Nick BostromProfessor of Applied Ethics, Director, Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford Steve ClarkeJames Martin Research Fellow, Program on the Ethics of the New Biosciences, University of Oxford; Principal Researcher, AHRC funded project ‘Science and Religious Conflict’, University of Oxford Roger CrispProfessor of Moral Philosophy, Uehiro Fellow, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, University… Read More »AUTHORS
Right wing politicians in Switzerland have been embroiled in a series of legal battles for the last several years over the construction of ‘minarets,’ or the tall spires that indicate the location of a mosque and broadcast the call to prayer. After suffering from a number of legal setbacks, the group finally succeeded in having a popular referendum on the issue on November 29. The Swiss people voted overwhelmingly in favor of amending their constitution to include a ban on the future construction of minarets, which are perceived by many in the country to be symbols of religious fundamentalism and theocratic political power.
Read More »The Swiss Minaret Controversy: Religion and the Tyranny of the Majority
Last week I participated in the Royal Society MP-Scientist Pairing Scheme where I got a chance to see Westminster from the inside. I was lucky to end up listening to a hearing in the Parliamentary Science and Technology Select Committee about whether the government was really pursuing evidence based medicine when it funds homepathic medicine through NHS and makes MHRA decisions for homeopathy pills. Ben Goldacre was there and has of course written eloquently about the whole thing. While Booths at least admitted they selling the remedies because they made money from them, the proponents tried both to claim clear results in their favor, that statistical measurement methods did not work and that placebo had nothing to do with what they are doing. A particular howler was how one speaker argued that homeopathy should be respected for its 200-year long history, yet it was "still early days" for explaining how or if it worked.
Read More »Diluted evidence: is there anything special with homeopathy?
A group of Dutch researchers has announced
a few days ago that they have produced the first in vitro meat. Attempts to
create in vitro meat started in 2001 and the Dutch government put $2 to support
research in this field, while PETA offered a $1 prize to the first team of
researchers that could produce edible in vitro meat by 2012. Researchers in
Norway (In vitro meat consortium) and in the United States (New Harvest) are
working on this issue as well, so we can reasonably expect that results will
come soon.
Read More »News from the future: you will have in vitro meat hamburgers within five years
Global warming hawks claim the moral high-ground, claim to speak for what is right against grubby self-interest. It behooves those who take the high ground to behave well themselves. Do they?
Data and email exchanges between climate scientists have been stolen from the servers at University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit and published online. Whether the data or content of these emails tell us anything about global warming is not an issue I am concerned with. Nor, for that matter, am I concerned with bad behaviour in the sense of global warming hawks being rude about global warming skeptics. The bad behaviour of interest is epistemic bad behaviour, and on this matter I think the emails tell us quite a lot. Furthermore, the Climatic Research Unit is one of the world’s leading players and so the behaviour of its members tells us something about the epistemic state of climate science.
The health care reform bill currently being debated in the United States has re-ignited controversy there over abortion, and in particular over the availability of federal government funding to pay for the procedure. Earlier this month, the House of Representatives version of the health care bill passed narrowly, and with a last minute amendment that will restrict provision of abortions. The so-called “Stupak amendment” says that no health care plans receiving any subsidy from the federal government may offer abortions, except in the case where abortion is the result of rape, incest, or to save the woman’s life, and it maintains this restriction even if the government subsidies are kept separate from the private payments made into the plans, and no government subsidy is ever used to pay for abortions. The Stupak amendment represents a tightening over existing policy, according to which the federal government is prohibited from directly funding the provision of abortions, but may provide funds for hospitals, for example, that also provide abortions – so long as the hospitals pay for the abortions themselves by some other means.
The argument for Stupak’s additional restrictions on abortion funding is supposed to be that since money is fungible, the old prohibition does not really work to prevent federal funds indirectly playing a role in providing for abortions. Whatever the merits of this argument, it’s worth noting that many of its proponents in congress make it hypocritically; they are more than willing to accept generous campaign contributions drawn from the profits of health insurance companies that provide insurance for abortions as a component of their plans. But I want to focus here on the question of having any restriction of this kind at all. Can the federal government legitimately be prohibited from funding abortion?
By now most readers will have heard about the case of the Belgian man, Rom Houben, apparently misdiagnosed as in a persistent vegetative state for 23 years. Rather than being unconscious, as persistent vegetative state patients are thought to be, he was apparently in the ‘locked-in state’. The locked-in state is not a disorder of consciousness at all; instead it is a state of paralysis. Because the patient is unable to give the behavioral manifestations of consciousness, they are often misdiagnosed. Genuine disorders of consciousness are notoriously hard to tell apart; the possibility of locked-in syndrome makes the diagnostic task even more difficult.
By: David Edmonds
As so often, I’m with
King Wangchuck. The former King of
Bhutan, the fourth ‘Dragon King’, coined the term, Gross National Happiness
(GNH). Governments, he thought, should
aim to boost the nation’s well-being, rather than target Gross National Product
(GNP). He used the phrase after his
coronation, an event which, unfortunately, his citizens couldn’t follow on the
box – because, until a decade ago, Bhutan didn’t have TV. The erstwhile King appears a happy man
himself – which may, or may not, be connected to his being married to four
queens.
In a report expressing concern about the increasing use of
biometric information to protect security and privacy, the Irish Council for
Bioethics (ICB) claimed earlier this month that “an individual’s biometric
information is an intrinsic element of that person”. Such claims are quite
commonly made in relation to genetic information, though the ICB’s extension of
the concept to other forms of biological information, such as that acquired from
fingerprinting, voice recognition software, and gait analysis, may be novel.
the person’ seems designed to invoke powerful intuitions about our ownership of
our own body parts: we own our biological information just like we own our
kidneys. Indeed, the ICB go on to say that “the right to bodily integrity…. should
apply not only to an individual’s body, but also to any information derived
from the body, including his/her biometric information”. But both the
metaphysical claim that biometric information is an intrinsic element of the
person,and the moral claim that it is covered by rights to bodily integrity
are highly problematic.
