By: Julian Savulescu Imagine someone offered you £1 000 000 to cross a busy road. There is a small chance you might lose your life or a limb. But most people would accept the chance. I certainly would. We do that kind of thing every day for…

Mariarosaria Taddeo BBC news (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8511711.stm) reported yesterday that the US Senate is about to appoint Lt General Keith Alexander as head of the U.S. Cyber Command (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Sta…

“Insofar as modern liberal discourse rests on a distinction between reasons that emerge in the course of disinterested observation — secular reasons — and reasons that flow from a prior metaphysical commitment, it hasn’t got a leg to stand …

The Family Court in Brisbance this week authorised a hysterectomy for a severely disabled 11 year old girl. Disability groups have branded the decision an abuse of human rights and called for a law prohibiting the sterilisation of disabled …

At the beginning of my journalistic career I went to interview a chap called Magnus Malan.  It was in Pretoria, and early in the morning.  General Malan had been at the heart of South Africa’s apartheid government.  He’d b…

A recent editorial in the British Medical Journal (Grubin D, Beech A, BMJ 2010; 340:c74) discusses the efficacy and ethics of chemical castration for sex offenders.   Its efficacy is not in doubt. Recidivism rates of less than 5% over…

Julian mentioned in passing the other day that he thought it would not obviously be immoral, and perhaps even morally desirable, to eliminate all shark species from the earth. The reasons he gave related to their limited ecological role, th…

By: Julian Savulescu In an article in the New York Times, Lisa Belkin relates the story of Laurie Strongin Allen Goldberg who tried to use PGD to create a sibling to provide bone marrow to treat their son, Henry, suffering from Fanconi anem…

There has been a recent controversy in the UK over proposed cuts to university Arts and Humanities budgets (see here, here, here). These cuts are to the scale of £600 million by 2013 and are joined with a call for stronger ties between univ…

“He has a heart of gold.” “There’s not a mean bone in her body.” “They’re rotten to the core.” “We’re going to show them what we’re made of.” What do all these statements have in common? They all cluster around the idea that people contain …