Discriminating happiness. Journal of Practical Ethics 2(2) is out!
by Dominic Wilkinson, Managing editor JPE, @Neonatalethics The latest issue of the journal is out this week: Valerie Tiberius examines the relevance of different theories of wellbeing for the important practical task of providing life-advic…
Read MoreHelping Friends
Guest post: Valerie Tiberius, University of Minnesota. Read the related paper: How Theories of Well-being Can Help Us Help in the latest issue of the Journal of Practical Ethics. I have a friend I’ll call Liam who is ruining his life. Liam…
Read MoreBeing Angry at Zoella – What Moral Outrage Tells About Us
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 a…
Read MoreThe Ethics of Humor
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 prof…
Read MoreDisability and Minimally Decent Samaritanism
This week, The Court of Appeal in the UK ruled that bus companies are not legally required to force parents with buggies to make way for wheelchair users in designated bays on vehicles. This ruling overturned a 2013 County Court judgement …
Read MoreWhere are you from? What is it worth?
A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine posted a New York Times article on Facebook, where the author, Lev Golinklin, shared his difficulties with coming to terms with where he was from: “Well, technically I’m from the Russian-speaking regi…
Read MoreChristine Korsgaard on our Moral Obligations to Animals [Uehiro Lecture 2]
by Karamvir Chadha @karamvirchadha What are our moral obligations to animals? This was the subject of Christine Korsgaard’s Uehiro lecture on 2 December 2014, the second of a three-lecture series on the moral and legal standing of animals.…
Read MoreChristine Korsgaard: Fellow Creatures (Lecture 1)
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 fir…
Read MoreLimiting the damage from cultures in collision
A Man in Black has a readable twitter essay about the role of chan culture in gamergate, and how the concepts of identity and debate inside a largish subculture can lead to an amazing uproar when they clash with outside cultures. A brief re…
Read MorePrometheus and the Drive to Mastery
Writers who express caution about the over-enthusiastic embrace of new technologies, such as Michael Sandel, who worries about human enhancement and genetic engineering, and Clive Hamilton, who worries about geoengineering, sometimes warn u…
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