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Can we solve the world’s problems by offering a large enough prize?
On the 22nd of October 1707, more than 1400 British sailors died when a British naval fleet sank in stormy weather off the Isles of Scilly. The disaster was later attributed to failings in navigation and sailors’ difficulty in determining their location at sea. This was a perennial problem at the time, and had persisted
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Personal Genome Project UK email disaster: If you can’t guarantee privacy, at least try to ensure trust
It’s not often that you can write on a topic in ethics whilst rolling around laughing, so I shall take this rare opportunity to make a few comments on the ludicrous breach of privacy that occurred last night when the Personal Genome Project messed up something as simple as an email list. I’d expressed an
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On the ‘right to be forgotten’
This week, a landmark ruling from the European Court of Justice held that a Directive of the European Parliament entailed that Internet search engines could, in some circumstances, be legally required (on request) to remove links to personal data that have become irrelevant or inadequate. The justification underlying this decision has been dubbed the ‘right
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Revenge – an unjust necessity?
Recently, I have come to seemingly hap hazardously stumble over a series of texts and events that all circulate around what I always considered base and somewhat repulsive desires to hurt fellow human beings on what is considered good grounds. Some months ago, I wrote a post here about so-called shaming sites that expose in
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Is Home Birth Really As Safe As Hospital Birth? “Woman-centred Care” vs “Baby-centred Care”
Imagine that you and your partner are having a baby in hospital. Tragically something goes wrong unexpectedly during birth and the baby is born blue. He urgently needs resuscitation if there is to be a chance of preventing permanent severe brain damage. How long would it be reasonable for doctors to wait before starting resuscitation?
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Do people have a right to be bigots?
Last month Australia’s Attorney-General said in parliament that “people have the right to be bigots”. The remark came in the context of a debate about the government’s proposed amendments to sections of the country’s Racial Discrimination Act 1975 that deal with racial hate speech. The relevant provisions of the Act make it unlawful for a
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‘Hello Kitty’, Society, Utopia
Several people have asked me why I wrote a post to defend Avril Lavigne’s music video ‘Hello Kitty’. I’m a little bemused by the question, as I thought my main motive was self-explanatory: it is a part of philosophers’ job to consider when it’s appropriate to use normative terms to blame someone or something. It’s one
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Reporters Shouldn’t Embrace Bias
For a long time, objectivity and impartiality were perceived to be noble and uncontroversial goals for journalists. Objectivity is straightforwardly appealing – we want information that is accurate and undistorted by reporters’ personal politics. However, there is of late some pushback against that view (often called ‘The View from Nowhere’, which has apparently become such
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Lethal Injection: Time for the Chop
On 29th April 2014, Clayton Lockett, 38, was executed by lethal injection in Oklahoma for the heinous crimes he committed fourteen years earlier. That evening, he was escorted to the execution chamber and placed on the table. An intravenous line was inserted in his groin. At 6.23pm, he was given midazolam, a sedative intended to