Cognitive enhancement, legalising opium, and cognitive biases
Suppose you want to enhance your cognition. A scientist hands you two drugs. Drug X has at least 19 controlled studies on the healthy individual showing it is effective, and while a handful of studies report a slight increase in blood press…
Read MoreShould men be allowed to discuss abortion?
@JimACEverett www.jimaceverett.com Feminists are kicking up quite a storm in Oxford at the moment. Oxford Students for Life have organized a debate on abortion to happen tomorrow (the 18th November, 2014), which has inspired some rather tr…
Read MoreOne Million Readers: Thank You
We are pleased to have reached our one millionth reader since our records began. Thank you to all our authors, guest posters, readers and commentators who have supported the blog over a number of years. And thanks to reader one million, who…
Read MoreA Methodological Worry for ‘Top Down’ Accounts of Human Rights
The language of human rights is pervasive both in academic literature and international legal practice. We often take the satisfaction of human rights to be a necessary condition for a state’s legitimacy, and the failure of a state to respe…
Read MoreWhy I Am Not a Utilitarian
Utilitarianism is a widely despised, denigrated and misunderstood moral theory. Kant himself described it as a morality fit only for English shopkeepers. (Kant had much loftier aspirations of entering his own “noumenal” world.) …
Read MoreDoing Good by Doing Nothing?
@JimACEverett www.jimaceverett.com A common theme running through debates on combating global problems like poverty and common change is the idea that something must be done. Usually, this is taken to mean that some prosocial behavi…
Read MoreSinnott-Armstrong on Implicit Moral Attitudes
On October 30th, Professor Walter Sinnott-Armstrong of Duke University gave the 2014 Wellcome Lecture in Neuroethics. His talk, “Implicit Moral Attitudes”, concerned the practical and theoretical implications of recent empirical research i…
Read MoreCan Bioethics be done without Theology? Guest Post from Charles Camosy
Guest Post: Charles Camosy, Associate Professor of Christian Ethics at Fordham University, New York City E-mail: ccamosy@gmail.com Twitter: @nohiddenmagenta The discipline of theological bioethics is in trouble. Especially as theology conti…
Read MoreAbortion on the grounds of sex
Apparently some UK doctors have been aborting babies because their parents don’t want a baby of that sex. In response the government is now planning to outlaw abortion on the grounds of sex. It is already illegal, however, so we must wonde…
Read MorePedophiles and homosexuals – apples and oranges?
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 peo…
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