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Can You Really Do More than What Duty Requires?
By Roger Crisp Your legal duties are what the law demands of you: to pay your taxes, not to park on yellow lines. Moral duties are what morality demands of you: to keep your promises, not to kill the innocent. Most think it’s possible to ‘go beyond’ your moral duty. Imagine you’re one of the
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The Morality of Sending Asylum Seekers to Rwanda
Written by Doug McConnell The government has recently claimed that their policy to send asylum seekers on a one-way trip to Rwanda as part of the UK-Rwanda Migration and Economic Development Partnership is “completely moral” and responds to an “urgent moral imperative”. The justification for these claims is that the policy will act as a
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The Homeric Power of Advance Directives
By Charles Foster [Image: Ulysses and the Sirens: John William Waterhouse, 1891: National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne] We shouldn’t underestimate Homer’s hold on us. Whether or not we’ve ever read him, he created many of our ruling memes. I don’t think it’s fanciful (though it might be ambitious) to suggest that he, and the whole
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Press Release: Court of Appeal decision in Dance & Battersbee (respondents/appellants) v Barts Health NHS Trust
by Dominic Wilkinson Archie is legally alive, and the legal decision about whether it is in his best interests to keep him alive now needs to be revisited in the High Court. Today, the Court of Appeal made a decision in the case of Archie Battersbee to send the case back to the High Court
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Track Thyself? Personal Information Technology and the Ethics of Self-knowledge
Written by Muriel Leuenberger The ancient Greek injunction “Know Thyself” inscribed at the temple of Delphi represents just one among many instances where we are encouraged to pursue self-knowledge. Socrates argued that “examining myself and others is the greatest good” and according to Kant moral self-cognition is ‘‘the First Command of all Duties to Oneself’’.
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Should Parents be Able to Decline Consent for Brain Death Testing in a Child?
by Dominic Wilkinson In the recently reported case of Archie Battersbee, a 12 year old boy with severe brain damage from lack of oxygen, a judge declared that he had died on 31st May. This was almost eight weeks after his tragic accident, and five weeks after doctors at his hospital first applied to the
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Archie Battersbee: How the Court Reached its Conclusion
Mother of Archie Battersbee, Hollie Dance, outside the high court in London, England. PA Images / Alamy Stock Photo Dominic Wilkinson, University of Oxford London’s high court has heard the tragic case of 12-year-old Archie Battersbee, who suffered severe brain damage after an accident at his home in Southend, Essex, in early April. On Monday,
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Cross Post: Is Google’s LaMDA conscious? A philosopher’s view
Written by Benjamin Curtis, Nottingham Trent University and Julian Savulescu, University of Oxford Shutterstock LaMDA is Google’s latest artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot. Blake Lemoine, a Google AI engineer, has claimed it is sentient. He’s been put on leave after publishing his conversations with LaMDA. If Lemoine’s claims are true, it would be a milestone
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Healthcare Ethics Has a Gap…
By Ben Davies Last month, the UK’s Guardian newspaper reported on a healthcare crisis in the country. If you live in the UK, you may have already had an inkling of this crisis from personal experience. But if you don’t live here, and particularly if you are professionally involved in philosophical ethics, see if you