Frequently in life there is some good available if you and I can agree on some split of that good between us. If we cannot agree the good never comes into existence. This fact can be modelled by what is called the ultimatum game. In the ul…

A number of clerics of various Christian denominations are claiming that the recent rescue of 33 Chilean miners was a miracle and, therefore, evidence in favour of the particular version of Christianity that they respectively represent. How…

In a couple of weeks, the verdict in the case against Geert Wilder’s for inciting hatred will be announced. Wilders is charged under laws that have been enacted in many jurisdictions, but which are controversial. I don’t know whether these …

by Dominic Wilkinson In the news this week is the first US officially-sanctioned human trial of embryonic stem cells. A patient with spinal cord injury has received an injection of embryo-derived stem cells. Predictably, the news has not be…

This post is about the main argument of Sam Harris’s new book The Moral Landscape. Harris argues that there are objective truths about what’s morally right and wrong, and that science can in principle determine what they are, all by itself.…

From October the 12th to the 14th London will host the RSA conference, which gathers together information security experts from across the world to discuss the most pertinent emerging issues in information security. The safeguarding of user…

The UK's culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, has suggested that the state should limit the provision of social security benefits to large, unemployed families. Hunt said last week that The number of children that you have is a choice and wh…

Last Saturday  I attended an interesting conference about "Reason, Theology and the Genome " organized by the McDonald centre for theology, Ethics and Public Life in Oxford. I noticed that there was a general agreement, amon…

Patients want wise, kind, good, trustworthy, empathetic people around them when they are in pain or dying. For most patients, an ethically good decision will be one made in conversation with such a person. The real business of ethics, then,…

Jeff McMahan's recent piece in the New York Times has provoked a lot of discussion (including two pieces here). He argued that just as it is bad for animals to suffer at the hands of humans, so is it bad when they suffer in the wild. Mo…