At the beginning of this month, the pheasant shooting season began. Pheasant shooting is little discussed – it’s usually seen just as a harmless country pass time. However, it’s far from clear that it really is as unobjectionable as this neglect implies.Read More »Pheasant Shooting: Bad for Pheasants, Worse for Humans?
“Morality is just social convention, so torture isn’t wrong.” Hearing that thought was a sobering recent experience, especially when you’re trying to get people to care and worry about existential risks. But that’s just a vivid and extreme example of a more commonly expressed sentiment:
P: “If there is no objective morality, then anything goes.”
Now, call those who express that sentiment P-expressers. Who are these people? In my experience, these are individuals who have subjectivised their ethics, but not their meta-ethics, and ended up nihilists as a result.
Today, if a gay couple wants to have a child, they have two main options: Either (1) they adopt a child or (2) they get an egg from a donor, have it fertilized in a laboratory, and have a surrogate mother carry and give birth to their child. These are both good options. Imagine, however, that… Read More »Using Close Genes: A Suggestion
On Friday, Dr. Ralph Steinman died. On Monday, he won the Nobel Prize for Medicine.
This posed a problem for the Nobel committee. Per the award foundation’s bylaws, prizes may not be awarded posthumously. The committee met in emergency session, and resolved to avoid the heartless option of rescinding the dead man’s prize.
This seems a very sensible choice, in a situation whose details could have been designed by a philosopher to test the principles animating the ban on posthumous awards. Apparently Dr. Steinman died only hours before the committee met on Friday to award the prize to him (and to two other researchers, for their work on the immune system). The committee decided that, since it had not learned of Dr. Steinman’s death at the time of the selection, it had made a good faith effort to abide by the rule requiring recipients to live. (The demanding philosopher asks: so, if someone had rushed to call and inform the committee immediately after Dr. Steinman’s death, they would not have awarded it to him? Then, does the merit of an individual Nobel depend in part on the alacrity with which one’s survivors communicate one’s death? But we’ll leave such irritating queries to the side.) Still, two matters of ethical interest remain.
Today, my colleague Michael Mansfield QC appears in a mock trial in the Supreme Court that considers the crime of ‘ecocide’. The project is the brainchild of lawyer Polly Higgins. Ecocide is defined as: ‘The extensive damage, destruction to or loss of ecosystems of a given territory, whether by human agency or by other causes, to such an extent that peaceful enjoyment by the inhabitants of that territory has been severely diminished.’ To me, creating some type of crime like this seems a no-brainer, but I think making this a crime in any meaningful sense will be particularly difficult.
By Brian Earp
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Forget about “medical marijuana.” Isn’t it time to legalize heroin in the United States? Recreational cocaine? Ecstasy? LSD? How about the whole nefarious basketful of so-called ‘harder’ drugs?
Yes, it is, says Ron Paul, a fourteen-term libertarian congressman and obstetrician from the state of Texas. It’s a view shared by virtually none of his Republican colleagues, nor, for that matter, very many Democrats. Nor really anyone in the “mainstream” of American politics. But in this post, I’ll argue that he’s right.
Paul—who is currently making his third bid for President of the United States—offered his perspective to comedian and Daily Show host Jon Stewart in an interview earlier this week:
By Charles Foster
Three years ago Ana Mejia bore a son, Bryan Santana. To her surprise he had no arms and only one leg. I should have been warned about this, she recently told a Florida court. It was negligent not to warn me. Had I been warned, I would have had an abortion. She asked the court for $9 million compensation. The jury gave her $4.5 million.
The disability rights lobby is predictably outraged. Why, they say, should it be presumed (as it clearly is), that a disabled person’s life isn’t worth living?
If that is Ana Mejia’s presumption, then (at least in relation to a child as relatively mildly disabled as Bryan) it is plainly reprehensible. I don’t know her motivation, but I doubt that she saw it that way. Many parents in her situation (and this is a very common issue in medico-legal practice) don’t make their decisions on the basis of their child’s quality of life at all. A much commoner thought is: ‘A disabled child will disrupt my own life. One of the purposes of pre-natal screening is to enable me to decline to bring into the world a child who does not fit with my ideas about how I should be living my life.’ I will call this thought the ‘pre-natal screening default thought’ (PNSD).Read More »Is a child a blessing?
Like many in the UK, I was gripped last week by the reports from Wales about the search for four trapped miners, and saddened to hear of their deaths. Readers outside the UK perhaps heard nothing, or very little, about this story, thought it dominated the news here. One important reason for that, of course,… Read More »Fellow-Citizens, Foreigners, and Statistical Lives
Alex Tabarrok on Marginal Revolution posted about how the software company Turnitin is not just helping schools detect student plagiarism, but also providing WriteCheck, a tool for checking that a paper is non-infringing. Are they providing a useful service for conscientious students to avoid unconscious infringement, or just playing both sides of the fence, profiting from an arms race where they sell all the arms?
Read More »Buying authenticity: plagiarism checking and counter-checking
“Beauty is a greater recommendation than any letter of introduction.” – Arthur Schopenhauer, Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life
As our wealth increases, more and more of us undergo cosmetic surgery: From tummy tucks, breast enlargements and nose jobs to hair transplants and face-lifts: You name it—and pay—they fix it.
Even though cosmetic surgery has grown to become a multi billion-dollar industry, it is looked at with some suspicion. Many feel that there is something superficial and, perhaps, slightly desperate about undergoing surgery for aesthetic reasons. In academia, at least, although a hair transplant and a teeth bleaching might pass, chances are that a breast enlargement would raise eyebrows.
It is not be unlikely, however, that the eyebrows in question would be both plucked and colored—for we already do quite a bit to enhance our looks. We work out, try to dress well, shave, and go to the hairdresser. We make sure we get tanned during summer. Some of us are on a diet, wear make up, or dye our hair.
