In a particularly eye-catching pull quote in the November issue of The Atlantic, journalist and scholar Robert Wright claims, “The world’s gravest conflicts are not over ethical principles or disputed values but over disputed facts.”[1] The…

Tonight I participated in BBC’s “The Moral Maze”, discussing the recent reactions to a report by Dominic Cummings, an advisor to the education secretary, that mentioned that genetic factors have a big impact on educational outcomes. This ti…

A tragic case was recently reported of a man who died following botched care via the NHS’ telephone helpline. Suffering from blood poisoning, a series of errors, mis-recording and failure to listen meant that he was told simply to take the …

Last week Pieter Bonte gave a St. Cross seminar titled “Neither God nor Nature. Could the doping sinner be an exemplar of human(ist) dignity?” The talk is online as a mp3. Here are some of my notes:

By Luke Davies Follow Luke on Twitter.   A recent article in the New York Times has advocated extending the notion of personhood, and the rights associated with that status, to dogs. Gregory Burns, the author of the article, argued for…

In her first Winchester Lecture, ‘Who Turned the Trolley?’, presented in Oxford on 21 October, Frances Kamm discussed some of the recent views of Judith Thomson on so-called trolley cases. 

The Winchester Visiting Lecturerships were established in 1995 for the purpose of inviting visiting lecturers in the fields of International Relations, History, Philosophy, Religion, Theology or Law. We are grateful to the committee for thi…

Press Release: British Medical Journal Head to Head: Should athletes be allowed to use performance enhancing drugs? Stories about illegal doping in sport are a regular occurrence. On bmj.com today, experts debate whether athletes should be …

Imagine you have been set the following trolley problem by a villain. There is a central track, called CONTINUE. If you do nothing, the trolley will continue down this track, and kill whomever is at the end of it, then stop. Part way along …