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The best ethical ideas of the year?
Foreign Policy magazine recently released its annual list of the top 100 global thinkers of the year. The members included a wide range of activists, scientists, politicians, academics and businesspeople, but what most interested me was a sidebar feature. The feature consists of a half-dozen questions that were posed to each person on the list,…
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Don’t tax the fat!
by Rebecca Roache Dr Philip Lee, Conservative MP for Bracknell and a practising GP, today suggested that people whose lifestyle choices lead to medical problems should have to contribute towards their healthcare costs. He apparently highlighted type 2 diabetes – which can be brought on by an unhealthy diet, being overweight, and lack of exercise, although…
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Condom County: Porn, Condoms and Liberty in Los Angeles
On November 6th, while most of the world focused on the United States’ presidential election, the citizens of Los Angeles County confronted a slightly more explicit question at the voting booth: should porn performers be required to wear condoms while filming? Nearly fifty-six percent of LA county voters said yes.
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Tony Coady on Religion in the Political Sphere: Part 1
In the last twenty years, there has been great interest in the dangers religion presents to liberal democracies, in particular as a result of terrorist attacks, and the political success of the religious right in the United States. Religion is difficult to define and its appropriate role in the public domain is frequently disputed. Violence…
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Treating ADHD may reduce criminality
Pharmaceutical treatment of attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is associated with reduced criminality according to a study published yesterday in the New England Journal of Medicine. The study of over 25,000 Swedish adults with the disorder found that men undergoing pharmaceutical treatments had a 51% chance of committing at least one crime in a 4-year period…
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Armstrong the Good Giraffe and the Moral Value of Effort
Let me introduce you to Armstrong the Good Giraffe. Appearing in the news last week due to his goodness (and probably his giraffeness), Armstrong is a man in a costume who goes around voluntarily doing good deeds. Throwing himself into helpful tasks – such as providing free water and bananas to runners, picking up litter…
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Janet Radcliffe Richards on the past, present and future of sex: Part 2
In the second of her Uehiro lectures on the topic of feminism in the 21st century (which you can listen to here), Professor Janet Radcliffe Richards addresses the question of how the sexes may be said to differ in the light of a shift in our metaphysical understanding of the world.
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A Dyslexic boy in a Trojan horse
‘Come in’, said the Well Known Educational Psychologist. We did. ‘Please sit down’, she said, and we did. She didn’t waste time, and quite right too. We wanted to know. ‘Tom and I have had a very interesting afternoon.’ That sounded bad. ‘He’s a very able child indeed’. That sounded worse, because it came with…
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FGM and the Golden Rule
When Binta Jobe [not her real name] was nine, she was taken into the Gambian bush where she suffered female genital mutilation at the hands of an amateur surgeon without anaesthetic. She is now a 23-year-old asylum seeker in the UK, trying to prevent her three-year-old daughter from a similar experience if she is forcibly…
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Janet Radcliffe Richards on the past, present and future of sex
In the last two centuries, there has been a massive shift in the legal, social and institutional norms surrounding sex – both in terms of women’s rights and regulation of sexual activity. And, undoubtedly, there will be more such shifts in the future – the sexual norms that emerge in the future may well…