In Australia and New Zealand wearing bike helmets is compulsory. In the United States, bike helmets are strongly promoted. The message in these countries is clear – not wearing a bike helmet is stupid because it can significantly damage you…

by Julian Savulescu, Uehiro Chair in Practical Ethics & Director, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics Yamaka and Gurdon have jointly won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, for the discovery that mature cells can be reprog…

 By Charles Foster Fast food permanently reduces children’s IQ, a recent and unsurprising study reports. What should be done? The answer is ethically and legally simple. Parents who feed their children junk food, knowing of the attend…

When MPs took a maths exam it showed that the members of parliament are pretty bad at elementary probability. When asked “if you spin a coin twice, what is the probability of getting two heads?” 47% of conservatives and 77% of t…

The Governor of California, Jerry Brown, has signed a Bill that will ban ‘conversion’ or ‘reparative’ therapies in that State. These are interventions that aim at ‘curing’ homosexuality or at least, controlling homosexual desires. There hav…

There has been discussion on a Polish news site about an extreme case of reckless driving. The discussion is not about the driver – his culpability and stupidity are in no doubt – rather, the discussion is about whether the passengers in th…

By Charles Foster How well do you know yourself? Can you identify confidently your convictions on major moral issues? If you can, do you think you could change them in a moment, and argue robustly and with conviction for exactly the opposit…

In a previous post, I discussed how, as a philosopher, one should decide on a research areas.  I suggested that one method was to work out what are potentially the biggest problems the world faces, work out what the crucial normative consid…

Some days ago, two 13-year-old boys have been charged with first degree murder in Wisconsin (USA), as reported by the Daily News (New York). Allegedly, they went to one of the boy’s great-grandmother’s home, killed her using a hatchet and h…

The European Court of Human Rights recently ruled ‘arbitrary and unlawful’ the UK practice of indeterminate prison sentences for the protection of the public (IPPs). Currently more than 6,000 prisoners in this country are serving such sente…