During the year I’ve just spent in the US, several of the ethical issues commonly discussed in the media – gay marriage, assisted suicide, whether there should be universal health care, along with several others – have seemed to me largely unproblematic in themselves. The main issue in each case is how to deal politically… Read More »Abortion and Equality
It is of course nearly the ‘silly season’, but the amount of attention paid in recent days to Carolyn Bourne’s critical email to her future daughter-in-law Heidi Withers about her manners is remarkable. Most of the rules Bourne mentions concern the table manners of guests: 1) Don’t declare what you will and will not eat.… Read More »The Ethics of Etiquette
Many since the nineteenth century, including Ghandi and Churchill, have said that a society should be judged by how it treats its weakest members. They must be right – although of course it’s not the only relevant measure. The Panorama programme which uncovered the systematic abuse of highly vulnerable people by staff at the Winterbourne… Read More »The Savage in Us All
As always, we sentient beings on earth are at risk of being wiped out by some global catastrophe. Some of the risks – diseases or meteorites – are old; others – nuclear weapons or global warming – are more recent. They are discussed very well in Nick Bostrom and Milan Cirkovic’s edited collection Global Catastrophic… Read More »Would the End of the World really be so Bad?
After the tsunami of 11 March, many thousands of people in northern Japan have lost their homes or are in dire need of medical and other supplies. The Oxfam website has a special page on the disaster through which you can donate using a debit or credit card. Other pages enable you to help Ivory… Read More »Above and Beyond …?
In book 4 of Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus’s son Telemachos arrives in Sparta to quiz Menelaos on whether Odysseus is still alive and if so where he might be. Menelaos reduces everyone (including himself) to tears by telling everyone how sad he is that Odysseus hasn’t made it home. He then says it’s time for them… Read More »Good Grief?
Roger Crisp writes …
Plato’s allegory of the Cave (Republic 514a-517a) is perhaps the most famous image in the history of philosophy. Socrates describes a group of people living underground, bound so that they can see only in front of them. Behind them burns a fire, and in front of the fire there is a path with a barrier. Other people carry objects that project above the barrier, casting shadows on the wall in front of the prisoners. Naturally, the prisoners believe the truth to be nothing other than the shadows. ‘Strange prisoners’, says Socrates’s companion, Glaucon. ‘They’re like us’, Socrates answers.
This passage resonated with me during the recent mid-term elections here in the US. Liberal commentators were already expecting the worst after the landmark Supreme Court ruling in January, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, that the government cannot limit corporate funding of independent political broadcasts. That ruling was described by President Obama as ‘a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies, and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans’. During the most recent elections, for example, Goldman Sachs (which you may remember received $10 billion in George Bush’s ‘Troubled Asset Relief Program’) gave the Republican party $1.2 million.
Roger Crisp writes… In his new book The Moral Landscape, Sam Harris claims that science 'reveals' values to us. Kwame Anthony Appiah is one of the many who have pointed out that Harris makes the common mistake of seeking to derive an 'ought' from a series of mere 'is' statements, a mistake pointed out by David… Read More »Science and Morality
By Roger Crisp Two recent pieces of news highlighted a major difference between modern and ancient attitudes to the moral status of the human fetus. On the one hand, archaeologists have suggested that a burial of ninety-seven infants at a Roman villa in Hambleden is evidence of systematic infanticide of children born to prostitutes working… Read More »Roman Infanticide, Modern Abortion
by Roger Crisp
Taking drugs to improve one’s sporting performance seems, on the face of it, a paradigmatic example of a wrong action. It combines two activities usually considered shameful: the use of banned substances, and cheating.
But on closer inspection the issue is more complicated. The use of some drugs, such as nicotine or caffeine (both of which might enhance performance in some cases), carries little or no stigma, and the charge of cheating would be inappropriate were the drugs in question explicitly permitted.
