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How Could Julian Savulescu Still Be a Utilitarian
Guest post: Professor Valentin Muresan, University of Bucharest Professor Julian Savulescu writes: “People think I am a utilitarian, but I am not. I, like nearly everybody else, find Utilitarianism to be too demanding” . Why does he need to confess? He tells us: ethical utilitarianism is in crisis because of several misunderstandings. One is that
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Moral Offsetting
A recent blogpost on 3 Quarks Daily satirised the idea of ‘moral offsetting’. Moral offsetting would work like carbon offsetting. With carbon offsetting, you purchase carbon credits to offset against your emissions – for instance, you might give money to a private company that plants trees, to offset your transatlantic flights. Moral offsetting works in
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Treated like Animals, Guest Post by Christine Korsgaard
Guest Post: Christine Korsgaard, Harvard University On November 5, 2014, RT reported that Filipino workers in Saudi Arabia claimed that they were being “treated like animals.” On November 14, The Independent reported that the members of Pussy Riot complained that while in prison in Russia they were “treated like animals.” On November 17, the BBC
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What are the ethics of using brain stimulation technologies for ‘enhancement’ in children?
New open access publication: announcement: In a recently published article, Hannah Maslen, Roi Cohen Kadosh, Julian Savulescu and I present an argument about the permissible (and not-so-permissible) uses of non-invasive brain stimulation technology in children. We consider both children who may be suffering from a specific neurological disorder, for whom the stimulation is intended as
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“Ravines and Sugar Pills: Defending Deceptive Placebo Use” – New Open Access Publication
A placebo can be understood as a medical intervention that lacks direct specific therapeutic effects on the condition for which it has been prescribed, but which can nonetheless help to ameliorate a patient’s condition. In March 2013, a study by Howick et al. suggested that the vast majority of UK general practitioners (GPs) have prescribed
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Is it worth saving human lives at the cost of mistreating animals?
Guest Post: Emilian Mihailov, Research Centre in Applied Ethics, Univeristy of Bucharest The most persuasive argument for experimenting on animals is probably the claim that it is only through such research, that we save human lives. This does not imply that we don’t have any moral duties towards animals. Because they are not mere objects
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Bucharest – Oxford Workshop in Applied Ethics: Workshop Summary
Guest Post: Toni Gibea, University of Bucharest. The Bucharest-Oxford Workshop in Applied Ethics, which took place in Oxford on the 1st of December, brought together researchers from the University of Oxford and the University of Bucharest to discuss new research across a variety of topics in applied ethics. The workshop consisted of three main sessions:
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Milk Round success is tragic, culpable failure
Several times this term I’ve staggered out onto Oxford station, cramped and queasy from Cattle Class, and seen packs of sleek suits ooze out of First Class, briefcases in their hands and predatory gleams in their eyes. ‘Let’s go hunting’, one floppy-haired account manager said to his confederates. They climbed into cabs, which they saw
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Earth: Priceless
Christmas is the season when prices, costs and value are on everybody’s mind. At least when trying to estimate how much a present is worth to a friend or family member (and the value of our own happiness at their happiness): is it really worth the price in the store? Lee Billings recounts a fascinating
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Mindfulness meditation and implicit bias
A recent study purports to demonstrate that mindfulness meditation techniques can reduce implicit biases. Affecting all manner of interpersonal interactions, implicit biases are unconscious attitudes or associations that influence our understanding, behavior and decisions. Implicit biases can be revealed using implicit association tests (IATs), which often measure the degree to which a participant associates particular