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
Kony 2012 has become the highest profile issue of international justice on social media by far. For those without a Facebook account, Kony 2012 is a slick 30-minute YouTube film about Joseph Kony, leader of the Lords Resistance Army. The video explicitly seeks to mobilise support for efforts to arrest Kony, who has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, particularly against children. As I type, the video, released Monday, is approaching 70 million views. The video has also attracted a fair share of criticism, much of which I’m not sure is honest.
Two recent court cases in America highlight the difficulties we face in making ethical sense of social media and individual identity. The cases are quite different – one involves the denial of access to social media, while the others requires its use – but each raises seemingly unresolvable questions about the relation between our internet presences and ourselves.
In Portland, 26-year-old nursing assistant Nai Mai Chao has been convicted of invasion of privacy, for posting to Facebook photographs of patients at the nursing home where she worked. The patients were photographed, without their knowledge, on bedpans and in other embarrassing postures. Chao and her friends evidently wrote mocking comments on the Facebook post. One patient reportedly felt “humiliated” when told about the photograph’s public circulation; he died three months later. As a result of the case, Chao lost her nursing license, has been barred from similar employment, and spent eight days in prison. And she is prohibited from accessing Facebook.
Meanwhile, in Cincinnati, Mark Byron was found in contempt of a Domestic Violence Civil Protection Order, after posting to his Facebook wall that his estranged wife was an “evil, vindictive woman” and allowing his friends to write abusive and threatening comments about her. Although Elizabeth Byron could not directly access Mark Byron’s wall (they are not Facebook ‘friends’), mutual contacts alerted her to the posts. The court then ruled that Mark Bryon’s comments were “clearly intended to be mentally abusive”, found him in contempt, and gave him a choice. He could accept jail time, or post an apology – one written for him by the magistrate – on his Facebook wall every single day for one month. Byron chose the latter.
On February 29th, 2012, Robert Henry Moormann was executed in Arizona for murder. Back in 1984, he was in prison for kidnapping and molesting an eight year old girl, when the state gave him three days of compassionate leave. His elderly adoptive mother took a long bus trip to go and meet him. After an argument in a motel room where she was staying, he beat, stabbed and suffocated her, then dismembered her body. He asked a number of local businesses if he could dispose of “spoiled meat and animal guts” in their refuse containers, before disposing of most of her remains in bins and sewers around town. He also asked a prisoner officer to dispose of a box of what he described as “dog bones”. This behaviour raised suspicion. Moormann claimed not to remember the details of the crime, and at the original trial, Moormann’s lawyers mounted a defence of insanity. The jury rejected it. Since 1985, he had been living on death row while his appeals process was gradually exhausted.
In light of the gruesomeness of his crime, it is easy to think that if anyone ever deserved the death penalty, Moormann did. But the contention of Moormann’s defence lawyers that he was intellectually disabled casts a new light on the case.
Read More »Arbitrary Execution: Why the Law Needs Help from Neuroscience, Psychology and Philosophy
