I’ve been reading, for a research project, about a group of remarkable philosophers who were educated in Oxford during and after World War II: some went on to teach at Oxford. They include Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, Iris Murdoch, Mary Warnock. Several of them, it transpires, were taught classics by a brilliant and… Read More »Female Philosophers and Sexual Harassment
I am not a consequentialist, and so I am generally not prone to applying utility-maximization tests to every policy. Yet even I found my greatest-good-for-the-great-number buttons pressed by the news this week that the British government will invest £41million in opening and closing ceremonies of the 2012 London Olympics and Paralympics. This comes on top… Read More »Can Olympics costs be ethically justified?
At the current Conference of the Parties in Durban, Libya proposed an ambitious scheme which, it claims, will not only halt, but reverse global warming. (See http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0f852f8c-1d00-11e1-a26a-00144feabdc0.html?ftcamp=rss#axzz1fff3AXgX)
Effectively, the “Libyan Climate Change Initiative” will turn the Sahara desert, and perhaps the Arabian and other deserts, into a giant wind-farm. But not your average of wind-farm. This wind-farm is one which first creates wind out of solar power and then uses it to drive giant wind turbines. Read More »To 1750 – or beyond?
The Washington Post recently reported the news of a dozen of nurses from a New Jersey hospital who claimed the right not to assist a patient before and after an abortion. Although conscience clauses are very common worldwide, they usually allow the health care personnel to refuse to perform abortions (or other morally controversial treatments) but not to refuse to assist a patient before and after the abortion. For this reason, the request put forward by the New Jersey nurses is particularly interesting.One of these nurses declared to the newspapers “I’m a nurse so I can help people, not help kill, and it just doesn’t seem right to me”. Now, it is hard to understand how someone who takes care of a woman who just had an abortion is somehow helping to kill. The care these nurses are refusing to provide involves feeding and washing the patient, maybe giving her pain killer drugs, but certainly not helping to kill, because the killing happens during the abortion, not before or after.
Read More »The subtle line between conscientious objection and sabotage
The world is full of problems. Pollution is a problem. The destruction of the coral reefs, the eradication of the rain forests, the mass extinction of animal species are problems, and tragedies. Loss of biodiversity is a problem. Global warming is a problem. Poverty and the unequal distribution of resources are major problems.
But lack of basic resources isn’t a problem. We’ll have enough food, water and energy for the whole human race for the forseable future, at reasonable costs. Take a worse-case scenario for all three areas, and let’s look at the figures.
The High Pay Commission today published a report denigrating the salaries of executives in the city. This isn’t unusual: it’s common to see the high pay of bankers and other city workers is reviled in the media. But there’s a flip side to bankers’ earnings, which often gets neglected. Wealth, of course, can be spent… Read More »Banking as an ethical career
Written by Roman Gaehwiler In western communities the degree of gender equality and emancipation represents an important indicator to level sophistication and liberalism. In sports, however, sexual discrimination is taken for granted. As a result of strict sex segregation, there’s no opportunity for women to measure their abilities with male opponents. Consequently, either sport seems… Read More »Gender Competition Preserves Natural Traits of Competitive Sports
Yesterday evening in front of a record audience in the OxfordMartinSchoolbuilding, Dr. Molly Crockett delivered the Wellcome Lecture in Neuroethics: “Moral enhancement? Evidence and challenges” (a podcast of the lecture will soon appear in the events archives here)
In her engaging talk, Dr Crockett spoke of the emerging body of neuroscience research she and others have been conducting on neurobiological modifiers of moral behavior and how manipulations in neurotransmitter systems can affect that moral behavior.
For example, in a study where subjects were presented with two classic trolley problems, whether they had previously received an antidepressant that increased the availability of the neurotransmitter, serotonin, in the neuronal synapse (in this case, a Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor – SSRI) significantly shifted peoples decisions into a deontological, as opposed to consequentialist framework. Namely, the group that had received the SSRI was less likely to say it was ok to push a very large man off of a bridge in front of a trolley in order to save five workers who would certainly otherwise die.
From a deontological point of view, this increased aversion to harming others after taking the SSRI might be thought of as a moral enhancement, but might be thought of as impairment to a consequentialist.
The NHS spends three to four million pounds per year on homeopathic remedies, despite conceding that there is no evidence that homeopathic remedies actually work. They justify this expenditure on the grounds of patient choice: http://www.nhs.uk/news/2010/July07/Pages/nhs-homeopathy.aspx. In a post on this subject, on August 20th 2010, I took the view there is something right about this line of reasoning. If people want to choose homeopathic remedies that are known to be no more effective than placebos, rather than conventional medical alternatives, then they are making a foolish choice, but it is their choice to make and provided that they are not harming others it should be respected. However, I also argued that the NHS has a duty to manage its budget carefully. They should only pay for homeopathic remedies when these are cheaper than the conventional medical alternatives that they are replacing and they should not spend more money on homeopathic remedies than is necessary. Given that the NHS spends three to four million pounds on approximately 25,000 ‘homeopathic items’ per year, I calculated that the NHS spends an average of £140- per homeopathic item prescribed. This figure could easily be reduced. In the earlier post I offered two suggestions to help the NHS save money on homeopathy. First, on the grounds that homeopathic training makes no difference to the efficacy of homeopathic remedies, I suggested that the NHS should pay homeopaths minimum wage. Second, I argued that the NHS should reduce the cost of homeopathic remedies by making its own homeopathic remedies, or outsource the job to a competitive supplier who can reduce the price of homeopathic remedies.
By Brian Earp (Follow Brian on Twitter by clicking here.)
WATCH MY EXCHANGE WITH SAM HARRIS AT OXFORD – ON YOUTUBE HERE.
I just finished a booklet by “New Atheist” Sam Harris — on lying — and I plan to write about it in the coming days. But I want to dig up an older Harris book, The Moral Landscape, so that I may express my hitherto un-expressed puzzlement about Harris’ (aging) “bold new” claim — presented in this book — that science can “determine human values” or “tell us what’s objectively true about morality” or “give us answers about right and wrong,” and the like.
In his new book (the one about lying) Harris says, in effect, you should never, ever, do it — yet his pretense in The Moral Landscape to be revolutionizing moral philosophy seems to me the very height of dishonesty. What he actually does in his book is plain old secular moral reasoning — as non-religious philosophers have been doing for a very long time — but he claims that he’s using science to decide right from wrong. That Harris could be naive enough to think he’s really bridged the famous “is/ought” chasm seems unlikely (Harris is a very smart writer and researcher, and I tend to like a lot of what he publishes), and so I submit that he’s exaggerating* to sell books. Shame on him (or his publisher).
*A previous version of this post had the word “lying” here, but I was told that my rhetorical flourish might be interpreted as libel. I hope “exaggerating” is sufficiently safe. Now onward to my argument:
