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…

Roger Crisp writes… In his new book The Moral Landscape, Sam Harris claims that science 'reveals' values to us. Kwame Anthony Appiah is one of the many who have pointed out that Harris makes the common mistake of seeking to de…

by Rebecca Roache The BBC recently reported that some homeopaths are offering their patients homeopathic remedies designed to replace the MMR vaccine.  Given that the efficacy of homeopathic remedies is notoriously unproven, thi…

A new company, Internet Eyes, promises to crowdsource monitoring of surveillance cameras by using online users to watch footage and report suspicious activity. They would get rewarded 'up to £1,000' if they press the alarm button to…

Other things being equal, killing two people must be worse than killing one, and killing three people worse than killing two. Right? But a new study by Loran Nordgren and Mary McDonell, published in Social Psychology and Personality Science…

The  article recently published by J. McMahan on The New York Times  provoked, quite unsurprisingly, both enthusiastic and polemic reactions. Alexandre Erler  wrote an interesting post discussing some of the questions aros…

A new study from the Mayo clinic in the United States points to a frequent problem in certain types of medical research. When healthy volunteers or patients with a given condition take part in research studies they may have brain scans, CAT…

by Alexandre Erler In a provocative piece for the New York Times, Jeff McMahan remarks that cruelty pervades the natural world: he stresses the vast amount of suffering and the violent deaths inflicted by predators on their innocent victims…