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Special lecture: Jeff McMahan on Cognitive Disability and Cognitive Enhancement

Special lecture: Jeff McMahan on Cognitive Disability and Cognitive Enhancement

Friday 27 February, 12.30 p.m. – 2.00 p.m.Venue: Seminar Room 1, Old Indian Institute, 34 Broad St, Oxford, OX1 3BD Abstract: There are some members of the human species whose cognitive capacities and potential are no higher than those of higher nonhuman animals. I will seek to explain why it is important for our understanding… Read More »Special lecture: Jeff McMahan on Cognitive Disability and Cognitive Enhancement

Transparent brains: detecting preferences with infrared light

Researchers at University of Toronto have demonstrated that they can decode which of two drinks a test subject prefers by scanning their brains with infrared light. (Original paper here.) The intention is to develop better brain-computer interfaces for severely disabled people, but there are obvious other applications for non-invasive methods of detecting what people want. No doubt neuromarketers are drooling over the applications. But the threat to mental privacy might be a smaller problem than the threat of mistaken preferences.

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Born believers?

The latest issue of New Scientist features an article by Michael Brooks on the evolutionary origins of religious belief. Brookes spends most of the article considering the relative merits of the two main contending hypotheses. On one view, religion is an adaptation selected for its role in promoting cooperation; on the other, it is a by-product of other mental modules which are themselves evolutionarily advantageous. Towards the end of his piece, however, Brookes briefly addresses the implications of this research for the epistemic status of theism. As Brookes writes,

if religion is a natural consequence of how our brains work, where does that leave god? All the researchers involved stress that none of this says anything about the existence or otherwise of gods: as Barratt points out, whether or not a belief is true is independent of why people believe it.

Barring non-realist interpretations of religious discourse, it is undoubtedly the case that these studies do not impinge on the truth of religious claims. (It is not clear to me what would non-realist theologians, such as like Don Culpitt, say about this research.)  Yet the interesting question concerns, not the truth, but the warrant of theism in light of scientific findings about why people believe in God.

Such findings can, I believe, undermine theism, in at least two different ways. First, they may provide a rival, superior explanation for a belief which was previously thought to be best explained by a supernatural hypothesis. Secondly, they may show that belief in God arises not as a result of attention to arguments or evidence, but as a contingent accident of our evolutionary past. Let us consider these in turn.

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Educating children on matters of food

As evidenced by recent declarations by the Children’s Secretary (see here and here),
the British government is determined to fight childhood obesity and to initiate
nothing less than a “lifestyle revolution”, resulting in more children leading
a healthy and active life. With this aim in view, a free cookbook was recently distributed to 11
year-olds by the Department for Children, Schools and Families. In
addition to that, from 2011
cookery lessons will be compulsory in England's secondary schools for children
aged 11 to 14, and £3.3 million will be invested in order to
recruit and train people capable of teaching cooking skills to children.
Parents are also urged to teach their children how to prepare meals from
scratch.

These are certainly sensible steps to take. With nine out of 10 British adults
and two-thirds of children expected to be overweight or obese by the year 2050
unless action is taken (http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/jul/30/obesity),
we are clearly dealing with an important public health issue. And given the
significance of the link between excess weight and an unhealthy diet (lack of
exercise being another major contributing factor), it seems clear that we should
teach children what a healthy diet consists in and equip them not to be dependent on
the local fast-food chain when the time of the next meal comes. We can hope
that the government’s scheme will help to achieve this, and that parents will
follow the lead – though it is also necessary that the meals provided in school
canteens be in keeping with those aims. However, I would like to suggest that
these steps should form part of a wider project meant to educate children on
matters of food. We want our children to be healthy, but we should also want
them to become autonomous and ethically responsible eaters (and, more
generally, consumers).

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Achievement and the welfare of children

A report commissioned by the Children’s Society claims that the aggressive pursuit of individual achievement is damaging the interests of children in the UK: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7861762.stm The principal author is Lord Richard Layard, whose book *Happiness: Lessons from a New Science* (Allen Lane, 2005) is the best account of the last few decades of research on… Read More »Achievement and the welfare of children

Which issues are moral issues? The Case of Egg Freezing

The link in the Guardian reads "Fertility experts warn about morality of egg freezing". In the Telegraph the word "moral" doesn't appear in the headline, but does appear in the lede (the first sentence of the story, which is supposed to summarize the essential facts): The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists and the British Fertility Society… Read More »Which issues are moral issues? The Case of Egg Freezing

EightFourteen is enough

As the Guardian reports, what started out as the more usual happy, wonder-of-modern medicine story of octuplets born in California has turned a little bit sour. It turns out that the 33 year old single mother of the eight newborns who lives with her parents, has six children already, the eldest of whom is seven. That’s 14 children below the age of eight. The story gets more difficult. Apparently, the mother is a self described ‘professional student’ who lives on “education grants and her parents’ money” and plans on becoming a “television childcare expert.” Further, the woman’s parents have recently filed for bankruptcy and her mother has previously consulted a psychologist about her daughter’s obsession with children.

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Lies, libel and layered voice analysis

Two Swedish scientists have been threatened with legal action after publishing a scientific article sharply criticizing what they consider "charlatanry" in detecting deception. Nemesysco, a company named in the article wrote to the researchers that they may be sued for libel if they continue to write on this subject in the future. As a response to another legal threat the publisher has removed the online version of the article. Trying to remove information from the net is often counterproductive ("the Streisand effect"), and now copies of the article circulate online. Nemesysco has inadvertently drawn attention to the issue of the article, likely to their own detriment.

But can a scientific publication be libel? Does libel law serve a moral purpose?

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Why We Need a War on Aging

Based on presentation given at 2009 World Economic Forum in the Live Long and Prosper session, January 28, 2009 by Professor Julian Savulescu.

  1. There is no normal human life span, or if there is, it was very short.

Life-expectancy for the ancient Romans was circa 23 years; today the average life-expectancy in the world is circa 64 years.

For the past 150 years, best-performance life-expectancy (i.e. life-expectancy in the country where it is highest) has increased at a very steady rate of 3 months per year.

  1. Aging is the biggest cause of death and misery in humanity.

100 000 people die per day from age-related causes.  150 000 people die per day in total. Cardiovascular disease (strongly age-related) is emerging as the biggest cause of death in the developing world.

  1. Progress is possible

The goal should be to extend the HEALTHY, PRODUCTIVE lifespan, not to just keep people alive longer on respirators or in old people's homes. This is embodied in the concept not of life span but “health span”.  The easiest way to do this is to prolong healthy life not attempt to compress morbidity

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Allen Buchanan: Leverhulme Lectures 2009′ Ethics in Political Reality’

We are pleased to announce Professor Allen Buchanan’s Leverhulme Lecture Series ‘Ethics in Political Reality’. Allen Buchanan is James B. Duke Professor Philosophy at Duke University. His research is in political philosophy, with a focus on international issues, and bioethics, with a focus on the ethics of genetic interventions with human beings. He is visiting Oxford as  Leverhulme Visiting Professor for four months, and will be giving the 2009 Uehiro Lectures.

The lectures are open to all including the public and there is no need to book. For further information, please email ethics@philosophy.ox.ac.uk

 

Please see full post for the details on each lecture

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