Announcement: New Open Access ‘Journal of Practical Ethics’ Available
We are pleased to announce the first issue of the Journal of Practical Ethics, a new open-access journal in moral and political philosophy (and related areas) published by the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics. All the papers are fr…
Read MoreWhat grounds paternal obligations?
Last week, Laurie Shrage caused a bit of a stir on the blogosphere with her controversial article on the Stone, a New York Times philosophy blog, entitled “Is Forced Fatherhood Fair?” In the article, Shrage challenges the prevailing notion…
Read MoreAre cyborgs the future of humanity?
Yesterday’s Observer features two pieces about human enhancement in the prospect of the FutureFest festival in London in September (see here and here). The articles mention Bertolt Meyer, a Swiss man born without a left hand who was recentl…
Read MoreThe Permissibility of Refusing the MMR Vaccine and the Issue of Blame
Since November 2012, there have been more than 1,100 cases of measles in the Swansea area. To put these numbers into perspective, in 2011, there were 19 cases of cases of measles in the whole of Wales. Measles can result in pneumonia, loss …
Read MoreEmpathy ethics: How to get a lung for your child
By Julian Savulescu & Brian D. Earp [updated version – as of 17 April 2016] Sarah Murnaghan is a 10-year-old from Pennsylvania. Suffering from cystic fibrosis, she was likely to die without a lung transplant. Her situation was det…
Read MoreSkin switching, implicit racial bias and moral enhancement
A recent study has shown that a person’s implicit racial bias can be reduced if she spends some time experiencing her body as dark-skinned. Psychologists in Spain used an immersive virtual reality technique to allow participants to ‘see’ th…
Read MoreA WHITE MAN’S COURT
Is it a White Man’s Court? I went to a talk recently in which the International Criminal Court, the ICC, was accused of racial bias. The evidence seems pretty damning. Virtually no non-African has been targeted by the Court. Yet nobody …
Read MoreSecret snakes biting their own tails: secrecy and surveillance
To most people interested in surveillance the latest revelations that the US government has been doing widespread monitoring of its citizens (and the rest of the world), possibly through back-doors into major company services, is merely a c…
Read MoreCasinos should say: ‘Enough. Go home.’
Over about 14 months, Harry Kakavas lost $20.5 million in a casino in Melbourne. It could have been worse. He put about $1.5 billion on the table. He sued the casino. It knew or should have known, he said, that he was a pathological gambler…
Read MoreOne for the Road? . . .
It was announced yesterday that the J D Weatherspoon’s firm has been given the go-ahead to open a pub in a motorway service station. Is there anything morally problematic with this development?
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