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Cyber-war – the rhetoric of a disruptive and non-destructive warfare
Mariarosaria Taddeo BBC news (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8511711.stm) reported yesterday that the US Senate is about to appoint Lt General Keith Alexander as head of the U.S. Cyber Command (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Cyber_Command). This is a United States armed forces’ sub-unified command. The USCybercom, as it is abbreviated, manages USA cyber-warfare. The existence of this command and the military career of…
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A Secular Foothold?
“Insofar as modern liberal discourse rests on a distinction between reasons that emerge in the course of disinterested observation — secular reasons — and reasons that flow from a prior metaphysical commitment, it hasn’t got a leg to stand on.” And so Stanley Fish concludes his recent column about the role of secular reasons and…
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Hysteria over a hysterectomy
The Family Court in Brisbance this week authorised a hysterectomy for a severely disabled 11 year old girl. Disability groups have branded the decision an abuse of human rights and called for a law prohibiting the sterilisation of disabled children.
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Breakfast with Satan
At the beginning of my journalistic career I went to interview a chap called Magnus Malan. It was in Pretoria, and early in the morning. General Malan had been at the heart of South Africa’s apartheid government. He’d been head of the army and the Minister of Defence. He had, no doubt, been responsible for…
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Castration and conscience
A recent editorial in the British Medical Journal (Grubin D, Beech A, BMJ 2010; 340:c74) discusses the efficacy and ethics of chemical castration for sex offenders. Its efficacy is not in doubt. Recidivism rates of less than 5% over long periods are consistently reported. The expected rate, absent ‘treatment’, is 50% or more. But…
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Jumping the Shark
Julian mentioned in passing the other day that he thought it would not obviously be immoral, and perhaps even morally desirable, to eliminate all shark species from the earth. The reasons he gave related to their limited ecological role, the fact that sharks only serve to further deplete the already under-populated reserves of bony fish…
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Our Lethal Moral Ideals: Having a Child to Save Another
By: Julian Savulescu In an article in the New York Times, Lisa Belkin relates the story of Laurie Strongin Allen Goldberg who tried to use PGD to create a sibling to provide bone marrow to treat their son, Henry, suffering from Fanconi anemia. Congress, however, shut down the lab that was working on P.G.D., calling…
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Do the Arts and Humanities need to justify their existence?
There has been a recent controversy in the UK over proposed cuts to university Arts and Humanities budgets (see here, here, here). These cuts are to the scale of £600 million by 2013 and are joined with a call for stronger ties between universities and business. There are also moves to make research funding depend…
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Metaphors We Moralize By
“He has a heart of gold.” “There’s not a mean bone in her body.” “They’re rotten to the core.” “We’re going to show them what we’re made of.” What do all these statements have in common? They all cluster around the idea that people contain fundamental moral properties that define who they are and determine…
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Sleepy ‘Ordinary Ethics’
It has often struck me how the most common ethical issues surround us like smog, yet we never see them. And how science and some fairly simple and uncontroversial values could go a long way to solving them. How should we eat? What kinds of friends should we have? Should we take drugs? How should…