Geoengineering: Lessons from Human Bioengineering
[W]e have no non-radical solutions left to deal with climate change… either we face a radical climate catastrophe or we must radically shift our economy and modes of social organisation away from the current fossil fuel economy That was the…
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The Indignity of Imprisonment
Do we need to radically rethink the practice of imprisonment of criminals – not in the direction of novel forms of punishment, but rather in the form of vastly reducing punitive imprisonment altogether? While prisons are integr…
Read MoreA Wrong Turn, A Hundred Years Ago
Just over a hundred years ago, a car took a wrong turn. It happened to stop just in front of Gavrilo Princip, a would-be assassin. Princip took out his gun and shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife from point blank range. This triggere…
Read MorePrinciples for the Legalization of Trade in Rhino Horn
Last Wednesday night in Kenya, on a private ranch near Nanyuki, armed gangs killed four rhinoceroses for their horns. According to a representative from the Kenyan Wildlife Service, this could be the worst rhino-poaching incident the countr…
Read MoreEconomic arguments and assisted dying.
by Dominic Wilkinson (@NeonatalEthics) Lord Falconer’s assisted dying bill is being debated today in the House of Lords. In the past week or two there has discussion in the media of many of the familiar arguments for and against such a prop…
Read MoreWhen Are Objections ‘Religious’ Objections?: Hobby Lobby, Wheaton College, and Contraceptive Coverage
On June 30th, the Supreme Court of the United States handed down its decision in Burwell vs. Hobby Lobby. The case required the court to consider whether closely held for-profit companies owned by individuals with sincere religious objectio…
Read MoreWould Legal Assisted Suicide be the Final Triumph of Market Capitalism?
Tomorrow in the House of Lords Lord Falconer’s bill on assisted dying will be debated. The bill would allow those who are terminally ill and likely to die within six months to request life-ending drugs from their doctor for the patients to…
Read MoreA shocking discovery about thinking?
You’ve probably already seen the story. Participants in an experiment were asked to sit and think. The only distraction available was the possibility of giving themselves a mild electric shock. One third of women and two thirds of men…
Read MoreThank You Luis Suarez!
The world cup is winding down, and a lot of astonishing, surprising things happened throughout the tournament. But nothing offered more to people interested in morality than when Luis Suarez, Uruguayan football star and Premier League playe…
Read MoreThe pill to banish painful memories—forget it!
It is a curious feature of the late 20th and early 21st centuries that the media regales readers and viewers almost daily with exciting details of breakthroughs in medical science: new cures, reversals of previous certainties about old reme…
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