Oxford Martin School Seminar: Robert Rogers and Paul Van Lange on Social Dilemmas
In a joint event on November 15th, Prof Robert Rogers and Prof Paul van Lange presented their scientific work related to social dilemmas. Social dilemmas are situations in which private interests conflict with collective interests. This mea…
Read MoreGet your nasty Platonic hands off my kids, Mr. Gove
My book of the year, by a very wide margin, is Jay Griffiths’ splendid ‘Kith: The Riddle of the Childscape’ (Hamish Hamilton, 2013). Amongst her many virtues is a loathing of Plato’s Republic. Here she is, in typical…
Read MoreIs it morally permissible for parents to encourage their children to play high-impact sports?
Concussions are prevalent in high-impact and much-beloved sports such as American and Australian football, rugby, and hockey. Concussions are harmful – recent studies link repeated concussions to degraded cognitive performance along a numbe…
Read MoreBeyond 23andMe’s Shutdown: The Role of the FDA in the Future of Direct-to-Consumer Genetic Testing
Kyle Edwards, Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and The Ethox Centre, University of Oxford Caroline Huang, The Ethox Centre, University of Oxford An article based on this blog post has now been published in the May – June 2014 Hastin…
Read MoreIs Two -Thirds of What We Say Immoral?
Allegations that Nigella Lawson, professional domestic goddess, was an inveterate drug taker caused a media, twitter, blog and water-cooler storm. Even after the initial shock subsided, column inches have been devoted to her relationship wi…
Read MoreA Puzzle about Parenting
Consider the following case. Sikes, walking home late one evening, comes across an envelope containing a thousand pounds outside a neighbour’s house. He’s pretty sure it belongs to the neighbour, as she’d told him she would be withdrawing t…
Read MoreCaesarean Sections, Autonomy and Consent
In the past week in the UK, an Italian woman has claimed that a health trust had carried out a Caesarean section on her against her will. Whilst details of the case are still emerging, it appears that the woman had been detained unde…
Read MoreIn praise of insult
You have no right to be free from insult. Indeed, sometimes you may deserve to be insulted. Let us take a case that brings this into sharp focus: the Tory chief whip who lost his job because… well, we still don’t know exactly why because it…
Read MoreThe Situational Judgement Test – a great tool for the wrong job?
Next week, thousands of final year medical students will sit a Situational Judgement Test (SJT) as part of the application for their first medical jobs. This will be the second year that the Foundation School Application System (FPAS) has u…
Read MoreInvasion from the blue planet: are we protecting Mars too much?
Are we overprotective of Mars? That is the claim made by Alberto G. Fairén and Dirk Schulze-Makuch in a recent commentary in Nature Geoscience. They argue that current planetary protection policies that try to prevent bodies in the solar sy…
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