. In application forms for a driver’s license, applicants are asked whether they wish to be included in the organ donation registry. In order to opt out, one needs to tick a box; otherwise, the applicant will be registered as an organ donor. The form was designed in this way in order to recruit more organ donors; applicants are more likely to be registered than they would have been had the default been not being included in the registry.

Interventions like these two are often called nudges. Though many agree that it is, at least sometimes ethically OK to nudge people, there is a thriving debate about when, exactly, it is OK.

Some authors have suggested that nudging is ethically acceptable only when (or because) the nudge is easy to resist. But what does it take for a nudge to be easy to resist? Authors rarely give accounts of this, yet they often seem to assume what we call the Awareness Condition (AC):

AC: A nudge is easy to resist only if the agent can easily become aware of it.

We think AC is false. In our forthcoming paper, we mount a more developed argument for this, but in this blog post, we simply consider one counterexample to it, and one response to it.

Read More »Awareness of a Nudge is not Required for Resistance of a Nudge

Video Interview: Prof Erica Charters on when does (or did) the Covid-19 pandemic end?

In this ‘Thinking Out Loud’ episode, Katrien Devolder (philosophy, Oxford) interviews Erica Charters, Professor of the Global History of Medicine at the University of Oxford about how we know, or decide, when the covid-19 pandemic ends. Professor Charters explains why the end as well as the beginning of a pandemic are murky, and what past… Read More »Video Interview: Prof Erica Charters on when does (or did) the Covid-19 pandemic end?

We Should Regulate Politicians’ Public Statements Like Advertisements

Written by Hazem Zohny

There are strict regulations in place to stop businesses falsely advertising their products or services — why not the same for politicians? Lizz Truss and Rishi Sunak are currently trying to appeal to the Conservative party members who will determine the UK’s next prime minister in September – why can they largely get away with saying pretty anything about how their proposed policies will improve the status quo?

The UK’s Advertising Standards Authority has a clear code governing the public statements businesses can make about their products and services. They cannot mislead consumers by omitting key information or by exaggerating the performance of a product or service, and they must state any significant limitations and qualifications. In contrast, politicians are free to make misleading public statements about how they will tackle, say, inflation or recession using (potentially fudged) figures with little context or caveats.Read More »We Should Regulate Politicians’ Public Statements Like Advertisements

First synthetic embryos: the scientific breakthrough raises serious ethical questions

synthetic mouse.
Weizmann Institute of Sciences

Julian Savulescu, University of Oxford; Christopher Gyngell, The University of Melbourne, and Tsutomu Sawai, Hiroshima University

Children, even some who are too young for school, know you can’t make a baby without sperm and an egg. But a team of researchers in Israel have called into question the basics of what we teach children about the birds and the bees, and created a mouse embryo using just stem cells.

It lived for eight days, about half a mouse’s gestation period, inside a bioreactor in the lab.

In 2021 the research team used the same artificial womb to grow natural mouse embryos (fertilised from sperm and eggs), which lived for 11 days. The lab-created womb, or external uterus, was a breakthrough in itself as embryos could not survive in petri dishes.

If you’re picturing a kind of silicone womb, think again. The external uterus is a rotating device filled with glass bottles of nutrients. This movement simulates how blood and nutrients flow to the placenta. The device also replicates the atmospheric pressure of a mouse uterus.

Some of the cells were treated with chemicals, which switched on genetic programmes to develop into placenta or yolk sac. Others developed into organs and other tissues without intervention. While most of the stem cells failed, about 0.5% were very similar to a natural eight-day-old embryo with a beating heart, basic nervous system and a yolk-sac.

These new technologies raise several ethical and legal concerns.

Read More »First synthetic embryos: the scientific breakthrough raises serious ethical questions

Press release: Battersbee appeal at European Court declined

by Dominic Wilkinson @Neonatalethics Tonight, the European Court responded to Archie’s parents’ request for a final appeal against the decision by a series of UK courts to end the treatment keeping him alive.   What happened in the European Court?   The European Court provided a rapid answer to the application by Archie’s lawyers earlier… Read More »Press release: Battersbee appeal at European Court declined

Press release: Battersbee final* appeal rejected

by Dominic Wilkinson In the latest legal hearing, in a long running dispute about treatment for brain-injured 12 year old Archie Battersbee, the Court of Appeal yesterday rejected his family’s request to delay stopping treatment until a UN committee had reviewed his case. Why was the appeal rejected? Archie’s parents had previously mounted a series… Read More »Press release: Battersbee final* appeal rejected

Epistemic Diligence and Honesty

Written by Rebecca Brown

All else being equal, it is morally good for agents to be honest. That is, agents shouldn’t, without good reason, engage in non-honest behaviours such as lying, cheating or stealing. What counts as a ‘good reason’ will vary depending on your preferred ethical theory. For instance, Kant (in)famously insisted that even if a murderer is at the door seeking out their victim you mustn’t lie to them in order to protect the victim’s life. A rule utilitarian, in contrast, might endorse lies that can generally be expected to maximise expected utility (including, presumably, lying to murderers about the whereabouts of their intended victims).

What will actually count as being dishonest will vary depending on your preferred conception of honesty. If honesty has very extensive requirements, failure to volunteer relevant information when you know someone would find it useful might be a failure of honesty. On a narrower account, perhaps even ‘paltering’ – misleading by telling the truth – might not count as dishonest so long as what the agent says is technically true.Read More »Epistemic Diligence and Honesty