By Kei Hiruta ‘STOP ORIENTALISM’. So says the banner of the protest group, ‘Stand Against Yellow Face’ (SAYF), campaigning against a weekly event at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in Boston. The event, called ‘Kimono Wednesdays’, originally encouraged museum visitors to ‘interact’ with Claude Monet’s ‘La Japonaise’ by trying on a replica of the kimono… Read More »Stop Orientalism?: On Boston MFA’s ‘Kimono Wednesdays’
Many people are suspicious about being manipulated in their emotions, thoughts or behaviour by external influences, may those be drugs or advertising. However, it seems that – unbeknown to most of us – within our own bodies exist a considerable number of foreign entities. These entities can change our psychology to a surprisingly large degree. And they pursue their own interests – which do not necessarily coincide with ours.
Read More »Is this really me? Parasites and other humans’ cells in our brains change our psychology
Driverless or autonomous cars will almost certainly be commonplace quite soon. Imagine you are sitting in such a car, approaching a tunnel on a single-lane mountain road. A child wanders into the middle of the road, blocking the entrance to the tunnel. How should such cars be programmed to react? Two options are: to keep going and kill the child; or to swerve aside into the tunnel wall and kill the driver.Read More »The Tunnel Problem
By Dominic Wilkinson @Neonatalethics
At the bedside of a critically ill infant at 5am this morning I was tempted to tweet the latest meme, adding my voice to a chorus of NHS clinicians over the weekend. Last week, in a speech to the King’s fund, Health Minister Jeremy Hunt launched a drive towards 7 day NHS. In particular, he focused on consultant contracts, proposing that newly qualified hospital doctors will be required to work weekends as a condition of employment.
Read More »#IminworkJeremy – the ethics of 24/7 consultant cover
As many readers of this blog may know, in the last few years a “replication crisis” has caused intense soul searching in psychology – and particularly in social psychology. This crisis was sparked when several widely cited findings in psychology subsequently failed to replicate when tested by independent researchers (for some background see Earp and Trafimow’s paper here). This is – of course – a substantial problem because it severely limits the confidence we can have in psychological findings. For social psychological research this problem may be even graver, given that many of the topics studied – e.g. attitudes, prejudice, political voting – have direct implications for policy making. If we cannot have confidence in our findings, social psychology is in very hot water indeed.
Read More »Could PhD students solve the replication crisis in psychology?
Catia Faria, PhD Candidate
Department of Law, Universitat Pompeu Fabra
In 2004, the Hunting Act banned fox hunting with dogs from England and Wales. More than ten years later, 80% of Britons still believe that it should remain illegal. Strictly speaking, the Act did not establish an absolute ban on fox hunting with dogs (or the hunting of other wild mammals) but rather a conditional prohibition, filled with many exemptions.
In spite of how loose the current law already is, Prime Minister David Cameron recently proposed a new relaxing amendment to the Act. If it had been approved, the change would have shown a complete disregard for the animals involved. It would have also deviated British law from the moral path followed by its own people. The plan to relax the ban has now been postponed. Not based on the strong moral reasons against it, but because conservatives realised they couldn’t win the vote.
The only relevant discussion here is an ethical one: Is (fox) hunting an immoral practice? If so, shouldn’t the government uphold the ban? It seems that no sound way of understanding ethics can leave room for the huge amount of harm caused by fox hunting. This is a practice whose only aim is to provide hunters with some entertainment. This would still be so even if we set aside the harm these animals suffer by being deprived of their lives. Even a minimally stringent moral view would consider it unjustified to cause such severe suffering to animals merely for the sake of trivial human interests.
At any rate, it’s worth taking a look at the main arguments put forward by supporters of the amendment.
by Anders Sandberg and Ben Levinstein
Over the past week we have been subsumed by the intense, final work phase just before the deadline of a big, complex report. The profanity-density has been high, mostly aimed at Google, Microsoft and Apple. Not all of it was deserved, but it brought home the issue that designing software carries moral implications.Read More »Usable ethics: user design and ethics
Not long ago the UK implemented an NHS surcharge – an extra fee that non-EEA nationals (Australia and New Zealand are also exempt) applying for leave to remain in the UK must pay. It costs £200 per year, and must be paid up front. So, for example, if you are applying for a work visa for 3 years, and you have a family of three, you must pay £1800 to cover the surcharge for you and your family (on top of other visa costs).
It is difficult to find much public discussion in the UK regarding this surcharge, outside of a few articles that recently noted that the surcharge is unlikely to do what we were told it would do – namely, benefit the NHS. (See here)
Is the surcharge a just policy? Read More »Is the NHS surcharge just?
Written by David Aldridge
Oxford Brookes University
Recently a colleague offered in conversation that we should agree to disagree. This led me to some observations about the role of agreement and disagreement in dialogue. Some conversations involve a sort of perpetual agreement or mutual affirmation. These are instances where we’re really just ‘shooting the breeze’, and there’s nothing much at issue between us. We exchange the gnomes of accepted wisdom and nod. Other exchanges are characterised pretty much by disagreement. These are the situations where we talk at cross purposes, or talk past each other – we can’t even seem to get started on the way in which the matter at hand needs to be interrogated. Read More »Guest Post: Agree to disagree? Let’s not.
Suppose you are an altruistically minded person who is adamant about doing the most good you possibly can. If you are lucky enough to have a wide range of options, what career should you choose?
Two years ago, William MacAskill, President of 80,000 hours, a non-profit organisation focused on “enabling people to make a bigger difference with their career,” suggested you steer clear of charity work and aim for Wall Street. He called this approach earning to give. A couple of days ago, MacAskill has published a blog post where he admits that heavily pushing for the idea of earning to give was “a marketing strategy,” and that, although 80,000 hours did believe that “at least a large proportion of people” should become high-earners in order to donate more money, placing so much emphasis on this idea may have been mistaken. The 80,000 hours page on earning to give now reads: “This page was last updated in 2012 and no-longer fully reflects our views.” MacAskill’s current point of view is that only a “small proportion” of people should strive to earn to give.Read More »If you want to do the most good, maybe you shouldn’t work for Wall Street
