Event Summary: New St Cross Special Ethics Seminar: Should people have indefinite lifespans? Ethical and social considerations in life-extension, Professor João Pedro de Magalhães
Written by: Dr Amna Whiston On Thursday, 16th November 2023, Professor João Pedro de Magalhães, a prominent microbiologist specialising in ageing and longevity research, gave an engaging and personable New St Cross Ethics Seminar ent…
Read MoreOn Grief and Griefbots
Written by Cristina Voinea This blogpost is a prepublication draft of an article forthcoming in THINK Large Language Models are all the hype right now. Amongst the things we can use them for, is the creation of digital personas, k…
Read MoreIs Animal Liberation Speciesist?
Written by Joseph Moore This year, Peter Singer published Animal Liberation Now, a significantly updated version of his 1975 animal rights classic. Both the original and revised text argue that humans should refrain from inflicting unnecess…
Read MoreCross-post: Fairness and Freedom in Public Health Policy – On the need for a Humanities-based approach to public health policy
by Alberto Giubilini Originally posted on the Oxford Medical Humanities website Multidisciplinary Conference, Oxford, 23 and 24 Oct 2023 This conference explored two distinct but related issues in public health. One is the extent to …
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Playing the Game of Faces with AI
Written by Edmond Awad In the popular series “Game of Thrones” (and the corresponding “A Song of Ice and Fire” novels), the “Game of Faces” is a training method used by the Faceless Men, an enigmatic guild of assassins. T…
Read MoreGuest Post: Oppenheimer – Not The Morality Of The bomb
Written by Martin Sand & Karin Jongsma The recently released Christopher Nolan movie “Oppenheimer” proves to be a phenomenal movie that deserves being watched on screen. Despite its 3 hours length, “Oppenheimer” is an intriguing portray…
Read MoreThe Language of Freedom in Public Health: the Case of the Smoking Ban
Alberto Giubilini “Enough manipulation of the definition of man, and freedom can be made to mean whatever the manipulator wishes” (Isaiah Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty, 1958) The UK Prime Minister has announced his plan to ban the sal…
Read MoreMore Demoralizing
Readers of this blog may remember a contribution by me on ‘Demoralizing Ethics’ earlier this year. It set out some arguments (from a paper on religious pluralism) for, at least initially, avoiding moral concepts and language in ethics. Thes…
Read MoreBanning Cigarettes, Paternalism, Liberty and Harm: Clearing the Smoke
Media headlines in the UK are widely reporting Rishi Sunak’s announcement of a proposal to ban smoking for younger generations. Under the proposal, the legal age of smoking would increase by one year every year so that, eventually, no-one w…
Read MoreWhy I Don’t Have Pronouns In My Bio.
Written by Neil Levy It’s now pretty standard for academics to put their pronouns in their bio – in email signatures, Twitter profiles, on Zoom and so on. There are two sorts of reasons to do this. The first is because you have a preference…
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