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Can Facts Be Racist?
Here is the sequence of events. 1. Richard Dawkins tweets that all the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College Cambridge. 2. Cue a twitter onslaught – accusing Professor Dawkins of racism. 3. Richard Dawkins writes that a fact can’t be racist.
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Jane Austen’s Ring: Should We Care?
Ed Vaizey, the culture minister, recently put an export ban on a ring once owned by Jane Austen, bought legitimately by the US singer Kelly Clarkson at auction last year. Why? Because, apparently, the ring is too important a part of our literary history to go abroad.
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Would you hand over a moral decision to a machine? Why not? Moral outsourcing and Artificial Intelligence.
Artificial Intelligence and Human Decision-making. Recent developments in artificial intelligence are allowing an increasing number of decisions to be passed from human to machine. Most of these to date are operational decisions – such as algorithms on the financial markets deciding what trades to make and how. However, the range of such decisions that can…
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Dangerous dogs and proportionate sentencing
The government is currently consulting on whether the maximum sentences for aggravated offences under the Dangerous Dogs Act 1991 should be increased. This offence category covers cases in which someone allows a dog to be dangerously out of control and the dog injures or kills a person or an assistance dog. Respondents to the survey…
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Not all philosophers are equal
Not all ethical issues are equally important. Many ethicists spend their professional lives performing in sideshows. However entertaining the sideshow, sideshow performers do not deserve the same recognition or remuneration as those performing on our philosophical Broadways. What really matters now is not the nuance of our approach to mitochondrial manipulation for glycogen storage diseases,…
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I’m Too Unsexy For My Shirt
Follow David on Twitter @David Edmonds100 Thinking only of your career prospects now, is it better to be sexy or unsexy? This person was said to be too sexy and lost her job. But at Abercrombie & Fitch the allegation is that you can’t get a job unless you’re good looking. The A&F image of…
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Enhanced punishment: can technology make life sentences longer?
by Rebecca Roache Follow Rebecca on Twitter Edit 26th March 2014: It’s been pointed out to me by various people that this blog post does not make adequately clear that I don’t advocate the punishment methods described here. For a clarification of my views on the subject, please go here. For a Q&A, see here. Today, the…
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Lying in the least untruthful manner: surveillance and trust
When I last blogged about the surveillance scandal in June, I argued that the core problem was the reasonable doubts we have about whether the oversight is functioning properly, and that the secrecy makes these doubts worse. Since then a long list of new revelations have arrived. To me, what matters is not so much…
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Press Release: Ethical Meat
On Monday, London will see the world’s first artificial meat burger cooked and tasted, by Professor Mark Post of Maastricht University. Artificial meat stops cruelty to animals, is better for the environment, could be safer and more efficient, and even healthier. We have a moral obligation to support this kind of research. It gets the…
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Does philanthropy propagate an unjust system?
A week ago, Peter Buffett—the son of business magnate Warren Buffett—published an op-ed in The New York Times on what he called “the charitable-industrial complex.” His central thesis was that modern-day philanthropy is a form of “conscience laundering”: by engaging in large public acts of giving, the rich “sleep better at night” while keeping “the…