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Is it legitimate to ask opponents of embryonic stem cell therapy whether they support IVF?
by Dominic Wilkinson In the news this week is the first US officially-sanctioned human trial of embryonic stem cells. A patient with spinal cord injury has received an injection of embryo-derived stem cells. Predictably, the news has not been received positively by those who are opposed to research with embryonic stem cells. The development, however,…
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Sam Harris, the Naturalistic Fallacy, and the Slipperiness of “Well-Being”
This post is about the main argument of Sam Harris’s new book The Moral Landscape. Harris argues that there are objective truths about what’s morally right and wrong, and that science can in principle determine what they are, all by itself. As I’ll try to demonstrate here, Harris’s argument cannot succeed. I call the argument…
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Individual privacy and the conduct of web users
From October the 12th to the 14th London will host the RSA conference, which gathers together information security experts from across the world to discuss the most pertinent emerging issues in information security. The safeguarding of users’ privacy is one of the most important and frequently discussed issues in the field of information security, and…
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Benefit cuts for large, workless families
The UK's culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, has suggested that the state should limit the provision of social security benefits to large, unemployed families. Hunt said last week that The number of children that you have is a choice and what we're saying is that if people are living on benefits, then they make choices but…
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Should I love you as you are?
Last Saturday I attended an interesting conference about "Reason, Theology and the Genome " organized by the McDonald centre for theology, Ethics and Public Life in Oxford. I noticed that there was a general agreement, among speakers, about the intrinsic moral value of unconditional love of parents toward their children. Apparently parental unconditional love is…
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Virtue is back, and I’m worried about my mortgage
Patients want wise, kind, good, trustworthy, empathetic people around them when they are in pain or dying. For most patients, an ethically good decision will be one made in conversation with such a person. The real business of ethics, then, is not to determine whether Kant would frown on a particular decision, but to determine…
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Trying to get to the bigger moral picture
Jeff McMahan's recent piece in the New York Times has provoked a lot of discussion (including two pieces here). He argued that just as it is bad for animals to suffer at the hands of humans, so is it bad when they suffer in the wild. Moreover, since there are vastly more animals in the…
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Science and Morality
Roger Crisp writes… In his new book The Moral Landscape, Sam Harris claims that science 'reveals' values to us. Kwame Anthony Appiah is one of the many who have pointed out that Harris makes the common mistake of seeking to derive an 'ought' from a series of mere 'is' statements, a mistake pointed out by David…
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Should we force parents to vaccinate their children? No: let’s just scare them instead
by Rebecca Roache The BBC recently reported that some homeopaths are offering their patients homeopathic remedies designed to replace the MMR vaccine. Given that the efficacy of homeopathic remedies is notoriously unproven, this points to the worrying conclusion that some parents who have chosen a homeopathic alternative to the MMR vaccine believe that their children are…
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Spying on people for fun and profit
A new company, Internet Eyes, promises to crowdsource monitoring of surveillance cameras by using online users to watch footage and report suspicious activity. They would get rewarded 'up to £1,000' if they press the alarm button to report something useful. Not unexpectedly the anti-CCTV groups really dislike the idea. The Information Commissioner is somewhat sceptical…