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How can journal editors fight bias in polarized scientific communities?
By Brian D. Earp In a recent issue of the Journal of Medical Ethics, Thomas Ploug and Søren Holm point out that scientific communities can sometimes get pretty polarized. This happens when two different groups of researchers consistently argue for (more or less) opposite positions on some hot-button empirical issue. The examples they give are: debates over the merits of breast
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Lord Janner: Sex, dementia and the public interest
In deciding whether or not to prosecute, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) applies a two-stage test. The first stage is the evidential stage: is there a realistic prospect of conviction? The second stage is the public interest stage: is it in the public interest to prosecute? In the well-publicised case of the Labour Peer Lord
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How morality might ask less of scrooges (and more of kinder folks)
Could the fact that someone is more scroogelike – less willing to sacrifice for the sake of doing good – entail that morality is less demanding for her? The answer to this question has important implications for a host of issues in practical ethics, including issues surrounding adoption, procreation, charity, consumer choices, and self-defense.
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Press Release: The moral imperative to research editing embryos: The need to modify Nature and Science
The first study in which the DNA of human embryos was intentionally modified has been published in the journal Protein & Cell, released on Saturday. This research is significant because it may be an important step toward a world where we are free from genetic disease. However allegations that Nature and Science refused to publish
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The moral imperative to research editing embryos: The need to modify Nature and Science
Chris Gyngell and Julian Savulescu Human genetic modification has officially progressed from science fiction to science. In a world first, scientists have used the gene editing technique CRISPR to modify human embryos. While the study itself marks an important milestone, the reason it is truly extraordinary is the scientific community’s reaction to it. In refusing
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The Luck of Oskar Groening
Oskar Groening – the so-called ‘Bookkeeper of Auschwitz’ who counted money taken from prisoners – is now on trial in Lueneberg. Some philosophers suggest that our moral assessment of people like Groening should take into account his ‘bad luck’ in having the opportunities he was offered to join the SS in 1942, and so on.
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Interview with Christine M. Korsgaard on Animal Ethics by Emilian Mihailov
By Emilian Mihailov Cross posted on the CCEA blog Why should animals have the same moral standing as humans? Ask yourself on what basis human beings claim to have moral standing. I think the best way to understand this is in terms of the relation between something’s being good-for-someone and something’s being just plain
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Born this way? How high-tech conversion therapy could undermine gay rights
By Andrew Vierra, Georgia State University and Brian D Earp, University of Oxford This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. Introduction Following the death of 17-year-old Leelah Alcorn, a transgender teen who committed suicide after forced “conversion therapy,” President Barack Obama called for a nationwide ban on psychotherapy aimed at changing sexual orientation
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THE ETHICS OF EMBRYO EDITING
Darlei Dall’Agnol The British Parliament has, recently, passed Act 1990 making possible what is, misleadingly, called “three parents babies,” which will become law in October 2015. Thus, the UK is the first country to allow the transfer of genetic material from an embryo or an egg that has defects in the mitochondrial DNA to generate
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A Challenge to Gun Rights
Written By Professor Jeff McMahan On this day in the US, around thirty people will be killed with a gun, not including suicides. Many more will be wounded. I can safely predict this number because that is the average number of homicides committed with a gun in the US each day. Such killings have