The Right to Forget the Stock Market’s blemished Past
One of the great pleasures of studying human behaviour is to see that what we find in our experiments, what we theorize in our papers and textbooks – as unlikely and counterintuitive it appears to be – actually predicts what happens in so-c…
Read MoreHistorical Reconciliation in East Asia: How Optimistic Should We Be?
By Kei Hiruta In the latest episode of the Public Philosopher, Michael Sandel invites young men and women from China, Japan and South Korea to discuss national guilt and historical reconciliation. The conversation begins with factual questi…
Read MoreIn praise of organ-ised sport
By Dominic Wilkinson (@NeonatalEthics) The BBC reports today on a recent organ donation initiative in Brazil. This initiative has led to a 400% increase in the numbers of heart transplants in a local hospital. The waiting list for organs in…
Read MoreFood packaging matters more than informed consent to treatment
Packets of cigarettes carry pictures showing purchasers what their lungs or their arteries will look like if they carry on smoking. Consumers International and the World Obesity Federation are now suggesting that some foods should bear simi…
Read MoreOn Canada’s Proposed Bill C-24: The So-called ‘Strengthening Canadian Citizenship Act’
A new bill proposed by the Canadian government’s Citizenship and Immigration Minister, Chris Alexander, has been getting a lot of press recently. (You can find the bill here and the current Act here). Bill C-24, called by its proponents the…
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Expert workshop on cognitive enhancement device regulation: Are there ‘two worlds’ of devices?
Last week, we held an expert workshop with key stakeholders to discuss our recent Oxford Martin School policy paper. Our policy paper put forward proposals for how we thought cognitive enhancement devices such as brain stimulators should be…
Read MoreWhen the poison is the antidote: risky disaster research
A recent report by Lipsitch and Galvani warns that some virus experiments risk unleashing global pandemic. In particular, there are the controversial “gain of function” experiments seeking to test how likely bird flu is to go fr…
Read MoreHow Should I Vote?
Yesterday’s elections in the UK raised again an old question, which receives surprisingly little public discussion. Should I vote on the basis of my own self-interest (or the interest of my family), or should I vote on moral, or ‘other-rega…
Read MoreWas Marx Right?
In The German Ideology, Marx claimed that “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas”. The idea, roughly, is that the way the dominant class frame and view the world comes to be the ideology of the entire society. If…
Read MoreOn the Ethics of Tipping
At lunch-time, I will often venture out of the office for lunch to a sandwich shop with a friend. In my sandwich shop of choice, the staff have placed a small jar labelled ‘tips’ on the counter. Now, in the UK at least, sandwich shop staff…
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