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The Brainy or the Rich: who should inherit the Earth?

The Brainy or the Rich: who should inherit the Earth?

Does it matter if Britain is ruled by toffs?

Nineteen British Prime Ministers attended one extremely expensive boarding school for boys on the far western outskirts of London, an astonishing statistic. David Cameron is the latest Old Etonian Prime Minister.

Tomorrow the nominations close for the Labour Party leadership and commentators (many of them Oxbridge-educated) have decried the fact that the main candidates ‘look the same’: white, forty-something, and, most damning of all, graduates of Oxbridge. Cameron, like almost his PM predecessors, studied at Oxbridge (Oxford, in his case). Two thirds of his Cabinet are products of Oxbridge. And you are much more likely to get into Oxbridge if you are from a wealthy background.

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A Sting for Absolutes

Sam Harris can sting. Well known for his sharp criticisms of religion, this social gadfly has picked a new target: moral philosophy. His recent TED talk and later articles about the science of morality (here and here) have caused a bit of a ruckus in philosophical circles as well as a feisty response from the general public. His main claim is simple enough: science can give us answers to moral questions. Not just inform our moral judgments or help us get what we want out of life, but actually tell us what we ought to value. In his words, values are a certain kind of fact.

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Reminder – carnival next week

A quick reminder that Practical Ethics News will host the 109th Philosophers' Carnival on 7th June.  Don't forget to nominate your favourite (recent) philosophy blog post via this link. Posts need not be on the topic of practical ethics, although they should be accessible to a popular audience.  Posts relating to current affairs are especially… Read More »Reminder – carnival next week

Mining your past to justify your terminal care: the idea of a ‘retrospective QALY’

There is no end to human suffering. There is a distinct end to the amount of money that governments will spend on reducing it. Someone has to make decisions about healthcare resource allocation. I am very glad it’s not me.

Many tools are used in the decision-making process. Not many emerge well from a viva with a philosopher.

Individual clinicians use intuition, experience, NICE
guidelines, the fear of hospital accountants and, no doubt, prejudice and the
tossed coin. But policy makers do not have the luxury of being able to account
only to their consciences and the local man in a suit. They have to say something in the minutes about the
reason for funding procedure X but not procedure Y. The real reason might be:
‘My grandma, whom I loved very much, had procedure X, and it did her good’, but
they can’t say that.

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Creating Headlines, Artificial Life, Ethical Concerns, and Ontological Perplexity

Synthetic biology has been catapulted into the
public sphere after an article
in Science reported that
Craig Venter and his collaborators had managed to make a synthetic cell by
inserting a fabricated genome into a bacterium. The achievement made headlines
and was widely presented as a case of creating artificial life. Already there
has been debate about what impact it may be expected to have on future
biotechnological research and about what ethical concerns arise in relation to
synthetic biology. Unsurprisingly a third issue has been whether the
scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute have really created artificial
life?


With regard to the latter question the debate
has not focused on whether the synthetic cell is really alive, but whether it
is properly artificial. In an interview
with the BBC Nobel
Prize-winning biologist Paul
Nurse points out that not just the genome but the entire cell
would have to be synthesized for it to be properly artificial. What Venter
has produced is the first living cell which is entirely controlled by
synthesized DNA, not artificial life. 


George Church, geneticist at Harvard Medical
School, doesn’t think that Venter has really created new life either. Commenting
in Nature,
Church says that the bacterium made by Venter “is not changed from the wild
state in any fundamental sense. Printing out a copy of an ancient text isn’t the
same as understanding the language.” 

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Should Believers Trust Atheists?

The Science and Religious Conflict Project team here at Oxford has recently finished hosting a major international conference on Religion, Tolerance and Intolerance (For details see: http://www.bep.ox.ac.uk/archive_events_data/religion_and_tolerance_conference_may_2010). The conference involved a large number of very interesting papers by eminent scholars across a range of disciplines. One that particularly peaked my interest was a paper on ‘Religion as Parochial Altruism’, which was presented by Professor Ara Norenzayan from the Department of Psychology at the University of British Columbia.

Norenzayan discussed, among other topics, the attitude of religious believers to atheists in America. I knew that atheists were not popular in America but I was surprised to learn that they are the least liked group in the entire country. While 33.5% of Americans would disapprove if their child married a Muslim (the second least popular group in America) an amazing 47.3% would disapprove if their child married an atheist. In another survey average Americans revealed that they were more likely to vote for a homosexual that an atheist presidential candidate.

 

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