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Robot Girl: A Survey

Robot Girl: A Survey

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In collaboration with the BBC’s Radio 4 show ‘The Philosopher’s Arms‘, we are running a series of short opinion surveys on the Practical Ethics blog as a way of promoting discussion on issues in practical ethics.

This week The Philosopher’s Arms discussed the case of the Robot Girl, in which we consider the ethical problems arising from the development of machines who act, think and feel like human beings. What is it to think? What is consciousness? If a robot made of silicon can be made to seem like one of us, would we say of it that it can think? If it walked like us, talked like us, screamed in apparent agony when it was hit, would we, should we say it was conscious?

The following survey explores some of these ethical themes.
Read More »Robot Girl: A Survey

Why Pro-Life Counsellors Ought to Lie

Those who are pro-choice often get frustrated by anti-abortion advocates, who are seen as using underhanded and immoral tactics to decrease numbers of abortions. These include presenting misleading information about abortions at their advice centres.
For example, it is claimed that some abortion counsellors show pictures of late-stage abortions when discussing early-stage abortions, exaggerate the trauma felt by people who have had abortions and assert that foetuses feel pain earlier than scientists believe they do. A large part of the opposition to the amendment proposed by Nadine Dorries , which would have prevented bodies which carry out abortions from counselling women, was that this might mean that more women would be counselled by anti-abortion groups who cannot be trusted to provide accurate information about abortion. I’m going to suggest that it is a mistake to think that anti-abortion advisors are failing morally by providing misleading information about abortions. Indeed, they might be failing morally if they did not do so.Read More »Why Pro-Life Counsellors Ought to Lie

The Experience Machine: A Survey

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In collaboration with the BBC’s Radio 4 show ‘The Philosopher’s Arms‘, we are running a series of short opinion surveys on the Practical Ethics blog as a way of promoting discussion on issues in practical ethics.

This week The Philosopher’s Arms discussed the problem of the Experience Machine, Robert Nozick’s hypothetical scenario about the machine that could simulate a happy life:

Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired. Superduper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain.

The following survey explores some of the ethical themes raised by the Experience Machine.
Read More »The Experience Machine: A Survey

Geoengineering, Science, Consequentialism and Humility

The Uehiro Centre has recently hosted Clive Hamilton who was visiting from the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at Charles Sturt University. Hamilton is well known for his work on the politics of climate change. While here he presented a paper on the ‘Ethical Foundations of Climate Engineering’, which he has now been revised and is available at his website: http://www.clivehamilton.net.au/cms/media/ethical_foundations_of_climate_engineering.pdf.

Climate engineering is also known as ‘geoenginering’ and the ethics of geoengineering has recently been discussed in a joint paper by several members of the Uehiro Centre who take a view that Hamilton strongly disagrees with: http://www.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0013/21325/Ethics_of_Geoengineering_Working_Draft.pdf

 Hamilton’s paper is an attack on consequentialist justifications for geoengineering – attempts to use technology to try to manipulate the Earth’s climate in order to ameliorate the effects of climate change. He sees such attempts as part and parcel of a world view which springs from the Scientific Revolution. He tells us that: ‘The consequentialism of climate ethics is built on an unstated (and mostly unrecognized) understanding of the natural world, one that grew out of the Scientific Revolution in the 17th Century and the European Enlightenment philosophy that went with it.’ According to Hamilton, people who are in the grip of this scientific world view, including consequentialist philosophers, lack ‘humility in the face of nature’. The ground for this humility is, ‘… acceptance of our limitations in the face of the superior power, complexity and enigmatic character of the earth’. Hamilton sees the presumption that we might be able to ‘master’ nature as fundamentally misguided: ‘Climate engineering represents a conscious attempt to overcome resistance of the natural world to human domination …’, however, ‘… the sheer complexity and unpredictability of the natural world resists attempts at total mastery’.

Read More »Geoengineering, Science, Consequentialism and Humility

Unpalatable Theories about Falling Crime

The US crime rate continues to fall. There is no consensus why this is so, but there are a range of diverse theories, ranging from gun control, higher incarceration rates, the collapse of the crack cocaine epidemic, and ‘zero tolerance’ policing. While the diverse theories are interesting, so too are the different reactions that the theories provoke. Despite the difficulties in objectively assessing the theories, all theories are not equal: some are particularly unpalatable.

Read More »Unpalatable Theories about Falling Crime

Is the non-therapeutic circumcision of infant boys morally permissible?

On the ethics of non-therapeutic circumcision of minors, with a pre-script on the law

By Brian D. Earp (Follow Brian on Twitter by clicking here.)

PRE-SCRIPT AS OF 25 SEPTEMBER 2012: The following blog post includes material from an informal article I wrote many years ago, in high school, in fact, for a college essay competition. I would like to think that my views have gained some nuance since that time, and indeed with increasing speed, as I have researched the topic in more detail over the past several months–specifically during the period of a little over a year since the blog post first appeared online. Since quite a few (truthfully: many thousands of) people have come across my writings in this area, and since I am now being asked to speak about circumcision ethics in more formal academic company, I feel it is necessary to bring up some of the ways in which my thinking has evolved over those many months.

The most significant evolution is away from my original emphasis on banning circumcision. I do maintain that it is morally wrong to remove healthy tissue from another person’s genitals without first asking for, and then actually receiving, that person’s informed permission; but I also recognize that bringing in the heavy hand of the law to stamp out morally problematic practices is not always the best idea. It is a long road indeed from getting one’s ethical principles in order, to determining which social and legal changes might most sensibly and effectively bring about the outcome one hopes for, with minimal collateral damage incurred along the way. Until enough hearts and minds are shifted on this issue, any strong-armed ban would be a mistake.

