-
Cross Post: Nudging for Better Beliefs
This is the third in a series of blogposts by the members of the Expanding Autonomy project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Written By: Oscar A. Piedrahita & Matthew Vermaire, COGITO, University of Glasgow. Don’t you find that other people’s beliefs are always getting in the way of progress? They seem…
-
Medical assistance in dying: what are we talking about?
Alberto Giubilini Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics Medical assistance in dying – or “MAiD”, to use the somehow infelicitous acronym – is likely to be a central topic in bioethics this year. That might not be true of bioethics as an academic field, where MAiD has been widely discussed over the past 40 years.…
-
Outsourcing Without Fear?
This is the second in a series of blogposts by the members of the Expanding Autonomy project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. by Neil Levy As Adam Carter emphasises in the first post in this series, offloading cognitive capacities comes at a cost: the more we depend on external scaffolding and supports to perform…
-
Event Summary: Morality and Personality
by Roger Crisp On 2 November 2023, at one of the most well-attended (in-person and remotely) New St Cross Ethics seminars to date, Professor Predrag Cicovacki, Professor Emeritus in Philosophy at the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA, USA presented a fascinating lecture on ‘Morality and Personality’.
-
Event Summary: New St Cross Special Ethics Seminar: Should people have indefinite lifespans? Ethical and social considerations in life-extension, Professor João Pedro de Magalhães
Written by: Dr Amna Whiston On Thursday, 16th November 2023, Professor João Pedro de Magalhães, a prominent microbiologist specialising in ageing and longevity research, gave an engaging and personable New St Cross Ethics Seminar entitled: ‘Should people have indefinite lifespans? Ethical and social considerations in life-extension?’ Following a brief introduction to the biology of…
-
On Grief and Griefbots
Written by Cristina Voinea This blogpost is a prepublication draft of an article forthcoming in THINK Large Language Models are all the hype right now. Amongst the things we can use them for, is the creation of digital personas, known as ‘griefbots’, that imitate the way people who passed away spoke and wrote. This…
-
Is Animal Liberation Speciesist?
Written by Joseph Moore This year, Peter Singer published Animal Liberation Now, a significantly updated version of his 1975 animal rights classic. Both the original and revised text argue that humans should refrain from inflicting unnecessary suffering on non-human animals, especially the cruel practices still commonly employed in factory farming and animal experimentation. And as…
-
Cross-post: Fairness and Freedom in Public Health Policy – On the need for a Humanities-based approach to public health policy
by Alberto Giubilini Originally posted on the Oxford Medical Humanities website Multidisciplinary Conference, Oxford, 23 and 24 Oct 2023 This conference explored two distinct but related issues in public health. One is the extent to which individual freedom could be restricted in the pursuit of public health goals. The other is whose freedom could be…
-
Playing the Game of Faces with AI
Written by Edmond Awad In the popular series “Game of Thrones” (and the corresponding “A Song of Ice and Fire” novels), the “Game of Faces” is a training method used by the Faceless Men, an enigmatic guild of assassins. This method teaches trainees to convincingly adopt the face of others for their covert missions.…