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  • Spiderman and the Meaning of Hope

    Written by Hazem Zohny. In Marvel’s latest ‘Spider-Man: No Way Home’, Peter Parker’s girlfriend MJ has a simple philosophy: “If you expect disappointment, then you can never really be disappointed.” She repeats this at various interludes in the movie, except as the plot gears up to the inevitable showdown with the villains, Peter Parker says…

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  • Social Media and the Loss of Knowledge

    written by Neil Levy Here’s the common view of social media and its epistemic effects. Social media leads to people sequestering themselves in echo chambers, and echo chambers cause extreme and/or unjustified beliefs. When we don’t exchange opinions with a variety of people, we don’t have access to the full range of evidence and argument.…

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  • Cross Post: Vaccine Mandates For Healthcare Workers Should Be Scrapped – Omicron Has Changed The Game

    Written by Dominic Wilkinson, Jonathan Pugh and Julian Savulescu Time is running out for National Health Service staff in England who have not had a COVID vaccine. Doctors and nurses have until Thursday, February 3, to have their first jab. If they don’t, they will not be fully immunised by the beginning of April and could…

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  • Guest Post: No, We Don’t Owe It To The Animals to Eat Them

    Written by Adrian Kreutz, New College, University of Oxford That eating animals constitutes a harm has by now largely leaked into public opinion. Only rarely do meat eaters deny that. Those who deny it usually do so on the grounds of an assumed variance in consciousness or ability to suffer between human and non-human animals.…

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  • Decoupling, Contextualising and Rationality

    Written by Rebecca Brown In February 2020, just before science journalists had to start writing about covid full time, Tom Chivers wrote an article for Unherd, ‘‘Eugenics is possible’ is not the same as ‘eugenics is good’’. In it he describes a Twitter outcry provoked by Richard Dawkins who tweeted:  It’s one thing to deplore…

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  • Cross Post: Pig’s Heart Transplant: Was David Bennett the Right Person to Receive Groundbreaking Surgery?

    Dominic Wilkinson, University of Oxford The recent world-first heart transplant from a genetically modified pig to a human generated both headlines and ethical questions. Many of those questions related to the ethics of xenotransplantation. This is the technical term for organ transplants between species. There has been research into this for more than a century,…

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  • Philosophical Fiddling While the World Burns: Second Movement

    Written by Doug McConnell Most ethicists would agree that the climate emergency is one of the most serious ethical problems society has ever faced, yet the focus of most of our work is elsewhere. In his piece, “Philosophical Fiddling While the World Burns”, Charles Foster suggests that business as usual for ethicists – “fine ethical…

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  • Was Djokovic Unethically Blamed and Shamed?

    By Dominic Wilkinson, Julian Savulescu and Jonathan Pugh The decision about whether to grant tennis star Novak Djokovic a visa allowing him to stay in Australia to compete in the Australian Open Championship has generated significant controversy. Last week, the Australian Immigration minister exercised his power to cancel the player’s visa on the grounds of…

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  • Cognitive snobbery: The Unacceptable Bias in Favour of the Conscious

    There are many corrosive forms of discrimination. But one of the most dangerous is the bias in favour of consciousness, and the consequent denigration of the unconscious. We see it everywhere. It’s not surprising. For when we’re unreflective – which is most of the time – we tend to suppose that we are our conscious…

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  • Are Public Health Institutions Honest?

    By Rebecca Brown The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted various cracks in the function of our public institutions. One notable concern is the way in which scientific – including health – information is communicated to the public. Communication can serve different purposes. In the context of COVID-19, communication has been essential: describing the nature of the…

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