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What to do with Google—nothing, break it up, nationalise it, turn it into a public utility, treat it as a public space, or something else?
Google has become a service that one cannot go without if one wants to be a well-adapted participant in society. For many, Google is the single most important source of information. Yet people do not have any understanding of the way Google individually curates contents for its users. Its algorithms are secret. For the past…
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Guest Post: Why it might be good to pamper terrorists
Written By Anders Herlitz Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey One of the most heated debates in “Western” countries these days concerns how to deal with individuals who either have traveled or consider traveling to Syria or Iraq in order to join Daesh and return to a “Western” country in which they are citizens.…
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Do I have a right to access my father’s genetic account?
Written By: Roy Gilbar, Netanya Academic College, Israel, and Charles Foster In the recent case of ABC v St. George’s Healthcare NHS Trust and others,1 [http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/QB/2015/1394.html] a High Court judge decided that: (a) where the defendants (referred to here jointly as ‘X’) knew that Y, a prisoner, was suffering from Huntingdon’s Disease (‘HD’); and (b) X…
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Guest Post: Volunteer Service
Written By Seth Lazar Australian National University Earlier this year, the British Army Reserves launched a recruitment drive, emphasising the opportunities that volunteering affords: world travel, professional training, excitement and comradeship.[1] In this sense it was typical. Military recruitment tends not to mention the possibility of being complicit in murder. But those who are considering…
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Guest Post: New Tools for Bioethics Education and Public Engagement
Written by Johann Ahola-Launonen University of Helsinki How should bioethical discussion be? The academic debate entails a tension between different parties, which often are difficult to compare. To mention some, for example, some draw from the tradition of liberal consequentialism and demand for rationalism and the avoidance of lofty moral arguments. Others descend from the…
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Guest Post: The Millennium Development Goals and Peter Singer’s new book on Effective Altruism
Written by William Isdale, of The University of Queensland As many readers will be aware, this year will mark the conclusion of the Millennium Development Goals. For some of these goals, expectations have been exceeded; for instance, the goal of halving global poverty (defined as living on less then US$1.25 a day) was achieved back…
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Strange brew: opiates from yeast
A recent series of papers have constructed a biochemical pathway that allows yeast to produce opiates. It is not quite a sugar-to-heroin home brew yet, but putting together the pieces looks fairly doable in the very near term. I think I called the news almost exactly five years ago on this blog. People, including the…
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It’s tough to make predictions*
by Dominic Wilkinson, @Neonatalethics The Court of Protection is due to review very soon the case of a teenager with a relapsed brain tumour. The young man had been diagnosed with the tumour as a baby, but it has apparently come back and spread so that according to his neurosurgeon he has been “going in…
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RESPECTFUL CARE
Written by Darlei Dall’Agnol [1] Professor of Ethics at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brasil We humans are, as social beings, care-dependent creatures. Since the very moment we are born (or even before), we need all sorts of attention to meet our basic needs: we must be fed, clothed, sheltered, protected from many…
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Guest Post: An Open Response to Roache’s Anti-Conservatism
Authors: Calum Miller, Final year medical student, University of Oxford; C’Zar Bernstein, BPhil graduate philosophy student, University of Oxford; Joao Fabiano, DPhil philosophy student, University of Oxford; Mahmood Naji, Final year medical student, University of Oxford One of the first things we did after seeing the election news on the morning after the election was to post a…