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Cross Post: Is Virtue Signalling a Perversion of Morality?
Written by Neil Levy Originally published in Aeon Magazine People engage in moral talk all the time. When they make moral claims in public, one common response is to dismiss them as virtue signallers. Twitter is full of these accusations: the actress Jameela Jamil is a ‘pathetic virtue-signalling twerp’, according to the journalist Piers Morgan;…
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When the State Distrusts Individuals Based Purely on their Nationality
Written by Hazem Zohny. The UK government finds my nationality sufficiently suspicious that it requires me to register with the police. Unlike any of the other foreign nationals working at my research centre, I alone have to present myself to the police to get ‘certified’ as part of my visa conditions. This is because I’m…
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Rewarding what matters: Status in academic ethics
By Charles Foster Not everything matters equally. If academic ethics is to be useful – if, indeed, it is to be ethical – it should address itself more to the things that matter most than to things that matter less. It is hard to imagine a pair of sentences more uncontroversial – no, downright trite…
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Be Excellent: How Ancient Virtues can Guide our Responses to the Climate Crisis
Written by Roger Crisp After world chiefs and youth leaders gathered in September in New York at the United Nations Climate Action Summit, many of us as individuals are left feeling powerless and overwhelmed. Making big personal changes can appear costly in terms of happiness. And anyway, why should I bother when any difference I…
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Hornless Cattle – Is Gene Editing The Best Solution?
In this talk [AUDIO + SLIDES], Prof. Peter Sandøe (Philosophy, Copenhagen University), argues that, from an ethical viewpoint, gene editing is the best solution to produce hornless cattle. There are, however, regulatory hurdles. (Presented at the workshop ‘Gene Editing and Animal Welfare’, 19 Nov. 2019, Oxford – organised by Adam Shriver, Katrien Devolder, and The…
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Pub Bores and Politics
Written by Stephen Rainey Pub bet: I bet you can’t button your coat up. You smell a rat, but go along with it, fastening you coat to see what’s up. I claim a victorious pint of plum porter because you close your coat starting with the top button and moving down. You didn’t button your…
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The Good Place, the Bad Place, and the Ugly Consequences
written by Gabriel De Marco I recently started to watch The Good Place again, a sitcom by NBC which takes place in the realm of the supernatural. The show has taken us to the good place (somewhat like heaven, where good people go after they have shuffled off their mortal coil), the bad place (the…
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Bad Ads And Stereotypes
Written by Rebecca Brown In June this year, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) brought into effect a ban on harmful gender stereotypes in advertising. In response to public outcry about adverts such as the 2015 ‘Are you beach body ready?’ campaign by Protein World, and growing discomfort with outdated depictions of gender roles in the…
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Interview with Julian Savulescu on Genetic Selection and Enhancement
Should we use genetic testing to choose what type of children to bring into the world, and if so, how should we choose? Is it acceptable to choose a deaf child? Should we choose our children on the basis of non-disease traits such as intelligence if that were possible ? Does genetic selection put too…
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Panpsychism and Moral Status
Panpsychism is the view that sentience is ubiquitous in the world. Some people find it attractive because it sidesteps the challenge for dualists of explaining why there are two radically different types of things in the world, physical things and mental things. And panpsychism seems to avoid some of of the challenges that face physicalist…