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Adding Happy People
Almost every week there’s a headline about our planet’s population explosion. For instance Indian officials confirmed recently that India is projected to overtake China in just over a decade – to become the most populous country on Earth. Many are worried that the planet is becoming increasingly overpopulated. Whether it is overpopulated, underpopulated, or appropriately…
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Guest Post: CARING ROBOTS
CARING ROBOTS Written by Darlei Dall’Agnol[1] Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina As we humans find ways of enhancing our physical, intellectual, emotional and other capabilities and, as a result, our lifespan expands, caring for the elderly becomes more challenging and complex too. We may postpone aging, but perhaps not forever and serious care will be…
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Guest Post : Synthetic Biology: Taking care of the public image
Written by Prof. Antonio Diéguez Universidad de Malaga The public image of science is usually subjected to distortions tending to blur the nuances and to generate monolithic assessments. The mass media contribute to a large extent to the creation of disproportionate expectations in the next and spectacular benefits provided by scientific research, or on the…
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The Moral Significance of Animal Suffering
Recently I attended a fascinating Society for Applied Philosophy lecture by Shelly Kagan, entitled ‘What’s Wrong with Speciesism?’. Kagan began the lecture by explaining how, while teaching a course involving some of Peter Singer’s writings on non-human animals, he had begun to doubt the view, defended by Singer, that other things equal the suffering of animals…
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Pandas, Humans, and Evolution: What is the state of nature?
Pandas are notoriously picky eaters: they only eat bamboo. But a recent study has found that pandas are actually poorly adapted for their diet. Pandas apparently evolved from omnivorous bears. Whether as a consequence of a decrease in the availability of prey or an increase in bamboo, however, they shifted to an exclusively vegetarian diet…
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Guest Post: Prostitution, harm, and disability: Should only people with disabilities be allowed to pay for sex?
* Note that this entry is being cross-posted at the Journal of Medical Ethics blog. By Brian D. Earp Introduction Is prostitution harmful? And if it is harmful, should it be illegal to buy (or sell) sexual services? And if so, should there ever be any exceptions? What about for people with certain disabilities—say—who might find it difficult or even…
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Ethics of the Minimally Conscious State: It’s Complicated
Last week I attended a conference on the science of consciousness in Helsinki. While there, I attended a very interesting session on the Minimally Conscious State (MCS). This is a state that follows severe brain damage. Those diagnosed as MCS are thought to have some kind of conscious mental life, unlike those in Vegetative State.…
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Race, Gender, and Authenticity: Reflections on Rachel Dolezal and Caitlyn Jenner
The concept of authenticity has been receiving a lot of attention in the past few weeks due to two high profile cases. First, Caitlyn Jenner, a former Olympic gold medallist and TV personality who was until recently known as “Bruce”, debuted her new name and identity in an interview with the magazine Vanity Fair. Second,…
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Guest Post: Is it cruel to make children sit and work in silence?
Written By David Aldridge, Oxford Brookes University This is a cross post from Dave Aldridge’s blog Ahead of a talk to be given at the Institute of Education, Tom Bennett, behaviour guru and figurehead of the ResearchEd movement, invited questions via twitter that he hoped he could address in his seminar. One tweeter asked…
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What Got Us Here Won’t Get Us There: Failure Modes on the Way to Global Cooperation
By Joao Fabiano and Diego Caleiro (UC Berkeley, Biological Anthropology) From single-celled to pluricellular to multicellular organisms or from hunter-gatherers to the EU, the history of evolutionary forces that resulted in human society is a history where cooperation has emerged at increasingly large scales. The major life transitions and, once human, the major cultural transitions have…