Before you read the blog, please take: General Knowledge Ethics Quiz What is the main cause of climate change? What is main cause of global poverty? Why does terrorism exist? What caused the Fukushima nuclear reactor disaster? Write your an…

I heard the news that Osama Bin Laden (OBL) had been killed by US forces on the BBC World Service this morning. In the hour or so before I left for a conference I was struck by the absence of discussion of whether this was morally justified…

As some may have noticed, today there is a wedding. It has been immensely costly, and while I do not for a moment resent that expenditure, the cost has an important ethical corollary. The money has been spent primarily to ensure dynasti…

As always, we sentient beings on earth are at risk of being wiped out by some global catastrophe. Some of the risks – diseases or meteorites – are old; others – nuclear weapons or global warming – are more recent. They are discussed very we…

Two-and-a-half year old web start-up Groupon is a stunningly successful company. It reportedly turned down a six billion US dollar buyout offer from Google in December, and Reuters reports that is now planning an initial public offering tha…

In a world where you shouldn’t have to wait for anything, why wait nine months for your child to be born? This is the marketing pitch of Silver Sling, a Manhattan-based surrogacy clinic. Silver Sling offers ‘chemically accelerated births’ t…

A debate piece in the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter by the philosophers Nicholas Espinoza and Martin Peterson (autotranslated version) on abortion rights has led to strong reactions in the Swedish blogosphere. The authors make two claims…

This week France’s ban on people covering their faces in public comes into force, prohibiting people from wearing, among other things, burqas, niqabs and masks. This has been greeted with horror by many in the UK. But is France showing more…

Legal Realism has been caricaturised as a school that believes that judicial decisions are made according to what the judge has had for breakfast. Research conducted in Israel suggests that this may not be so far from the truth.

Most people believe that a meritocracy is the ideal system for distributing jobs and university places. But ‘merit’ is notoriously difficult to define, as a recent story involving Liverpool football club illustrates. Liverpool is not the al…