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What is a party?
By Alberto Giubilini There seems to be some confusion these days around what exactly a party is. The Sue Gray report updates on the alleged (i.e. actual) parties at No.10 during lockdowns cast doubts on our certainties. For what is a party? Intriguing question, for those into philosophy. You start by thinking you know
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Cross Post: Is This the End of the Road for Vaccine Mandates in Healthcare?
Written by Dominic Wilkinson, Alberto Giubilini, and Julian Savulescu The UK government recently announced a dramatic U-turn on the COVID vaccine mandate for healthcare workers, originally scheduled to take effect on April 1 2022. Health or social care staff will no longer need to provide proof of vaccination to stay employed. The reason, as health
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Impersonality and Non-identity: A Response to Bramble
by Roger Crisp Consider the following case, from David Boonin: Wilma. Wilma has decided to have a baby. She goes to her doctor for a checkup and the doctor tells her that…as things now stand, if she conceives, her child will have a disability. . . that clearly has a substantially negative impact on a person’s quality of
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Spiderman and the Meaning of Hope
Written by Hazem Zohny. In Marvel’s latest ‘Spider-Man: No Way Home’, Peter Parker’s girlfriend MJ has a simple philosophy: “If you expect disappointment, then you can never really be disappointed.” She repeats this at various interludes in the movie, except as the plot gears up to the inevitable showdown with the villains, Peter Parker says
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Social Media and the Loss of Knowledge
written by Neil Levy Here’s the common view of social media and its epistemic effects. Social media leads to people sequestering themselves in echo chambers, and echo chambers cause extreme and/or unjustified beliefs. When we don’t exchange opinions with a variety of people, we don’t have access to the full range of evidence and argument.
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Cross Post: Vaccine Mandates For Healthcare Workers Should Be Scrapped – Omicron Has Changed The Game
Written by Dominic Wilkinson, Jonathan Pugh and Julian Savulescu Time is running out for National Health Service staff in England who have not had a COVID vaccine. Doctors and nurses have until Thursday, February 3, to have their first jab. If they don’t, they will not be fully immunised by the beginning of April and could
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Guest Post: No, We Don’t Owe It To The Animals to Eat Them
Written by Adrian Kreutz, New College, University of Oxford That eating animals constitutes a harm has by now largely leaked into public opinion. Only rarely do meat eaters deny that. Those who deny it usually do so on the grounds of an assumed variance in consciousness or ability to suffer between human and non-human animals.
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Decoupling, Contextualising and Rationality
Written by Rebecca Brown In February 2020, just before science journalists had to start writing about covid full time, Tom Chivers wrote an article for Unherd, ‘‘Eugenics is possible’ is not the same as ‘eugenics is good’’. In it he describes a Twitter outcry provoked by Richard Dawkins who tweeted: It’s one thing to deplore
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Cross Post: Pig’s Heart Transplant: Was David Bennett the Right Person to Receive Groundbreaking Surgery?
Dominic Wilkinson, University of Oxford The recent world-first heart transplant from a genetically modified pig to a human generated both headlines and ethical questions. Many of those questions related to the ethics of xenotransplantation. This is the technical term for organ transplants between species. There has been research into this for more than a century,
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Philosophical Fiddling While the World Burns: Second Movement
Written by Doug McConnell Most ethicists would agree that the climate emergency is one of the most serious ethical problems society has ever faced, yet the focus of most of our work is elsewhere. In his piece, “Philosophical Fiddling While the World Burns”, Charles Foster suggests that business as usual for ethicists – “fine ethical