In the long term, however, I think the goal remains: that each child should have the same moral, legal, and policy protections regardless of sex or gender, designed to preserve their sexual anatomy in their healthy, intact form until such time as they are mentally competent to make a decision about altering them, surgically or otherwise.

The project for the meantime is to work on hearts and minds.

I am grateful to the many hundreds of individuals who have left thoughtful comments on my sequence of posts on the ethics of circumcision, and I look forward to developing my arguments in ever more sophisticated ways in the coming months and years as this important debate continues. I am especially grateful to those of my interlocutors who have disagreed with me on various points, but who have done so in a thoughtful and productive manner. May we all aim at mutual understanding, so that the best arguments may emerge from both sides, and so that the underlying points of genuine disagreement may be most clearly identified. — B.D.E.

* * *

Routine neonatal circumcision in boys is unethical, unnecessary, and should be made illegal in the United States. Or so I argue in this post.

Yet lawmakers in California, it is now being reported, have introduced a bill with the opposite end in mind. They wish to ban legislation that could forbid circumcision-without-consent. What could be going on?

Read More »Is the non-therapeutic circumcision of infant boys morally permissible?

Evidence on Evidence Based Policy

You were no doubt as surprised as I was when the Blair government announced it was henceforth doing evidence based policy. It was just like when the medical profession said it was going to do evidence based medicine. You mean—they weren’t already? Still, even though the promised reform doesn’t really sweeten the bitter truth, it is a move in the right direction. Or at least, it is a promise to take a move in the right direction. But was the move taken?  When it comes to the, perhaps minor, example of speed cameras, we have clear evidence whether the policy was evidence based. And the evidence says, No!

Read More »Evidence on Evidence Based Policy

The nym wars: how many identities are enough?

The biggest political question this year might not be national debts or the Arab Spring, but what form identity will take on the Internet in the future. As the Google+ service began demanding that people sign in with their legal names and suspending accounts believed to be in conflict with this policy, the “nym wars” broke out. Google is not alone in wanting to keep online identities strongly tied to legal identities: the National Geographic Society demands that comments on ScienceBlogs may no longer be pseudonymous, and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has stated:

“Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”

But can we live a human life with just one identity?

Read More »The nym wars: how many identities are enough?

Is Half an Abortion Worse than a Whole One?

Last week, the New York Times Magazine included an interesting article about abortion by Ruth Padawer. It provoked not a little angst and soul-searching among members of the pro-choice community, as well as some exultant pronouncements from anti-abortionists highlighting supposed inconsistencies in the pro-choice position.

The Times article profiled a number of women who chose to “reduce” their twin pregnancies to a single fetus, recounting the emotions and ethical issues grappled with by women, their partners, and the doctors who perform (or refuse to perform) this type of selective abortion. The procedure, which according to Padawer is “usually performed aound Week 12 of pregnancy”, involves the doctor selecting under an ultrasound scan a healthy fetus whose chest is lethally injected.  It shrivels in the womb, whilst its twin is carried to term. In the cases in question, the procedure is not performed for medical reasons, but because the woman has chosen for social reasons to carry only one child to term. Although reductions arose historically as a procedure that was medically indicated – reducing risky quint, quad or triplet pregnancies to twins that had a much better chance of survival – most practitioners have not recognized reduction below twins as having an adequate medical justification. Some practitioners consequently refuse to perform the procedure, but others perform it willingly. As Dr. Richard Berkowitz explained: “In a society where women can terminate a single pregnancy for any reason – financial, social, emotional – if we have a way to reduce a twin pregnancy with very little risk, isn’t it legitimate to offer that service to women with twins who want to reduce to a singleton?”  Dr. Berkowitz’s question is a good one, as is the main question that Padawer raises: “What is it about terminating half a twin pregnancy that seems more controversial than reducing triplets to twins or aborting a single fetus? After all, the math’s the same either way: one fewer fetus.”

So what is it that makes “terminating half a twin pregnancy” seem more controversial than aborting a single fetus? Does our  almost universal uneasiness about it show a fundamental inconsistency in pro-choice thinking, or is there a consistent pro-choice position that pays sufficient respect both to a woman’s presumed right to choose, and to our uneasy intuitive reactions to twin reduction?

Read More »Is Half an Abortion Worse than a Whole One?

Philosophy is the transformation of sheep

By Charles Foster

Over the last week English hoodies took to the streets to burn, smash and pillage and, (an almost equally distressing sight), the pop-sociologists of England took to the op-ed columns to tell us why. We’ve had no end of explanations. I’m no more qualified to add to them than most of the original writers were to promulgate them. But whatever the explanation is, it has to account for the fact that this was by no means a primal scream from the nation’s disenfranchised: alongside the youths who may have been expressing their turbulent  pasts and hopeless presents, were estate agents, Olympic ambassadors and law students who were ruining their promising futures. The deep causes are beyond me, but the most proximate, obvious (and possibly the only) cause for the vast majority was simply that they were following others. Why did A get involved? Because B did. And why did B get involved? Because C did. At one (and perhaps all levels), this was no more a revolution than sheep baa-ing after each other through a gate.

If alienation was the cause, as many said, from what were the participants alienated? From their ability to make up their own minds, and hence from themselves. If disenfranchisement, from what decision-making process? Their own.Read More »Philosophy is the transformation of sheep