Almost every week there’s a headline about our planet’s population explosion. For instance Indian officials confirmed recently that India is projected to overtake China in just over a decade – to become the most populous country on Earth. Many are worried that the planet is becoming increasingly overpopulated. Whether it is overpopulated, underpopulated, or appropriately populated is a challenging ethical question.
CARING ROBOTS
Written by Darlei Dall’Agnol[1]
Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina
As we humans find ways of enhancing our physical, intellectual, emotional and other capabilities and, as a result, our lifespan expands, caring for the elderly becomes more challenging and complex too. We may postpone aging, but perhaps not forever and serious care will be needed at some point. Now, recent figures show that the number of carers aged 85 and over has risen in England by 128% in the last decade and is around 87.000.[2] Half of these carers work for 50 hours or more each week. Most are compromising their own well-being showing that we must deal with the problem in a different way to avoid aggravating it. These individuals should be cared for and not be the ones caring. An aging population brings greater burdens for the health care system raising many issues about fairness and justice in distributing resources. In countries like Japan, with 25% of the population over 65,[3] caring is even becoming a social problem and some companies are turning to robots.
Pepper “a robot with a heart” will be sold to care for the elderly and children. Other examples include: Wakamaru a “companion robot” designed to co-inhabit with humans (see figure below); Paro a fur-covered robotic seal developed by AIST that responds to petting; Sony’s AIBO robotic dog and NeCORO robotic cat covered in synthetic fur used for therapeutic purposes; Secom My Spoon an automatic feeding robot; Sanyo robot for monitoring, delivering messages, and reminding about medicine and other devices to help on the problem of caring for the elderly. In continental Europe, there are a few robots in experimental tests as caregivers too. But are robots the best solution for caring for the elderly?Read More »Guest Post: CARING ROBOTS
Written by Prof. Antonio Diéguez
Universidad de Malaga
The public image of science is usually subjected to distortions tending to blur the nuances and to generate monolithic assessments. The mass media contribute to a large extent to the creation of disproportionate expectations in the next and spectacular benefits provided by scientific research, or on the contrary, to the creation of exaggerate concerns lacking in many occasions of a rational basis. This is the reason why any professional scientist with the required talent and vocation should currently assume the task of offering to the public clear and accessible information about the research underway in any field. In the present circumstances, the scientific divulgation cannot be a personal hobby of some scientists or an exclusive task of scientifically educated writers, but it must be a central aspect of scientific practice. Science needs a good public image for its survival –at least in the form it has had so far. If the scientists do not provide determinedly and abundantly the socially demanded information, then the citizens will look for it in less reliable sources (Internet has plenty of them), with the consequent proliferation of bad information. Information is like money, the counterfeit one finally circulates better than the good one.Read More »Guest Post : Synthetic Biology: Taking care of the public image
Recently I attended a fascinating Society for Applied Philosophy lecture by Shelly Kagan, entitled ‘What’s Wrong with Speciesism?’. Kagan began the lecture by explaining how, while teaching a course involving some of Peter Singer’s writings on non-human animals, he had begun to doubt the view, defended by Singer, that other things equal the suffering of animals matters no less than that of human beings.Read More »The Moral Significance of Animal Suffering
Pandas are notoriously picky eaters: they only eat bamboo. But a recent study has found that pandas are actually poorly adapted for their diet. Pandas apparently evolved from omnivorous bears. Whether as a consequence of a decrease in the availability of prey or an increase in bamboo, however, they shifted to an exclusively vegetarian diet about two million years ago. But they did not evolve the kind of digestive apparatus usually seen in herbivores. They have a carnivore’s digestive system, and they lack the gut flora required for extracting the maximum amount of energy from plant-based sources. Hence, perhaps, the fact that they spend so much of their time eating.Read More »Pandas, Humans, and Evolution: What is the state of nature?
* Note that this entry is being cross-posted at the Journal of Medical Ethics blog.
Introduction
Is prostitution harmful? And if it is harmful, should it be illegal to buy (or sell) sexual services? And if so, should there ever be any exceptions? What about for people with certain disabilities—say—who might find it difficult or even impossible to find a sexual partner if they weren’t allowed to exchange money for sex? Do people have a “right” to sexual fulfillment?Read More »Guest Post: Prostitution, harm, and disability: Should only people with disabilities be allowed to pay for sex?
Last week I attended a conference on the science of consciousness in Helsinki. While there, I attended a very interesting session on the Minimally Conscious State (MCS). This is a state that follows severe brain damage. Those diagnosed as MCS are thought to have some kind of conscious mental life, unlike those in Vegetative State. If that is right – so say many bioethicists and scientists – then the moral implications are profound. But what kind of conscious mental life is a minimally conscious mental life? What kind of evidence can we muster for an answer to this question? And what is the moral significance of whatever answer we favor? One takeaway from the session (for me, at least): it’s complicated.
Read More »Ethics of the Minimally Conscious State: It’s Complicated
The concept of authenticity has been receiving a lot of attention in the past few weeks due to two high profile cases. First, Caitlyn Jenner, a former Olympic gold medallist and TV personality who was until recently known as “Bruce”, debuted her new name and identity in an interview with the magazine Vanity Fair. Second, it was reported that Rachel Dolezal, the Spokane NAACP president, was allegedly born a white woman, and has been deceptively representing herself as a black woman.
The latter case has sparked a great deal of controversy that I do not intend to fully address here. Furthermore, although some commentators have drawn all things considered likewise comparisons between the two cases, it seems clear that Dolezal’s case involves a range of separate issues, which make an all things considered likewise comparison inappropriate; again, I do not intend to make such a comparison here. Rather, in this post, I shall explore one particular theme that has emerged in many discussions of these cases, namely the language of authenticity.Read More »Race, Gender, and Authenticity: Reflections on Rachel Dolezal and Caitlyn Jenner
Written By David Aldridge, Oxford Brookes University
This is a cross post from Dave Aldridge’s blog
Ahead of a talk to be given at the Institute of Education, Tom Bennett, behaviour guru and figurehead of the ResearchEd movement, invited questions via twitter that he hoped he could address in his seminar. One tweeter asked “Is it cruel to make [children] read/ write/ think in silence?” Bennett’s response on twitter was a one word, “no”, accompanied by this picture of guffawing muppets.Read More »Guest Post: Is it cruel to make children sit and work in silence?
By Joao Fabiano and Diego Caleiro (UC Berkeley, Biological Anthropology)
From single-celled to pluricellular to multicellular organisms or from hunter-gatherers to the EU, the history of evolutionary forces that resulted in human society is a history where cooperation has emerged at increasingly large scales. The major life transitions and, once human, the major cultural transitions have rearranged the fitness landscape of evolving entities in ways that increased the size of the largest existing coalitions. Notwithstanding, it seems that freewheeling evolution will not lead to satisfactory levels of global human cooperation in time to prevent severe risks. Nor it will lead to the preservation of human values in the long run; humans, human values, and human cooperation are in no way the end-point of evolutionary processes. Read More »What Got Us Here Won’t Get Us There: Failure Modes on the Way to Global Cooperation
