How to Criticize on the Internet: What Shame Teaches us about Online Harassment
Participating in that great experiment of the internet—social media in particular—runs some risks; an emotional tweet, a late-night blog entry, or a Facebook post after a couple of pints can not only get you into trouble with friends and fa…
Read MoreWhat’s Wrong With Giving Treatments That Don’t Work: A Social Epistemological Argument.
Let us suppose we have a treatment and we want to find out if it works. Call this treatment drug X. While we have observational data that it works—that is, patients say it works or, that it appears to work given certain tests—observational …
Read MoreStatement from Blog Admin
A recent post on this blog by a lecturer from Royal Holloway has caused negative comment and attention. All posts on the blog reflect the author’s own arguments, and are not a reflection of the views of other blog writers, of the Centre, or…
Read MoreStopping the innocent from pleading guilty
Written by Dr John Danaher. Dr Danaher is a Lecturer in Law at NUI Galway. His research interests include neuroscience and law, human enhancement, and the ethics of artificial intelligence. A version of this post was previously published he…
Read MoreMcMahan’s Hazardous (and Irrelevant) Thought Experiment
Written by Professor Allen Buchanan and Professor Lance K. Stell This is a response to an earlier post, by Jeff McMahan, about the right to carry guns, https://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2015/04/a-challenge-to-gun-rights. Before…
Read MoreThe Conservatives’ Legacies: What should we do with Inheritance Tax?
A majority in the House of Commons has provided David Cameron with the freedom to do over the next five years some of the things that he’s found difficult over the last five. One of the things that is set for reform is the law on inheritan…
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If you’re a Conservative, I’m not your friend
By Rebecca Roache Follow Rebecca on Twitter here One of the first things I did after seeing the depressing election news this morning was check to see which of my Facebook friends ‘like’ the pages of the Conservatives or David Camero…
Read MoreShould we punish crimes from the distant past?
Former Auschwitz SS officer Oskar Gröning is currently being tried as an accessory to murder for his role as an administrator in the extermination camp, and the trial has stirred up a lot of debate. One strand of the debate addresses the qu…
Read MoreThe Pink Princess
So we (whether ‘we’ are British, or Australians, apparently) have a new princess. Only the most curmudgeonly among us can resist a small smile at the news, right? A small minority holds themselves aloof, dismissing the whole circus as an an…
Read MoreLegally Competent, But Too Young To Choose To Be Sterilized?
In the UK, female sterilisation is available on the NHS. However, as the NHS choices website points out: Surgeons are more willing to perform sterilisation when women are over 30 years old and have had children. Recent media reports about t…
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