The 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?
Read MoreCry havoc and let slip the robots of war?
Stop killer robots now, UN asks: the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions Christof Heyns has delivered a report about Lethal Autonomous Robots arguing that there should be a moratorium on the development o…
Read MorePodcast: David Nutt, ‘The current laws on drugs and alcohol – ineffective, dishonest and unethical?’
Professor David Nutt argues in this podcast of his lecture, that whilst the use of the law to control drug use is long established, it remains unproven in efficacy. Although seemingly obvious that legal interdictions should work there is li…
Read MorePodcast: Folk Psychology, the Reactive Attitudes and Responsibility
In this podcast of her recent lecture, Professor Jeanette Kennett explores the connections between the folk psychological project of interpretation, the reactive attitudes and responsibility, (podcast ). The first section argues that the re…
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