When Brad and I started dating in early 2008, Brad mentioned that if our relationship ended with us having a baby, it would be best if I was tested to see if I carried the CF gene. We meet with the geneticist at Hunter Genetics in Newcastle…

Tonight at 8.30 p.m. Australian Time, SBS will be airing a show on Deisgner Babies. I’ll be live tweeting during the show, and in the meantime, here are a few links to some opinion pieces, media and papers I’ve written on the to…

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…