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Tis’ the season of pardons

Tis’ the season of pardons

This year Alan Turing got a posthumous royal pardon for his conviction of homosexuality. Justice Minister Chris Grayling said: “Turing deserves to be remembered and recognised for his fantastic contribution to the war effort and his legacy to science. A pardon from the Queen is a fitting tribute to an exceptional man.” Last year I blogged here on why asking for a pardon of Alan Turing might be a mistake. I still stand by my criticism: the fact that Turing was exceptional doesn’t mean he was above the (unjust) law or that he is more morally deserving than any other victim of that law.

Meanwhile in Russia, an amnesty has been called for 20,000 prisoners. This includes plenty of political prisoners, most notably members of Pussy Riot and Mikhail Khodorkovsky. The official reason for this seems to be the 20th anniversary of the adoption of Russian constitution, but in practice it might of course be a festive way of defusing some criticisms before the winter Olympics. Should the freed dissidents and their supporters now feel grateful to Putin?

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Emergence’s devil haunts the moral enhancer’s kingdom come

It is 2025. Society has increasingly realised the importance of breaking evolution’s chains and enhancing the human condition. Large grants are awarded for building sci-fi-like laboratories to search for and create the ultimate moral enhancer. After just a few years, humanity believes it has made one of its most major breakthroughs: a pill which will rid our morality of all its faults. Without any side-effects, it vastly increases our ability to cooperate and to think rationally on moral issues, while also enhancing our empathy and our compassion for the whole of humanity. By shifting individuals’ socio-value orientation towards cooperation, this pill will allow us to build safe, efficient and peaceful societies. It will cast a pro-social paradise on earth, the moral enhancer kingdom come.

I believe we better think twice before endeavouring ourselves into this pro-social paradise on the cheap. Not because we will lose “the X factor”, not because it will violate autonomy, and not because such a drug would cause us to exit our own species. Even if all those objections are refuted, even if the drug has no side-effects, even if each and every human being, by miracle, willingly takes the drug without any coercion whatsoever, even then, I contend we could still have trouble.

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Happiness, meaning and well-being

If someone were to ask you what you want from life, how would you reply? Plausible answers might include: ‘to be happy’, ‘to be successful’, ‘to make a difference’, or perhaps ‘to experience as much as possible’. Whatever these aspirations mean in their detail, they capture various implicit assessments of what we think it means to live a life that is good for us. A recent psychological study presents interesting data that suggests that two of the things we might want in our lives – happiness and meaning – sometimes do not go together. In fact, some of the things that lead to a life being happy are negatively associated with it being meaningful and some of the things that seem to confer meaning detract from happiness. If this occasional incompatibility is in fact the case, does this mean that we must sometimes make a decision about which to pursue?Read More »Happiness, meaning and well-being

Pursuing your dreams when drunk

For a long time I wanted to go to Indonesia on a holiday, to see the rice fields, the buffalo’s and the wayang puppets. But for some reason it took me actually years to realize this. The reason why I didn’t go had nothing to do with practical difficulties: I had money, time, a travel companion, it was more a psychological threshold: the travel seemed so important to me that I felt I couldn’t just book it, I was thinking that people would find it decadent to just book a trip to Indonesia, and there always seemed to be some other travel destination that had more priority. Now this story became very popular in the news and on twitter. Luke Harding, a 19-year-old youngster went clubbing in the UK and woke up in the destination of his dreams, Paris.

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Should exceptional people receive exceptional medical treatment?

There are approximately 150,000 human deaths each day around the world. Most of those deaths pass without much notice, yet in the last ten days one death has received enormous, perhaps unprecedented, attention. The death and funeral of Nelson Mandela have been accompanied by countless pages of newsprint and hours of radio and television coverage. Much has been made of what was, by any account, an extraordinary life. There has been less attention, though, on Mandela’s last months and days. One uncomfortable question has not been asked. Was it ethical for this exceptional individual to receive treatment that would be denied to almost everyone else?Read More »Should exceptional people receive exceptional medical treatment?

Professor Tim Scanlon: When Does Equality Matter?

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2013 Uehiro Lectures by Professor Tim Scanlon (Department of Philosophy, Harvard University) We are very grateful to Professor Tim Scanlon (Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity, Harvard University) for delivering the 10th Annual Uehiro Lectures in December 2013, entitled “When Does Equality Matter?” Lecture 1: “Equal Treatment”  AUDIO  Lecture 2:”Equal Status” … Read More »Professor Tim Scanlon: When Does Equality Matter?

Podcast: Genetic Parenthood, Assisted Reproduction, and the Values of Parental Love

On the evening of Thursday 28 December, Prof. Justin Oakley, Deputy Director of the Centre for Human Bioethics at Monash University, gave a fascinating and suggestive lecture on whether there is reason for the state to broaden access to IVF treatment for childless people as well as facilitating adoption.Read More »Podcast: Genetic Parenthood, Assisted Reproduction, and the Values of Parental Love

Podcast: Is Networking Immoral?

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Guest Post: Ned Dobos, University of New South Wales

This post is a summary of a talk presented by Dr. Dobos at the University of Oxford. Listen to the Podcast

Despite being ubiquitous in both the public and private sectors, “networking” has largely escaped ethical scrutiny. But is it the perfectly innocuous business and career-advancement strategy it is presumed to be? Let us concentrate on a specific kind of career networking: networking aimed at increasing one’s prospects of prevailing in a formal competitive selection process for a job or university placement. That is the end, so what is the means? How exactly is networking supposed to deliver this advantage? Experts tend to answer with at least one of the following responses: 1) networking is about building relationships with people that are (or might be) in a position to benefit your career; 2) networking is about demonstrating your worth to these people.

On either account, networking arguably involves seeking unfair advantage.

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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 means that people facing a social dilemma have to decide whether to prioritise either their own short-term interests or the long-term interests of a group. Many real-life situations are social dilemmas. For example, as individuals we would (economically) benefit from using public motorways without paying taxes to maintain them, but if all acted according to their self-interest, no motorways would be built and the whole society would be worse off. In the academic literature, the three types of social dilemmas that are discussed most prominently are the Prisoner’s Dilemma, the Public Goods Dilemma, and the Tragedy of the Commons. All three types have been modelled as experimental games, and research from different fields like psychology, neuroscience, and behavioural economics uses these games to tackle the question of under which conditions people are willing to cooperate with one another in social dilemmas, instead of maximising their self-interest. The ultimate goal of such research is to be able to give recommendations about how to solve social dilemmas in society.

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Get 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 typically swashbuckling style:

‘Excessive laughter is banned and so is the liquid superfluity of metaphor. Plato would rid his ideal state of anything that could arouse emotion, mischief, wildness or fun….so ghastly is his Republic that it could be interpreted as satire. But, generally, its ambition has been taken with deadly seriousness as a founding text on the education of boys. The purpose of The Republic is to school its youth to be good soldiers engaged in unending war to take the resources of neighbouring lands. It is a handbook for the education of imperialists.

Brick by brick, Plato builds the walls of his citadel of control, hierarchy and obedience. His ideal republic is obsessed with rule – not only the rule of command, but the rule of measurement… the heart of his vision [is] that Apollo, god of measure, metre, civilisation and, surely, god of metronomes, should keep Dionysus, god of the Romantic movement, god of wildness and nature, firmly under his thumb.’ 1

Familiar? It should be – at least to UK readers. It’s the policy of Michael Gove and his rightly vilified Department. They want to produce a generation of nerdish measurers – people who wield rulers rather than wands, and who write in Excel rather than blank verse.

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