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Mummification and Moral Blindness
By Charles Foster Image: The Great Sphinx and Pyramids of Gizeh (Giza), 17 July 1839, by David Roberts: Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons Words are powerful. When a word is outlawed, the prohibition tends to chill or shut down debate in a wide area surrounding that word. That tendency is much discussed, but it’s not…
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Stoicism as a Foundational Component of Ethics and Existentialism
Provided my eyes are not withdrawn from that spectacle, of which they never tire; provided I may look upon the sun and the moon and gaze at the other planets; provided I may trace their risings and settings, their periods and the causes of their travelling faster or slower; provided I may behold all the…
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Guest Post: Body Shaming is Unacceptable, Even if Directed at Vile People. An Intersex Critique of “Small Dick Energy”
Guest post by Morgan Carpenter, bioethicist; co-founder and executive director, Intersex Human Rights Australia; Magda Rakita co-founder and executive director, Fundacja Interakcja (Poland), and co-chair, OII Europe; and Bo Laurent, founder, Intersex Society of North America We love Greta Thunberg. But we were hurt and disappointed that she chose “small dick energy” as a pejorative…
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The New Relevance of Rationing
By Ben Davies Decisions about how to allocate healthcare resources can be divided, somewhat crudely, into macro– and micro-level choices. Roughly speaking, macro-choices are policy choices, often made outside any clinical setting, e.g., by government. For instance, it is a macro-level choice which treatments to fund to what degree, and how large the health budget…
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Moral Psychology at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics
Written by Joanna Demaree-Cotton This last Michaelmas term marked the inaugural series of lab meetings for the Uehiro Centre’s BioXPhi lab (https://moralpsychlab.web.ox.ac.uk). Co-directed by myself and Dr. Brian Earp, the lab brings philosophers together with psychologists to conduct experimental studies in moral psychology and bioethics. Specifically, we investigate the contributing factors and psychological processes…
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Guest Post: It has become possible to use cutting-edge AI language models to generate convincing high school and undergraduate essays. Here’s why that matters
Written by: Julian Koplin & Joshua Hatherley, Monash University ChatGPT is a variant of the GPT-3 language model developed by OpenAI. It is designed to generate human-like text in response to prompts given by users. As with any language model, ChatGPT is a tool that can be used for a variety of purposes, including academic research…
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Crosspost: Impostor syndrome and pretense
Written by Neil Levy The original version of this article was published at New Work in Philosophy. It’s hard to get any sort of reliable estimates of its prevalence, but impostor syndrome seems to be very widespread. Lots of people report feeling it, at least on occasion, and we might well suspect those who…
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Cross Post: Halving Subsidised Psychology Appoints is a Grave Mistake—Young Australians Will Bear a Significant Burden
Written by Dr Daniel D’Hotman, DPhil student studying mental health and ethics at the Oxford Uehiro Centre The original version of this article was published in the Sydney Morning Herald Unprecedented times called for unprecedented measures. COVID-19 was the most significant health crisis many of us had ever faced. While the physical effects were much…
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Abortion in Wonderland
By Charles Foster Image: Heidi Crowter: Copyright Don’t Screen Us Out Scene: A pub in central London John: They did something worthwhile there today, for once, didn’t they? [He motions towards the Houses of Parliament] Jane: What was that? John: Didn’t you hear? They’ve passed a law saying that a woman can abort…
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Simulate Your True Self
Written by Muriel Leuenberger A modified version of this post is forthcoming in Think edited by Stephen Law. Spoiler warning: if you want to watch the movie Don’t Worry Darling, I advise you to not read this article beforehand (but definitely read it afterwards). One of the most common reoccurring philosophical thought experiments in movies…