Gambling on Liberty
Fixed Odd Betting Terminals (FOBTs) allow punters to bet up to £100 a time in casino games such as roulette. Bookmakers are allowed four terminals in each shop, and there are now around 35,000 of them in the UK. In the latest version of the…
Read MoreOn the nature of defiance
When a thug or a bully or a terrorist is threatening you to stop you doing something they don’t like, not doing it is not defying them, it is submitting to them. Even if you otherwise would not, to defy them you must do the very thing they …
Read MoreBorn this way? Selecting for sexual preference
Doctors Offering ‘Gay Gene’ To Same Sex Couples Wanting Gay Children: apparently Dr. William Strider at the Fertility Center of Chicago suggests that homosexual parents should have the option of increasing the chances of their kid being hom…
Read MoreAboriginal rights and refusal of treatment in Canada
Consider: An 11 year-old girl, J.J., is diagnosed with high-risk acute lymphoblastic leukemia, a type of cancer that arises in the bone marrow. She is put on a 32-day course of chemotherapy with an estimated success rate of over 90%. Her do…
Read MoreHow Could Julian Savulescu Still Be a Utilitarian
Guest post: Professor Valentin Muresan, University of Bucharest Professor Julian Savulescu writes: “People think I am a utilitarian, but I am not. I, like nearly everybody else, find Utilitarianism to be too demanding” . Why does he need to…
Read MoreMoral Offsetting
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…
Read MoreTreated like Animals, Guest Post by Christine Korsgaard
Guest Post: Christine Korsgaard, Harvard University On November 5, 2014, RT reported that Filipino workers in Saudi Arabia claimed that they were being “treated like animals.” On November 14, The Independent reported that the members of Pus…
Read MoreWhat are the ethics of using brain stimulation technologies for ‘enhancement’ in children?
New open access publication: announcement: In a recently published article, Hannah Maslen, Roi Cohen Kadosh, Julian Savulescu and I present an argument about the permissible (and not-so-permissible) uses of non-invasive brain stimulation te…
Read More“Ravines and Sugar Pills: Defending Deceptive Placebo Use” – New Open Access Publication
A placebo can be understood as a medical intervention that lacks direct specific therapeutic effects on the condition for which it has been prescribed, but which can nonetheless help to ameliorate a patient’s condition. In March 2013, a stu…
Read MoreIs it worth saving human lives at the cost of mistreating animals?
Guest Post: Emilian Mihailov, Research Centre in Applied Ethics, Univeristy of Bucharest The most persuasive argument for experimenting on animals is probably the claim that it is only through such research, that we save human lives. This d…
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