In an interesting recent essay in the Atlantic – ‘Is it Possible to Wage a Just Cyberwar?’ – Patrick Lin, Fritz Allhoff, and Neil Rowe argue that events such as the Stuxnet cyberattack on Iran suggest that the way we fight wars is changing, as well as the rules that govern them. It is indeed… Read More »Cyberwarfare: No New Ethics Needed
Most of us think that intention has great significance in practical ethics. If you barge into me, my reaction will be very different if I believe you intended to do so from the case in which I think it was an accident. And if you believe the so-called ‘doctrine of double effect’, you will think… Read More »Turning Cardinal Newman on his Head: Just how bad is a bad intention?
Stephen Gough, over a series of sentences, has served nearly six years in custody in the UK for refusing to wear clothes in public. He shows no sign of changing his view on the importance of nudity, and it is conceivable that he will spend the rest of life behind bars. Why does he do… Read More »The Naked Truth?
Recently , UNICEF launched their Children’s Rights and Business Principles, the sixth of which says that businesses should ‘use marketing and advertising that respect and support children’s rights’. This is hard to deny, as is the claim that many companies are seeking unjustifiably to manipulate children and their parents for profit. Indeed there seems little reason to restrict… Read More »A World without Advertising?
Professor Paul Keim, who chairs the US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, recently recommended the censoring of research that described the mutations which led to the transformation of the H5N1 bird-flu virus into a form that can be transmitted between humans through droplets in breath (in ferrets, the number of mutations required is frighteningly… Read More »H5N1: Why Open the Stable Door?
Eve Richardson, chief executive of the National Council for Palliative Care and the Dying Matters coalition, argues that the government needs radically to improve end-of-life care in the UK, and makes several excellent suggestions about how that might be done. I agree wholeheartedly, and would like to add a suggestion of my own: that end-of-life… Read More »Ending life and end-of-life care
For many of us, there is probably no better time of year to think about weakness of will. Some will be mentally preparing themselves to resist the temptations of the Christmas table, while others, already knowing that in their case such preparations are pointless, will be assuring themselves that a new year’s resolution to revisit… Read More »A Slave to Christmas Pudding?
Every Saturday evening, and often on other evenings too, my daughters sit goggling at the TV talent show X Factor. Am I witnessing the long tentacles of the dreaded ‘celebrity culture’ we are said to inhabit reaching into my living room? I think not. I confess I find the show tedious, but as part of… Read More »Celebrity Culture
Katherine Viner of the Guardian has just chosen The Smiths’ Meat is Murder as her favourite album. The album came out in 1985, in the middle of a decade in which I myself was an enthusiastic advocate of vegetarianism. I began by being swayed by the arguments of Stephen Clark, but it was the horrible… Read More »Meat is Murder?
Like many in the UK, I was gripped last week by the reports from Wales about the search for four trapped miners, and saddened to hear of their deaths. Readers outside the UK perhaps heard nothing, or very little, about this story, thought it dominated the news here. One important reason for that, of course,… Read More »Fellow-Citizens, Foreigners, and Statistical Lives
