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To kill or to violate?
By Charles Foster A highly intelligent 32 year old woman has profound anorexia. She has had it for years. It is complicated by alcohol and opiate dependency, and by personality disorder. Her BMI is 11.3. A healthy BMI is around 20. Less than 17.7 is in the anorexic range. Less than 14 indicates dangerous weight…
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Cyberwarfare: No New Ethics Needed
In an interesting recent essay in the Atlantic – ‘Is it Possible to Wage a Just Cyberwar?’ – Patrick Lin, Fritz Allhoff, and Neil Rowe argue that events such as the Stuxnet cyberattack on Iran suggest that the way we fight wars is changing, as well as the rules that govern them. It is indeed…
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Should you take ecstasy to improve your marriage? Not so fast …
Love drugs and science reporting in the media: Setting the record straight By Brian D. Earp, Julian Savulescu, and Anders Sandberg Love. It makes the world go round. It is the reason we have survived as a species. It is the subject of our art, literature, and music—and it is largely the product of chemical…
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The Diversity that Dare Not Speak Its Name
This is a guest post by Dave Frame. Many thanks to him for contributing! Over the last few years, researchers have pointed out a dimension along which there is an extraordinary lack of diversity in the academic social sciences and humanities.[1] And the response from social scientists has been striking. Usually, statistics like these…
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Banning Junk Food Ads On Disney Media Outlets: A “Game-Changer”, or a Mickey Mouse Measure?
Yesterday, with the help of first lady Michelle Obama, the Walt Disney Company announced that from 2015, it will no longer allow the advertisement of junk food on its media outlets (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-18336478). This announcement has been lauded by those who are alarmed by the colossal statistics regarding childhood obesity in the USA. Mrs. Obama herself…
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Just War Theory and Cyber Warfare
Lin’s, Allhoff’s and Rowe’s article in yesterday’s “The Atlantic” could have not been more timely. In the previous week a new cyber weapons has been ‘discovered’, the Flame; the New York Times reported the story behind one of the most famous cyber attacks, i.e. Stuxnet, confirming everyone’s suspicion that both the US and Israel had…
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The Queen’s an anachronism: another problem with predicting the future
The Queen serve many roles, it seems. She provides stability to the British government, fosters links with the ex-colonies, promotes tourism, serves a safe focus for nationalist sentiment, gives the nation a centralised way of taking care of various palaces, provides nationalised opportunities for neighbours to come together, warms that deep part of the human heart that…
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Philosophical Shock Tactics
Not long ago Peter Singer sent a shock wave around his home country when on national television he provided an ethical justification for bestiality. This year three analytical philosophers were taken aback at the ridicule they attracted for proposing that humans be biologically engineered to reduce their carbon footprints as a response to global warming. And…
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Who is to define your identity?
To categorize people into different groups seems to be not only a fundamental function of human cognition, but also of our whole society: child vs. grownup, man vs. woman, black vs. white… Based on such categorizations, we assign rights and duties as for example the right to vote or the monthly fee we have to…
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Professional roles and private lives: How separate are they?
The Daily Mail likes to ‘out’ teachers as porn stars. It did so again last week. The standard response to the discovery that a teacher stars in adult films or ‘moonlights’ as a stripper is to sack him or her, even if (as in one case) two decades have elapsed since involvement in the adult…