In a provocative article forthcoming in the Journal of Medical Ethics (one of a new series of feature articles in the journal) philosophers Walter Sinnott Armstrong and Franklin Miller ask ‘what makes killing wrong?’ Their simple and intuit…

Practical ethics aims to offer advice to decision-makers embedded in the real world.  In order to make the advice practical, it typically takes empirical uncertainty into account.  For example, we don’t currently know exactly to what extent…

The idea of a simple, cheap and widely available device that could boost brain function sounds too good to be true. Yet promising results in the lab with emerging ‘brain stimulation’ techniques, though still very preliminary, have prompted …

By Charles Foster I spent a lot of the weekend at a very good conference entitled Moral Evil in Practical Ethics. There was, I think, a complete or almost complete consensus about many things. Here are two: (1) Evil exists, and is of a diff…

Eve Richardson, chief executive of the National Council for Palliative Care and the Dying Matters coalition, argues that the government needs radically to improve end-of-life care in the UK, and makes several excellent suggestions about how…

The lord of the manor is not a typical peasant, and doesn’t have the same responsibilities. Nowadays, it is quite fashionable to see humans as part of the natural world, part of a cycle of life, dependent on a nature that could eradic…

In the US, Randall Terry is challenging Obama for Democratic leadership. Strangely, his reason for doing so is in order to be able to show graphic anti-abortion adverts  featuring aborted foetuses, holocaust victims, and a black person bein…