Should you take ecstasy to improve your marriage? Not so fast …
Love drugs and science reporting in the media: Setting the record straight By Brian D. Earp, Julian Savulescu, and Anders Sandberg Love. It makes the world go round. It is the reason we have survived as a species. It is the subject of our …
Read MoreThe Diversity that Dare Not Speak Its Name
This is a guest post by Dave Frame. Many thanks to him for contributing! Over the last few years, researchers have pointed out a dimension along which there is an extraordinary lack of diversity in the academic social sciences and h…
Read MoreBanning Junk Food Ads On Disney Media Outlets: A “Game-Changer”, or a Mickey Mouse Measure?
Yesterday, with the help of first lady Michelle Obama, the Walt Disney Company announced that from 2015, it will no longer allow the advertisement of junk food on its media outlets (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-18336478). This …
Read MoreJust War Theory and Cyber Warfare
Lin’s, Allhoff’s and Rowe’s article in yesterday’s “The Atlantic” could have not been more timely. In the previous week a new cyber weapons has been ‘discovered’, the Flame; the New York Times reported the story behind one of the most famou…
Read MoreThe Queen’s an anachronism: another problem with predicting the future
The Queen serve many roles, it seems. She provides stability to the British government, fosters links with the ex-colonies, promotes tourism, serves a safe focus for nationalist sentiment, gives the nation a centralised way of taking care o…
Read MorePhilosophical Shock Tactics
Not long ago Peter Singer sent a shock wave around his home country when on national television he provided an ethical justification for bestiality. This year three analytical philosophers were taken aback at the ridicule they attracted for…
Read MoreWho is to define your identity?
To categorize people into different groups seems to be not only a fundamental function of human cognition, but also of our whole society: child vs. grownup, man vs. woman, black vs. white… Based on such categorizations, we assign righ…
Read MoreProfessional roles and private lives: How separate are they?
The Daily Mail likes to ‘out’ teachers as porn stars. It did so again last week. The standard response to the discovery that a teacher stars in adult films or ‘moonlights’ as a stripper is to sack him or her, even if (as in one case) two de…
Read MorePeter Singer and Christian Ethics: Beyond Polarization
For those of us doing Catholic moral theology, we most often hear and read the name “Peter Singer” invoked by our colleagues in a dismissive way. Indeed, if one can somehow show that another’s argument is heading in a Singer-like direction…
Read MoreThe dignity of the referee
FIFA want referees to be tested for drugs: delegates at FIFA’s medical congress were told by FIFA officers that referees in the future might be tested for doping. “We have to consider referees as part of the game,” said FI…
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