Groundhog Day and Legal Appeals. (What if Alfie Were a Texan?)
By Dominic Wilkinson @Neonatalethics According to media reports, the family of seriously ill infant Alfie Evans have decided to lodge a second appeal to the Supreme Court today. This is the 6th legal appeal mounted since the High Cou…
Read MoreMind Control, Free Will, and Jessica Jones
By Hazem Zohny In the first season of the Netflix show Jessica Jones, our traumatized, alcoholic protagonist is up against a particularly nasty villain: Kilgrave. He is a mind-controller and complete psychopath. A virus he emits compels peo…
Read MoreWhat is ‘Practical’ Ethics?
By Roger Crisp This is an exciting time for practical ethics in Oxford. The University has recently launched a new Masters in Practical Ethics, organized by the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and the Department for Continuing Edu…
Read MoreFacebook, Big Data, and the Trust of the Public
By Mackenzie Graham Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg recently appeared before members of the United States Congress to address his company’s involvement in the harvesting and improper distribution of approximately 87 million Facebook profiles —…
Read MoreScrabbling for Augmentation
By Stephen Rainey Around a decade ago, Facebook users were widely playing a game called ‘Scrabulous’ with one another. It was pretty close to Scrabble, effectively, leading to a few legal issues. Alongside Scrabulous, the popularity …
Read MoreTongue Splitting, Nipple Excision, And Ear Removal: Why Prosecute The Operator But Not The Customer?
By Charles Foster Image: ‘Split tongue: procedure, safety, result’: Tattoo World: Standard YouTube licence. The appellant in R v BM was a tattooist and body piercer who also engaged in ‘body modification’. He was charged with th…
Read MoreGuest Post: Cambridge Analytica: You Can Have My Money but Not My Vote
Emily Feng-Gu, Medical Student, Monash University When news broke that Facebook data from 50 million American users had been harvested and misused, and that Facebook had kept silent about it for two years, the 17th of March 2018 became a ba…
Read MoreHarm, Interests and Medical Treatment. Where the Supreme Court Got it Wrong…
By Dominic Wilkinson @Neonatalethics In the latest case of disputed medical treatment for a child, the family of Liverpool toddler Alfie Evans yesterday lost their last legal appeal. The family had appealed to the European Court of H…
Read MoreGuest Post: Consequentialism and Ethics? Bridging the Normative Gap.
Written by Simon Beard University of Cambridge After years of deliberation, a US moratorium on so-called ‘gain of function’ experiments, involving the production of novel pathogens with a high degree of pandemic potential, has been lifted […
Read MoreCross Post: Common Sense for A.I. Is a Great Idea. But it’s Harder Than it Sounds.
Written by Carissa Veliz Crosspost from Slate. Click here to read the full article At the moment, artificial intelligence may have perfect memories and be better at arithmetic than us, but they are clueless. It takes a few seconds of inter…
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