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Living near a busy road can kill you
Early April saw some unusually smoggy days across much of Western Europe, resulting in widespread media attention to air pollution. (See, for example, here, here and here.) On one day, air quality in some parts of London was worse than in Beijing. Further attention has been drawn to the issue by a number of recent…
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Call for Registration – GOOD DONE RIGHT: a Conference on Effective Altruism
7-9 July 2014, All Souls College, Oxford Speakers include: Derek Parfit (Oxford), Thomas Pogge (Yale), Rachel Glennerster (MIT Poverty Action Lab), Nick Bostrom (Oxford), Norman Daniels (Harvard), Toby Ord (Oxford), William MacAskill (Cambridge), Jeremy Lauer (WHO), Larissa MacFarquhar (the New Yorker), Nick Beckstead (Oxford), Owen Cotton-Barratt (Oxford). For further information and registration, please visit www.gooddoneright.com. Effective…
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Cricket and mental illness
There is a lively debate in the philosophy of psychiatry over what makes a condition a disease. The debate is particularly heated with regard to addiction: it is a moral failing, a brain disease or something else altogether? People who hold that addiction is a brain disease often claim that their view is more humane,…
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Trouble Brewing? The Ethical Significance of Synthetic Yeast
Back in 2010, I blogged about Craig Venter’s creation of the first synthetic organism, Synthia, a bacteria. Now, in 2014, the next step has been made by a team at John Hopkins University, the use of synthetic biology in yeast, which, whilst still a simple organism, has a similar cell structure to humans (and other…
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Neil Levy on Addiction
In a fascinating paper presented at the St Cross Ethics Seminar in Oxford, on 27 March 2014, Professor Neil Levy (Oxford and Melbourne) sought to solve the following puzzle about addicts: on the one hand, addicts are thought to lack control, but on the other they appear to engage in the kind of reason-responsive behaviour…
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The automated boycott
The dating site OKCupid displays a message to visitors using the web browser Firefox asking them to change browser, since “Mozilla’s new CEO, Brendan Eich, is an opponent of equal rights for gay couples”. The reason is that Eich donated $1,000 to support Proposition 8 (a California ban on same sex marriages) six years ago.…
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Things I’ve learned (so far) about how to do practical ethics
By Brian D. Earp Follow Brian on Twitter by clicking here. Things I’ve learned (so far) about how to do practical ethics I had the opportunity, a few months back, to look through some old poems I’d written in high school. Some, I thought, were pretty good. Others I remembered thinking were good when I…
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Giving alcohol to alcoholics: not as controversial as it seems
A Dutch program pays chronic alcoholics in beer for cleaning the streets and parks. A Canadian homeless shelter provides their alcohol clients with six ounces of white wine every 90 minutes. Giving alcohol to alcoholics, it seems counterproductive from a ‘just say no’ perspective, but I would like to argue that it makes sense on…
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Computer vision and emotional privacy
A study published last week (and summarized here and here) demonstrated that a computer could be trained to detect real versus faked facial expressions of pain significantly better than humans. Participants were shown video clips of the faces of people actually in pain (elicited by submerging their arms in icy water) and clips of people…