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Why Wills and Kate must breed
As some may have noticed, today there is a wedding. It has been immensely costly, and while I do not for a moment resent that expenditure, the cost has an important ethical corollary. The money has been spent primarily to ensure dynastic continuity. By accepting our money for their Bollinger and bobbies, William and Kate…
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Would the End of the World really be so Bad?
As always, we sentient beings on earth are at risk of being wiped out by some global catastrophe. Some of the risks – diseases or meteorites – are old; others – nuclear weapons or global warming – are more recent. They are discussed very well in Nick Bostrom and Milan Cirkovic’s edited collection Global Catastrophic…
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Could Groupons Save the World?
Two-and-a-half year old web start-up Groupon is a stunningly successful company. It reportedly turned down a six billion US dollar buyout offer from Google in December, and Reuters reports that is now planning an initial public offering that may value the company at between $15-20 billion. It has achieved this staggering valuation with a simple…
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For sale: one womb
In a world where you shouldn’t have to wait for anything, why wait nine months for your child to be born? This is the marketing pitch of Silver Sling, a Manhattan-based surrogacy clinic. Silver Sling offers ‘chemically accelerated births’ that can shorten the duration of surrogate births to three months. Wealthy clients who wish to…
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How are future generations different from potential persons?
A debate piece in the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter by the philosophers Nicholas Espinoza and Martin Peterson (autotranslated version) on abortion rights has led to strong reactions in the Swedish blogosphere. The authors make two claims: First, that even people with liberal values can take issue with current abortion rights because it involves a goal…
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Was France right to ban the burqa?
This week France’s ban on people covering their faces in public comes into force, prohibiting people from wearing, among other things, burqas, niqabs and masks. This has been greeted with horror by many in the UK. But is France showing more sense than we are on this issue?
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A Judge’s Breakfast
Legal Realism has been caricaturised as a school that believes that judicial decisions are made according to what the judge has had for breakfast. Research conducted in Israel suggests that this may not be so far from the truth.
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What makes a good football player?
Most people believe that a meritocracy is the ideal system for distributing jobs and university places. But ‘merit’ is notoriously difficult to define, as a recent story involving Liverpool football club illustrates. Liverpool is not the all-conquering club it was in the 70s and 80s. Although it’s a big club, it doesn’t have the economic…
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Banks: Liberty or Regulation
Gordon Brown has just said that he made a big mistake about financial regulation. His remarks are in line with many politicians on the financial crisis: regulation failed therefore we need more regulation. But do we? Frideswide Square is a notorious traffic junction in Oxford, and it’s a nightmare. It has about 20 sets of…
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Stop bullfighting but carry on bullrunning, really?
“The only place where you could see life and death, i. e., violent death now that the wars were over, was in the bull ring and I wanted very much to go to Spain where I could study it” wrote Ernest Hemingway. These days he couldn’t go to Catalunya to find some inspiration because bullfighting…