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The future of punishment: a clarification
By Rebecca Roache Follow Rebecca on Twitter here I’m working on a paper entitled ‘Cyborg justice: punishment in the age of transformative technology’ with my colleagues Anders Sandberg and Hannah Maslen. In it, we consider how punishment practices might change as technology advances, and what ethical issues might arise. The paper grew out of a blog…
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Can solitary confinement be justified?
This month an article published in the American Journal of Public Health (AJPH) outlined the results of a study on self-harm amongst jail inmates in New York City. Data on all jail admissions between January 2010 and October 2012 was analysed and the authors noted the following: “We found that acts of self-harm were strongly…
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Uses and Abuses of the Holocaust
Follow Dave on twitter https://twitter.com/DavidEdmonds100 At my advanced age, I can perhaps be forgiven for getting irritated by many things in life. But few exasperate me more than an argument or claim that draws a risible parallel to the Nazi era and/or the Holocaust.
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Brain training in schools?
Neurofeedback works like this: you are hooked up to instruments that measure your brain activity (usually via electroencephalography or functional magnetic resonance imaging) and feed it back to you via auditory or visual feedback. The feedback represents the brain activity, and gives you a chance to modulate it, much as you might modulate the movements…
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How much transparency?
By Dominic Wilkinson (Twitter: @Neonatalethics) There are reports in the press this week that the remains of 86 unborn fetuses were kept in a UK hospital mortuary for months or even years longer than they should have been. The majority were fetuses less than 12 weeks gestation. According to the report, this arose because of…
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Reconsidering the Ethics of Enhanced Punishment
Last summer, on this blog, Rebecca Roache suggested several ways in which technology could enhance retributive punishment—that is, could make punishment more severe—without “resorting to inhumane methods or substantially overhauling the current UK legal system.” Her approbation of this type of technological development has recently been reported in the Daily Mail, and reaffirmed in an…
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Is smoking morally wrong?
This week, I’ve been thinking about smoking. Full disclosure: My name is Jim and I am a smoker. I have smoked for nearly a decade now – since around 2005 – and I only smoke menthol cigarettes. I am addicted to the sweet menthol smoke, where that touch of red fire at the end of…
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For theta’s sake, smash up your TV and go for a walk
You can get experienced meditators to produce, on demand, feelings of timelessness and spacelessness. Tell them ‘Try to be outside time’, and ‘try not to be in the centre of space’, and they will. These sort of sensations tend to happen together – so strikingly so that Walter Stace proposed, as one combined element of…
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Contemporary space exploration, spectacles, and the creation of role models
Desire for space exploration and fantasies about what life will be like once the human race breaks free from the chains that bind us to this planet have been along for a long time. Some have envisioned a bright future without scarcity as we know it in which man is no longer driven by base desires for…
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Book review: ‘Moral Tribes’ by Joshua Greene
The dictator Joseph Stalin reputedly once said that “The death of one person is a tragedy; the death of one million is a statistic.” Behind this chilling remark lies an important insight into human moral psychology. Our moral intuitions are myopic. For instance, we are repelled by the idea of causing others direct physical harm,…