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Morality: what’s disgust got to do with it?

Morality: what’s disgust got to do with it?

Kathleen
Taylor has got an interesting recent piece in the Guardian about the importance
of the emotion of disgust for our moral lives. “If you had a dog”, she asks,
“and it died a natural death, how would you feel about roasting and eating it?”
Most of us would be revulsed by such an idea. And yet by hypothesis we
would not be causing the dog any harm whatsoever; suppose also we made sure
that the meat was adequately prepared so that it did not pose a health risk to
us and our children. Why should eating the dog raise any moral issue at all?

 

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Political Responsibility

The prospect of a hung parliament following the upcoming election has raised several interesting ethical issues. One such issue which has been discussed is what are the responsibilities of the party which holds the balance of power? Should members of that party support the party holding the majority of votes or follow their own party… Read More »Political Responsibility

I’m a taxpayer, I want my data!

A ruling by the Information Commissioner has ordered scientists at Queen’s University in Belfast to hand over copies of 40 years of research data on tree rings after a long battle with a climate sceptic. (PDF of the ruling) This is an important precedent for scientists, who have to comply with the strictest interpretation of the
Freedom of Information (FoI) Act. According to the Times: "Phil Willis, a Liberal Democrat MP and chairman of the Science and
Technology Select Committee, said that scientists now needed to work on
the presumption that if research is publicly funded, the data ought to
be made publicly available." More and more, there are demands for public releases of research data.

Were the scientists right in trying to withhold data, or is the public interest stronger? Is there a moral obligation to publish not just the results of publicly funded research, but the underlying data?

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The equal air-time solution for controversial research

When are placebos ethical in medical research? One common answer is that it is only appropriate to use placebos in research when there is no proven effective treatment for the condition (1). On this view, if there is a proven treatment placebos would be unethical, and any trial should compare new drugs or treatments with the existing proven one. But what if the question of ‘proof’ is in dispute? For new medical treatments there often comes a point where some researchers and doctors are convinced that the new treatment is effective and safe while others remain unconvinced. When placebo-controlled trials take place in this setting they are often controversial.

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Arguing about moral responsibility

Outside applied ethics and neuroethics, I work in philosophy of agency, specifically on the interlinked topics of free will and moral responsibility (interlinked because I, like most participants in the debate, understand free will, if it exists, to be the power we have to act in a way that makes us morally responsible for our actions). I defend a very unusual position in the free will debate, which I won’t get into now. But one feature it shares with some others (a relatively small minority) is that it holds that we don’t have free will, in the sense defined, and therefore we are not morally responsible for our actions (or for anything else). In this post, I want to address a common criticism of my argument, and of other arguments for the same conclusion. The criticism, roughly, is this: you are arguing for a radical revision of our beliefs and our practices: the overturning of a central component of our conception of ourselves and one another. But arguments for radical revisions of common sense must meet higher standards than arguments for less radical conclusions. As the stakes go up, so do the argumentative standards.

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Volcano Ethics: Should we be Flying the Unfriendly Skies?

An ash cloud produced by the eruption of the Eyjafjallajoekull volcano in Iceland has led to the severe disruption of airline transportation in the UK and across a wide swathe of Europe, with UK airspace almost completely closed since midday last Thursday. Passengers, freight importers and exporters, and airlines are just some of those affected by the disruption; some British employers are also taking a hit due to absent workers who went abroad for their Easter holidays and then found themselves stranded and unable to get home. The reasons for grounding the planes are non-trivial: as the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) wrote in a press release last week: “Since volcanic ash is composed of very abrasive silica materials, it can damage the airframe and flight surfaces, clog different systems, abrade cockpit windows and flame-out jet engines constituting a serious safety hazard.”

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Holidays in Death Camps

The paradox of tragedy, one that has puzzled philosophers for over two millennia, is that people like to go to watch tragedies at the theatre – and tragedies are depressing.   How can one enjoy being miserable? This weekend I went as a tourist around Sachsenhausen, a vast complex just outside Berlin.  Sachsenhausen was one of… Read More »Holidays in Death Camps

The real scandals in organ donation consent

Headlines in a number of newspapers in the last day or two have claimed scandalous failures in organ donation consent in the UK. According to ‘Sky News’, organs were “taken without consent”, while the Sun claims that “NHS doctors took the wrong organs from the bodies of donors”. But it is important to put these claims in context. There are some bigger and more serious scandals when it comes to organ donation consent.

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