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Is Drug Addiction a Lifestyle Choice?
According to BBC News this week, the brains of some people “may be wired for addiction.” A study has come out in the journal Science that presents evidence of abnormal brain structures that were found in drug addicts and their non-addicted siblings. The lead researcher, Dr Karen Ersche, was quoted by the BBC as saying…
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Oxford, Warsaw and Mock Tudor
Try this thought experiment. Imagine three cities. A medieval city (something like Oxford). A city heavily bombed in World War II and completely rebuilt, with original materials etc. (e.g. the centre of Warsaw). A city constructed in 2012 to look just like the medieval city (e.g. .Poundbury the ‘traditional’ village Prince Charles has created in…
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Contador’s Ban: The Death of Cycling?
Over 18 months after the race, Contador has been stripped of his 2010 Tour de France title, and banned for 2 years by the Court of Arbitration for Sport, making Andy Schleck the winner of the 2010 race. The ban is punishment for the traces of clenbuterol, an anabolic steroid were found in his blood.…
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‘No right not to be offended’?: Part Two
Thanks to everyone who commented on my earlier post, the one in which I cast doubt on the popular claim that ‘nobody has a right not to be offended’. Here – at last – are my responses to the various comments people have made. Should an apology be needed, could I apologise for having taken…
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Nothing to lose? Killing is disabling
In a provocative article forthcoming in the Journal of Medical Ethics (one of a new series of feature articles in the journal) philosophers Walter Sinnott Armstrong and Franklin Miller ask ‘what makes killing wrong?’ Their simple and intuitively appealing answer is that killing is wrong because it strips an individual of all of their abilities…
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Practical Ethics Given Moral Uncertainty
Practical ethics aims to offer advice to decision-makers embedded in the real world. In order to make the advice practical, it typically takes empirical uncertainty into account. For example, we don’t currently know exactly to what extent the earth’s temperature will rise, if we are to continue to emit CO2 at the rate we have…
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Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation: Fundamental enhancement for humanity?
The idea of a simple, cheap and widely available device that could boost brain function sounds too good to be true. Yet promising results in the lab with emerging ‘brain stimulation’ techniques, though still very preliminary, have prompted Oxford neuroscientists to team up with leading ethicists at the University to consider the issues the new…
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Choosing one’s own (sexual) identity: Shifting the terms of the ‘gay rights’ debate
Choosing one’s own (sexual) identity: Shifting the terms of the ‘gay rights’ debate By Brian Earp (Follow Brian on Twitter by clicking here.) UPDATE: See HuffPost Live debate on this topic here. Can you be gay by choice? Consider the following, from the Huffington Post: Former “Sex and the City” star Cynthia Nixon says she is gay…
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Skipping intuitively over the is-ought gap
By Charles Foster I spent a lot of the weekend at a very good conference entitled Moral Evil in Practical Ethics. There was, I think, a complete or almost complete consensus about many things. Here are two: (1) Evil exists, and is of a different quality from merely sub-optimal moral behaviour. (2) To recognise evil…
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10-year-old gets a tattoo, mother gets arrested
By Brian Earp Follow Brian on Twitter by clicking here. See Brian’s most recent prior post on this blog here. See a list of all of Brian’s previous posts here. Inking arms, piercing ears, and removing foreskins: The inconsistency of parental consent laws in the State of Georgia Gaquan Napier watched his older brother…