Our moral reactions are easily influenced by a variety of factors. One of them is anxiety. When people are confronted with disturbing experiences like mortality salience (i.e., being made aware of their own eventual death), they tend to aff…

There is another case in the news where someone is making a legal bid to allow his doctors help him to die. These cases are always heartrending. It’s a cliché that hard cases make bad law. But it’s a cliché because it’s true. If we look at …

How strongly wedded are people to their political preferences? The received wisdom amongst political journalists and pollsters is that most people can be counted on to vote for one major party or another, and only a relatively small percent…

To what extent do self-interest and altruism conflict? In my latest Quartz article, I suggest that they conflict less than you might think.

Advocates of even the mildest gun control reform in the US were dealt a serious blow yesterday, as the Senate failed to enact an expansion of background checks for gun purchases online and at gun shows.   Some have been quick to gloat over …

He never expressed doubt in anything, I think that was his – one of his strengths. He never expressed doubt. Once he’d made his mind up that something was right it was right. – General Pinochet’s personal driver, com…

By Kei Hiruta  Political activists are laughing everywhere. They mock the powerful and ridicule the corrupt, whether the target is a Middle Eastern dictator, a North American CEO, or a recently deceased British Prime Minister. On the street…

Some researchers in the US recently conducted an ‘experiment in the law as algorithm’. (One of the researchers involved with the project was interviewed by Ars Technia, here.) At first glance, this seems like quite a simple undertaking for …

I have just watched someone die. Just one person. But a whole ecosystem has been destroyed. Everyone’s roots wind round everyone else’s. Rip up one person, and everyone else is compromised, whether they know it or not. This is true, too, fo…

Recently a debate erupted in France over a proposal to use state funds to pay for sex surrogates for the disabled. News reports can be found here and here. Some advocates for the disabled applauded the move, including the French Association…