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Punishment and Memory
The public outcry at the decision of the Crown Prosecution Service that Lord Janner was not fit to stand trial for 22 sex offences, the last of which were allegedly committed in the 1980s, appears to have led the CPS to initiate a review. Janner’s case raises several issues about the punishment of crimes that may…
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Moral Agreement on Saving the World
There appears to be lot of disagreement in moral philosophy. Whether these many apparent disagreements are deep and irresolvable, I believe there is at least one thing it is reasonable to agree on right now, whatever general moral view we adopt: that it is very important to reduce the risk that all intelligent beings on…
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How to Criticize on the Internet: What Shame Teaches us about Online Harassment
Participating in that great experiment of the internet—social media in particular—runs some risks; an emotional tweet, a late-night blog entry, or a Facebook post after a couple of pints can not only get you into trouble with friends and family, but at times, even cost you your job and bring world-wide notoriety. Justine Sacco is…
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What’s Wrong With Giving Treatments That Don’t Work: A Social Epistemological Argument.
Let us suppose we have a treatment and we want to find out if it works. Call this treatment drug X. While we have observational data that it works—that is, patients say it works or, that it appears to work given certain tests—observational data can be misleading. As Edzard Ernst writes: Whenever a patient or…
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Statement from Blog Admin
A recent post on this blog by a lecturer from Royal Holloway has caused negative comment and attention. All posts on the blog reflect the author’s own arguments, and are not a reflection of the views of other blog writers, of the Centre, or of the University. Blog authors include staff and students of Oxford…
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Stopping the innocent from pleading guilty
Written by Dr John Danaher. Dr Danaher is a Lecturer in Law at NUI Galway. His research interests include neuroscience and law, human enhancement, and the ethics of artificial intelligence. A version of this post was previously published here. Somebody recently sent me a link to an article by Jed Radoff entitled “Why Innocent People Plead…
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McMahan’s Hazardous (and Irrelevant) Thought Experiment
Written by Professor Allen Buchanan and Professor Lance K. Stell This is a response to an earlier post, by Jeff McMahan, about the right to carry guns, https://blog.uehiro.ox.ac.uk/2015/04/a-challenge-to-gun-rights. Before we criticize McMahan’s argument, it is important to ascertain its implications: Assuming that, as McMahan thinks, there is no moral right to gun ownership,…
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The Conservatives’ Legacies: What should we do with Inheritance Tax?
A majority in the House of Commons has provided David Cameron with the freedom to do over the next five years some of the things that he’s found difficult over the last five. One of the things that is set for reform is the law on inheritance tax, with the Tory manifesto having pledged to…
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If you’re a Conservative, I’m not your friend
By Rebecca Roache Follow Rebecca on Twitter here One of the first things I did after seeing the depressing election news this morning was check to see which of my Facebook friends ‘like’ the pages of the Conservatives or David Cameron, and unfriend them. (Thankfully, none of my friends ‘like’ the UKIP page.) Life…
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Should we punish crimes from the distant past?
Former Auschwitz SS officer Oskar Gröning is currently being tried as an accessory to murder for his role as an administrator in the extermination camp, and the trial has stirred up a lot of debate. One strand of the debate addresses the question whether Gröning was complicit in the extermination of prisoners, and whether he…