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…

Should we increase the cognitive capacities of fish if we can? If we enhanced a chimpanzee so that it had the same cognitive capacities as us, would it have exactly the same moral status as us? Is it morally preferable to kill a mouse or to…

Written by Charles Foster ‘I do not understand my own actions’, grumbled St. Paul. ‘For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate….I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I d…

The New York Times just ran a fairly lengthy article that reported the use of psilocybin, a hallucinogenic drug, in a controlled experiment aimed at reducing anxiety and depression in cancer patients. (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/01/heal…

Written by Carissa Veliz DPhil Candidate in Philosophy, Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, University of Oxford This article was originally published in The Conversation Just a click away once you tick this too-long-to-read privacy agreeme…

Written by Prof Neil Levy, Senior Research Fellow, Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, University of Oxford This article was originally published on The Conversation What? Okay, that sounds good. Justin Lane/EPA One common reaction to the e…