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A blog post late last month by Richard Smith, former editor of the BMJ, has provoked a storm of criticism and controversy. Provocatively entitled, “Dying of Cancer is the Best Death”, the author argues that a death from cancer is preferable and closes, controversially, with:

“…let’s stop wasting billions trying to cure cancer, potentially leaving us to die a much more horrible death.”

To be fair, the points Smith attempted to make in his article have been taken to their emotional extreme by his critics – so much so that he has written a follow-up post better explaining his (far more moderate) views.

In any case, two questions come to mind. Might cancer indeed be the best, or least worst, death? And is it possible money allocated to cancer treatment and research could be better spent elsewhere? The first will be addressed in this piece – the latter, on the other hand, cannot be done justice in this given space (and may be the subject of a follow-up post).Read More »Cancer – The Best Way to Die?

A recent blogpost on 3 Quarks Daily satirised the idea of ‘moral offsetting’. Moral offsetting would work like carbon offsetting. With carbon offsetting, you purchase carbon credits to offset against your emissions – for instance, you might give money to a private company that plants trees, to offset your transatlantic flights. Moral offsetting works in a similar way: whenever you indulge in behavior of dubious morality (say eating meat, or buying clothes made in a sweatshop), your transgression would be offset. The simplest way to offset would be through a donation to a charity.Read More »Moral Offsetting

If you are like me you did not know who Zoe Sugg – known as Zoella – was before she published the fastest selling debut novel ever, “Girl Online”. Since then, I learned that Sugg is a video blogger on YouTube, publishing tips about beauty and life. More than 9 million people have subscribed to her channels (Ref). My immediate suspicion was that pretty soon snobbish intellectuals would start writing articles about how the success of a book written by a vlogger would indicate the end of the world. Yet, the backlash came in a different form. Shortly after the book was published, people started to question how much writing Sugg did and how much help she got: Did she write the novel herself? The publisher subsequently admitted that she had help (“To be factually accurate, you would need to say Zoe Sugg did not write the book Girl Online on her own,” Ref) and a lot of people on the internet got morally outraged.

Read More »Being Angry at Zoella – What Moral Outrage Tells About Us

Clinton Cards recently apologized for a Christmas card listing “10 reasons why Santa Claus must live on a Council Estate” (sample reasons: “He only works once a year”; “He drinks alcohol during working hours”). Predictably, some people professed outrage over the card (which seems to me mildly offensive, but not enough to get worked up over) and equally predictably some people slammed the reaction as an excess of political correctness (whatever that means). Humor is very often at someone’s expense. In fact, some people have suggested that making the person who laughs feel superior to the butt of the joke is the essence of humor. That theory is rather implausible, but we certainly don’t want a blanket ban on jokes that target other people. When is it okay to tell jokes at the expense of others and when isn’t it?Read More »The Ethics of Humor

We are delighted that Christine Korsgaard, Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University, has accepted our invitation to deliver the Uehiro Lectures in Oxford. The title of the series is Fellow Creatures, and this first fascinating and suggestive lecture – delivered on 1 December 2014 — is called ‘Animals, Human Beings, and Persons’. One primary purpose of this lecture is to clarify the similarities and differences between those three kinds of creature, and to clear the ground of some misunderstandings.Read More »Christine Korsgaard: Fellow Creatures (Lecture 1)

Australian columnist and TV personality Mia Freedman has been caught in a social media storm after comparing pedophiles to gay people. Freedman’s gaffe didn’t warrant the furious response it got; the response seems mainly the product of people’s inability to understand how analogies and similes work. Freedman, arguing in favor of a public sex offender’s register, claimed that we ought to expect pedophiles to continue to be a danger to children, because they can’t change who they’re attracted to, just like gay people can’t change who they’re attracted to. Freedman’s point was that we used to think that gay people could be ‘cured’; we now accept that that’s a fantasy. So we should say the same thing about pedophiles.

Read More »Pedophiles and homosexuals – apples and oranges?

In Japan, being good will soon be a formal subject in school education. The Japanese education ministry must develop textbooks and curricula to teach morality, and tests to grade it, which occasions a host of interesting practical questions (for a thoughtful list). In addition to practical questions about how to implement such a program, there are theoretical questions about whether trying to do so is wise. Moral education has a troubled past in Japan; it was scratched in the 1960s by the Americans because they suspected it taught racism and blind obedience to the emperor. Nevertheless, the idea of teaching moral values seems to be gaining steam internationally. In Britain, for instance, the Jubilee Centre for Characters and Values at the University of Birmingham hopes to form the moral character of British pupils (another attempt). And it just announced the launch of a free online course designed to teach people how to build a morally good character.

Read More »Is there Value in Teaching Moral Values?