After our enforced time offline it is with great pleasure that we can now announce and publish the winners of the Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics 2017 on the Practical Ethics in the News Blog. The winner of the Undergraduate Categor…

Should neurointerventions be used to prevent crime? For example, should we use chemical castration as part of efforts to prevent re-offending in sex offenders? What about methadone treatment for heroin-dependent offenders? Would offering su…

Cross-posted from The Conversation shutterstock Francis Vergunst, Université de Montréal and Julian Savulescu, University of Oxford When we hear about the horrors of industrial livestock farming – the pollution, the waste, the miserable liv…

Julian Savulescu Dominic Wilkinson’s Response A judge ruled last week that baby Charlie Gard will have his treatment withdrawn, against the wishes of his parents. His doctors argued that the rare mitochondrial disease (MDDS) he was bo…

Dominic Wilkinson Responding to Julian Savulescu The sad and difficult case of Charlie Gard, which featured in the media last week, is the latest in a series of High Court and Family court cases when parents and doctors have disagreed about…

By Charles Foster The Lord Chancellor recently announced that the discount rate under the Damages Act 1996 would be decreased from 2.5% to minus 0.75%. This sounds dull. In fact it is financially tectonic, and raises some important ethical …

Written by Dr Chris Gyngell Last year, the first truly novel synthetic life form was created. The Minimal Cell created by the Venter Lab, contains the smallest genome of any known independent organism.[1] While the first synthetic microbe w…

Following widespread media coverage about the court case where baby Charlie Gard’s parents were told that his life support would be removed against their wishes, Dominic Wilkinson appeared on BBC’s Newsnight to discuss the facto…

Alberto Giubilini, University of Oxford The use of antibiotics in meat production is a major contributor to one of the biggest threats facing human health in the 21st century: antibiotic resistance. Finding a solution to this requires us to…

Zero Degrees of Empathy author Simon Baron-Cohen, philosopher Peter Dews and Oxford Transhumanist Anders Sandberg dispute how to be good. We think empathising with others is the route to a better world. But studies show that empathy encoura…