In today’s blog, I want to ask you for your opinions on a question that has been bothering me for some days now. The question relates to the potential motivations of couples who try to have a baby. My question is: What are ethical – and what are unethical – intentions to conceive a child,… Read More »What are ethical and unethical intentions to conceive a child?
Recently , UNICEF launched their Children’s Rights and Business Principles, the sixth of which says that businesses should ‘use marketing and advertising that respect and support children’s rights’. This is hard to deny, as is the claim that many companies are seeking unjustifiably to manipulate children and their parents for profit. Indeed there seems little reason to restrict… Read More »A World without Advertising?
By Brian Earp
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The will is caused, not free
Everyone is talking about free will these days. Sam Harris has a new book out. Eric MacDonald has weighed in on that. Jerry Coyne, Paul Bloom, and some philosopher-types have a debate going on in the Chronicle of Higher Education. And way back in 2009 the Society for Personality and Social Psychology hosted a “showdown” between psychologists Roy Baumeister and John Bargh on the topic: What does the ‘free’ in ‘free will’ really mean? [A video of Bargh’s half can be seen here. Baumeister is here.]
The SPSP conference led to a fiery exchange of blog posts between the two principles, and then to a more sedated pair of papers in the society’s newsletter, Dialogue. Baumeister enlisted Kathleen Vohs to co-author his piece, and Bargh (for some reason) enlisted me. Here is what Professor Bargh and I had to say — after this delightful FoxTrot comic by Bill Amend.
We’ve all had fun hating Goldman Sachs again after one of their own sold them out . Mr Smith says that ‘culture was the secret sauce that made [Goldman] great and allowed us to earn our clients’ trust for 143 years’ whereas now Goldman pursues its own interest rather than its clients’ due to a ‘decline in the firm’s moral fibre’…. Hold on. Yes, I know its hard not to burst out laughing.
In 1983, scientists published a paper on nuclear winter. This boosted the death toll of all-out nuclear war from ‘only’ 200-500 million to the very real possibility of the complete extinction of the human race*. But some argued the report was alarmist, and there did seem to be some issues with the assumptions. So – a military phenomena that might cause megadeaths, possibly true but requiring further study, and a huge research defense budget that could be used to look into this critical phenomena and that was already spending millions on all aspects of nuclear weapons – can you guess what happened next?
Correct – the issue was ignored for decades. For over twenty years, there were but a tiny handful of papers on the most likely way we could end our own existence, and a vague and persistent sense that nuclear winter had been ‘disproved’. But in 2007, we finally had a proper followup – with the help of modern computers, better models and better observations, what can we now say? Well, that nuclear winter is still a major threat; the initial fear was right. Their most likely scenario was:
A global average surface cooling of –7°C to –8°C persists for years, and after a decade the cooling is still –4°C […]. Considering that the global average cooling at the depth of the last ice age 18,000 yr ago was about –5°C, this would be a climate change unprecedented in speed and amplitude in the history of the human race. The temperature changes are largest over land […] Cooling of more than –20°C occurs over large areas of North America and of more than –30°C over much of Eurasia, including all agricultural regions.
Also, precipitation would be cut in half and we’d lose most of the ozone layer. But there was a more worrying development: it also seems that a small-scale nuclear war could generate its own mini nuclear winter.
Read More »Old threats never die, they fade away from our minds: nuclear winter
Last week this blog mentioned the Kony 2012 video, and suggested that many of the criticisms of it were ‘dishonest’ in a particular sense, and biased. Criticisms of such a worthy cause, and other charities seeming to piggy-back on Kony 2012’s success, often meet with great anger. But such piggy-backing is entirely justifiable.Read More »Kony 2012, Malaria and Pizza
The Daily Mail has recently published an article entitled ‘Planet of the (little) apes: Save the world by genetically engineering humans to be smaller, suggests NYU philosopher.’ (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2114430/Save-planet-genetically-engineering-humans-smaller-suggests-NYU-philosopher.html)
It is always good to see the Daily Mail covering philosophy and covering issues in applied ethics in particular. The NYU philosopher in question is former Uehiro Centre researcher S. Matthew Liao. His co-authors, Anders Sandberg and Rebecca Roache are both affiliated with the Future of Humanity Institute here at Oxford and the paper under discussion is called ‘Human Engineering and Climate Change’ and is forthcoming in Ethics Policy and the Environment, an interdisciplinary academic journal which specialises in environmental policy and ethics.
Recent news stories have brought to public attention the fact that many Apple products, including iPhones, iPads, and Macs, are produced in part in factories with a record of using child labour, failing to provide safe work conditions, and requiring employees to work long shifts for low wages (see, for example, here, here, here and here). This raises the question: should we all stop buying these products?
Suppose you need a new laptop, or at least, are going to buy one. Leaving aside ethical considerations, you are indifferent between getting a Mac and buying a PC laptop from one of Apple’s competitors. Which should you buy?
To answer this, we need to say something more about the situation at factories run by Apple’s Chinese suppliers. Much of the attention has focused on Foxconn, which assembles the iPad and iPhone. It’s alleged that Foxconn negligence was responsible for a blast which killed two people and injured more than a dozen; that it exposes workers to toxic chemicals without adequate protection; that it requires illegal levels of overtime (often more than double the legal limit of 36 hours per month) for which it frequently does not pay in full; that it deceives potential recruits regarding pay rates; that workers are humiliated by supervisors; that workers often have to stand almost uninterrupted for a 12 hour shift; and that poor work conditions contributed to a spate of suicides at the company’s Shenzen plant in 2010. In addition, Mike Daisey, a New York performer who visited the Foxconn plant in Shenzen, reports that he met children in the age range 12-14 who were working in the plant. They told him that it was not difficult for children of their age to find employment there.
Read More »Which is least unethical—buying a Mac, or buying a PC?
According to a BBC report, Tony Nicklinson, 58, from Melksham, Wiltshire, has “locked-in syndrome” after a stroke in 2005 and “is unable to carry out his own suicide.” “He is seeking legal protection for any doctor who helps him end his life.”
In fact, it is not quite correct that Tony Nicklinson “is unable to carry out his own suicide.” He could at present refuse to eat food or drink fluids. Hunger strikers do this for political reasons. He could do it for personal reasons. People should not be force fed against their own autonomous wishes.
Now suppose that Tony did refuse to eat or drink, because he wanted to die because he found a life locked-in to be intolerable. He would die in weeks, perhaps less. Given that he will die, he should be given medical treatment to make his last weeks as comfortable as possible. He should be given sedation and analgesia. He could even be given such doses that render him unconscious.
Such a process already happens, int he UK, in a slightly different way. In the famous case of Tony Bland, law lords authorized the removal of a feeding tube that was keeping Tony Bland, who was permanently unconscious. They, his family and doctors all judged that continued life was not in his interests.
The issue of free speech has been directly addressed by at least one recent post and raised during the course of a number of other discussions. So, here are some of my own observations on the subject.
1 As a rough generalisation, I would say that those who discuss the subject tend to fall into one or the other of two categories. On the one hand, there are those who take a tough line and insist upon the right to express an opinion openly, however unpopular or offensive to others it may be. On the other hand, there are more tender souls who express worries over – e.g. – speech which is threatening, inflammatory, or in some way offensive. Members of the latter group are sometimes prone to argue that, while the freedom of speech and expression may be of great importance, it is necessary to ‘strike a balance’ between it and other values.
The trouble is that Read More »Free Speech: Some Comments
