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Guest Post: KILLER ROBOTS AND THE ETHICS OF WAR IN THE 21th CENTURY
Written by Darlei Dall’Agnol[1] I attended, recently, the course Drones, Robots and the Ethics of Armed Conflict in the 21st Century, at the Department for Continuing Education, Oxford University, which is, by the way, offering a wide range of interesting courses for 2015-6 (https://www.conted.ox.ac.uk/). Philosopher Alexander Leveringhaus, a Research Fellow at the Oxford Institute for
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Guest Post: “Gambling should be fun, not a problem”: why strategies of self-control may be paradoxical.
Written by Melanie Trouessin University of Lyon Faced with issues related to gambling and games of chance, the Responsible Gambling program aims to promote moderate behaviour on the part of the player. It is about encouraging risk avoidance and offering self-limiting strategies, both temporal and financial, in order to counteract the player’s tendency to lose
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Guest Post: What puts the ‘mental’ in mental illness?
Written by Anke Snoek Macquarie University I have a 3 year old who doesn’t eat. He seems not to be interested in food in general. We were offered many explanations for why he doesn’t eat and most specialists suspect a psychological source for his lack of appetite. But recently a friend suggested that maybe there
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Virtually reality? The value of virtual activities and remote interaction
By Hannah Maslen The Oxford Martin School recently held a two-day symposium on virtual reality and immersive technologies. The aim was to examine a range of technologies, from online games to telepresence via a robot avatar, to consider the ways in which such technologies might affect our personal lives and our interactions with
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Guest Post: An Unfortunate State Of Affairs
Hilary Greaves, University of Oxford Ashley Madison is an online extramarital dating service, running with the succinct subtitle “Life is short. Have an affair.” On July 20, 2015, the service announced that hackers had breached its data security defences, and obtained identifying details for the site’s 37 million members. In the months that have since
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ANNOUNCEMENT: Journal of Medical Ethics now accepting longer papers
Please note: this blog is was first published at the Journal of Medical Ethics Blog. The Journal of Medical Ethics is pleased to announce the addition of a new article type – Extended Essays – that will allow authors up to 7,000 words to provide an in-depth analysis of their chosen topic. In an interview, Associate Editor
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The reproducibility problem and the status of bioethics
There is a long overdue crisis of confidence in the biological and medical sciences. It would be nice – though perhaps rather ambitious – to think that it could transmute into a culture of humility. A recent comment in Nature observes that: ‘An unpublished 2015 survey by the American Society for Cell Biology found that
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Guest Post: Vampire Judges and Blood Money: Blood Donation as Criminal Sanction?
Written by Christopher Chew Monash University Early one September morning, plaintiffs at a rural Alabama County court in the US, were greeted with an unexpected and highly unusual offer. To quote presiding Judge Marvin Wiggins: “There’s a blood drive outside, and if you don’t have any money, and you don’t want to go to jail,
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From Self-Interest to Morality: How Moral Progress Might Be Possible
One of the most stunning successes I have personally seen in my life is the emergence of the Effective Altruism movement. I remember when Will Crouch (now MacAskill) first presented 80 000 hours to our Graduate Discussion Group and Toby Ord was still a grad student. From their ideas a whole movement has emerged of