The former president of Ivory Coast, Laurent Gbabgo, did little to enhance his democratic credentials by refusing to step down from power after defeat at the polls. President Barack Obama, it has recently transpired, tried to encourage him to depart by offering him an ivory tower carrot – an academic post at a prestigious East… Read More »From Ivory Coast to Ivory Tower
Some recent prison sentences in Belgium, as reported in several articles in De Standaard, one of the major Flemish newspapers:
Repeated rape of 13-year old stepdaughter: 2,5 years
Repeated rape of 15-year old girl:2 years
Rape of 2 mentally disabled girls: 2,5 years
Repeated rape of 2 girls younger than 15, making one pregnant: 2 years
Violent rape of a student: 3 years
Rape of 3 boys by a bishop: o years (but he lost his job)
Stealing 2 bags of muffins from a supermarket’s rubbish container: 6 months
(Prisoners are often released after doing half of their sentence)
Is it just me, or is something not right here?
Much of the ongoing debate about Libya has rested on what I believe to the mistaken philosophical premise that the United States, or any other potential intervening party, becomes more morally responsible for the fate of Libya if it chooses to intervene than if it doesn’t. Ross Douthat presents the most sophisticated defense in this post. Most relevant line:
But America’s leaders are not directly responsible for governing any country besides their own, which means that almost by definition, they/we bear less responsibility for tragedies that result from our staying out of foreign conflicts than for tragedies that flow from our attempts at intervention.
Douthat here is equivocating two senses of “responsibility;” the first empirical, and the second philosophical. It is true that the United States is only “directly responsible” for governing its own citizens in a contingent sense: the only people subject to U.S. law are, well, Americans. But that brute fact says nothing “by definition” about who to whom the American government is morally responsible. Douthat’s arguments rest on the foundation that empirical responsibility entails moral responsibility: that if we cause something, we are more morally responsible for it than we would have been otherwise. But is this position defensible?
Midsomer Murders is an ITV drama based around English village life: it pulls in millions of viewers and has been running for over a decade. The co-creator of the series has just been suspended for saying he deliberately kept ethnic minorities out of the series. “It wouldn’t be an English village with them”. Cue outrage… Read More »Murder in an English Village
When a lane is closed off for repairs, are you that driver who ignores all the “change lane” signs as you zoom past the stationary line of traffic, then cut in at the very last moment? Are you someone who loves to go to the beach or park to enjoy the scenery, eat a picnic, and leave your rubbish strewn behind you? Are you a bank trader taking risks for profit that would be ridiculous – were it not for the fact that your bank is “too big to fail” and the government will have to step in and raid the public treasury to save it if the gamble goes the wrong way? Do you cheat on your taxes? When your country goes to war, are you one of the brave legions of Keyboard Kommandos who tirelessly blogs (and comments on blogs) in support of it, yet wouldn’t even dream of signing up and risking your life to fight for what you believe in? Do you never buy a round of drinks at the pub, or pick up the tab at a restaurant, though you can afford to do so, and enjoy it when others buy for you?
By Charles Foster
Most scientific journals require contributors to declare any conflict of interest.
But what about ethicists? We are much more ambitious and presumptuous in our aims than most scientists. We purport to tell our readers not which drug will reduce their blood cholesterol, or which type of plate is best for their radial fracture, but how best to live: how to make right decisions about things that matter far more than cholesterol; how to be the right sort of people. If we write good papers, amounting to more than newspaper opinion pieces, the papers support their conclusions with supposedly objective reasoning. We try to look scientific. And yet, try as we might, we can’t escape from our own histories and tendencies. If an ethicist has been sexually abused as a boy by a paedophilic priest, or forced to watch US evangelical TV, he’ll never be able to think that religion is anything but evil or ridiculous, and his articles will argue, with apparent but wholly fake objectivity, towards that conclusion. If the Jesuits got him before the age of 7, and etched the catechism into his subconscious rather than buggering him, the man they made out of the boy will be theirs for ever, in the Journal of Medical Ethics just as devoutly as in the confessional. And yet there’ll be not a whisper of a warning next to their papers. Those influences are likely to be far more determinative of the views expressed than any financial conflict of interest in a drug trial ever was. Everything about an ethicist’s life raises a potential conflict of interest.Read More »You want to publish? Let’s hear all your dirty secrets
By Charles Foster
In North Kentucky, forty miles from its Creation Museum (where you can see Eve riding on a triceratops and videos in which weeping girls blame their moral degeneracy on their failure to believe in the verbal inerrancy of Scripture), ‘Answers in Genesis’ is building a full-size replica of Noah’s Ark. It’s an expensive business. The total bill will be $24.5 million, of which $845,910 has been raised to date. ‘Partner with us in this amazing outreach by sponsoring a peg, plank or beam…’, pleads the website. A peg will cost you $100, a plank $1000, and a beam $5000. But if you buy a beam, you’ll also get a model of the Ark personally signed by Ken Ham, the President of ‘Answers in Genesis’.Read More »On rebuilding Noah’s Ark and drinking old Burgundy
By Charles Foster
I took my son to school this morning. And I’m wondering if that was evil.
Proponents of human cognitive enhancement are fond of saying that there is nothing very novel about their suggestions. There is no difference in principle, they say, between improving someone’s neural processing power by (for example) manipulation of the genome, and improving that power by education. It is a potent argument. Brains are very plastic things. Education increases the number of neuronal connections. You can see the effect of education with an electron microscope. Education produces change every bit as physical as the bruises produced by a violently abusive parent.
by David Shipley
A friend of mine is a therapist. She faced the following dilemma.
My friend specialises in enhancing fertility and was approached by a prospective patient who wished to become pregnant but could not afford to pay the standard fee of £45 per treatment as she was on benefits. The woman was aged 40 and had no children. What should my friend the therapist have done?
by Julian Savulescu
Toby Ord is a brilliant young Oxford post doc. He has established Giving What We Can. On the website, you can calculate how many lives you could save by giving to the most effective charities he has evaluated. He calculates that even a person on the median salary could save 1350 lives. Here is an example of how Toby calculates the number of lives which could be saved.
