The Homeric Power of Advance Directives
By Charles Foster [Image: Ulysses and the Sirens: John William Waterhouse, 1891: National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne] We shouldn’t underestimate Homer’s hold on us. Whether or not we’ve ever read him, he created many o…
Read MorePress Release: Court of Appeal decision in Dance & Battersbee (respondents/appellants) v Barts Health NHS Trust
by Dominic Wilkinson Archie is legally alive, and the legal decision about whether it is in his best interests to keep him alive now needs to be revisited in the High Court. Today, the Court of Appeal made a decision in the case of Archie B…
Read MoreTrack Thyself? Personal Information Technology and the Ethics of Self-knowledge
Written by Muriel Leuenberger The ancient Greek injunction “Know Thyself” inscribed at the temple of Delphi represents just one among many instances where we are encouraged to pursue self-knowledge. Socrates argued that “examining myself an…
Read MoreShould Parents be Able to Decline Consent for Brain Death Testing in a Child?
by Dominic Wilkinson In the recently reported case of Archie Battersbee, a 12 year old boy with severe brain damage from lack of oxygen, a judge declared that he had died on 31st May. This was almost eight weeks after his tragic accident, a…
Read MoreArchie Battersbee: How the Court Reached its Conclusion
Mother of Archie Battersbee, Hollie Dance, outside the high court in London, England. PA Images / Alamy Stock Photo Dominic Wilkinson, University of Oxford London’s high court has heard the tragic case of 12-year-old Archie Battersbee, who …
Read MoreCross Post: Is Google’s LaMDA conscious? A philosopher’s view
Written by Benjamin Curtis, Nottingham Trent University and Julian Savulescu, University of Oxford Shutterstock LaMDA is Google’s latest artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot. Blake Lemoine, a Google AI engineer, has claimed it is sen…
Read MoreHealthcare Ethics Has a Gap…
By Ben Davies Last month, the UK’s Guardian newspaper reported on a healthcare crisis in the country. If you live in the UK, you may have already had an inkling of this crisis from personal experience. But if you don’t live here, and partic…
Read MoreCan a Character in an Autobiographical Novel Review the Book in Which She Appears? On the Ethics of Literary Criticism
Written by Mette Leonard Høeg The common intuition in literary criticism, in art criticism in general and in the public cultural sphere is that it is wrong to engage in criticism of a work if you have a personal relation to its author. The …
Read MorePeter Railton’s Uehiro Lectures 2022
Written by Maximilian Kiener Professor Peter Railton, from the University of Michigan, delivered the 2022 Uehiro Lectures in Practical Ethics. In a series of three consecutive presentations entitled ‘Ethics and Artificial Intelligence’ Rail…
Read MoreGoogle it, Mate.
Written by Neil Levy There’s just been an election in Australia. In elections nowadays, politicians attempt to portray themselves as one of us, or at least as someone who is in touch with ‘us’ (whoever ‘we’ are). Hence the (apparently disas…
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