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Regulation

Is doodling a form of cheating?

The public
often complains about the fluctuating and conflicting attitudes of scientists.  So often do things heralded as good for us
one week turn out to be deadly the next (consider, for example, this recent
report about vitamin pills) that there seems little point in
trying to follow the advice of scientists.  

Some recent
news stories raise the question of whether the public is inclined to dismiss
the conflicting views of ethicists, too.  Ethical
concerns about pharmacological cognitive enhancement have regularly been
reported in the press (see, for example, here,
here,
and here);
whilst at the same time—as Dominic Wilkinson has noted on this blog—the
public has embraced non-pharmacological cognitive enhancement in the form of software designed to improve brain power, and the media
currently abounds with docile, non-panicky reports of how instant messaging,
texting,
taking short naps,
taking long naps,
listening to The Beatles,
and doodling can all enhance cognition in various ways. 
So far, there have been no reports of ethical concerns about these
activities: nobody is suggesting that students who doodle during lectures are cheating.  It seems that, despite the concerns of some, the public is willing
to embrace cognitive enhancement in a variety of forms.

Read More »Is doodling a form of cheating?

Open source censorship

The struggle against child porn goes on. An Australian judge has ruled that a cartoon showing a character from The Simpsons engaged in sexual activity is child pornography. Australia is also trying to implement Internet filtering for the whole population, although the project has run into serious opposition. Meanwhile Wikipedia ended up 'censored' in the UK due to a page with the controversial cover of an album.

The most interesting aspect of the Wikipedia debacle is that the decision that led to the censorship was not made by any government authority but an industry-sponsored group, the Internet Watch Foundation. The IWF maintains a blacklist certain ISPs subscribe to, and users trying to reach a site on it will be sent a blank page. Is this censorship, and is this bad?

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Statutes of limitations for serious offences: why Europe needs a reform

Last Sunday, 30th of November, Switzerland, by a
narrow majority, approved a constitutional modification doing away with any
statute of limitations for paedophile crimes. The initiative proposing that
modification had been opposed by the government and by most of the country’s
political parties, who supported instead the idea of maintaining the existing
statute of limitations of 15 years but making it start later than had so far
been the case (thus giving more time to the victims to decide whether or not to
take legal action). The surprise acceptance of the initiative in the popular
vote was criticized by much of the Swiss press as marking a triumph of
“emotion” over “reason” (see for instance here and here; in French). But leaving aside the question of what actually led most Swiss voters to
endorse the initiative, does the very idea of opposing a statute of limitations
for paedophile (and other equally serious) crimes necessarily lend itself to
such criticism? I want to suggest that this is not so.

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To Leak or Not to Leak?

Last Thursday, anti-terrorism police in the UK arrested the opposition minister for immigration, Damian Green (http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/nov/29/whitehall-damian-green-civil-servant). He is suspected by the police of ‘conspiracy to commit misconduct in public life’, having published documents leaked to him by a junior civil servant. That official was himself arrested on 19 November, and has been suspended from duty. We should expect that many other such officials are now asking themselves whether, if they come across some document which they believe is a matter of public interest, they should leak it.

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Animal experimentation: morally acceptable, or just the way things always have been?

Following
the announcement last week that Oxford University’s controversial Biomedical
Sciences building
is now complete and will be open for business in mid-2009, the ethical issues
surrounding the use of animals for scientific experimentation have been
revisited in the media—see, for example, here ,
here,
and here.

The number
of animals used per year in scientific experiments worldwide has been estimated
at 200 million—well in excess of the population of Brazil and over three times that of the United Kingdom. If we take the importance of an ethical issue
to depend in part on how many subjects it affects, then, the ethics of animal
experimentation at the very least warrants consideration alongside some of the
most important issues in this country today, and arguably exceeds them in
importance. So, what is being done to address
this issue?

Read More »Animal experimentation: morally acceptable, or just the way things always have been?

Election ex machina: should voting machines be trusted?

When election of public officials through
public voting was instituted in the US,the framers of the constitution
had no inkling about how large the voting public would one day become. Beside logistical problems that
accidentally enfranchise goldfish and the many issues surrounding voter
registration a growing concern is the reliability of electronic voting
machines. As electronic voting machines are being installed, concerns about their reliability are being raised and legal battles ensue. In a Finnish election the system lost 2% of
all electronic votes. About 60% of American votes are cast on
paper ballots, but it might increase locally after problems with voting machines. The real fear is not that people might misvote due to misunderstandings or that votes might be miscounted, but that the machines themselves might be biased or easily tampered with. Can we trust the machines? Or are elections by their nature too messy for these problems to matter?

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Travelling for Treatment

A BBC report today suggests that “many” UK couples are going overseas to choose the sex of their children. What seems most odd about this is that in some cases they go to places where sex selection is illegal.

What is interesting here is the fascination with what people do when they go overseas or why they go overseas. There are a whole range of stories about Britons going overseas to get things that they cannot get in the UK – or cannot get in the UK as cheaply. The obvious examples are sex selection, assisted suicide or treatments not available on the NHS.

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Death Fiction and Taking Organs from the Living

By Julian Savulescu and Dominic Wilkinson

Imagine you could save 6 lives with a drop of your blood. Would you have a moral obligation to donate a drop of blood to save six people’s lives? It seems that if any sort of moral obligation exists, you have a moral obligation to save six lives with just a pinprick of your blood.

But every day people do far worse than failing to give a drop of blood to save 6 lives. They choose to bury or burn their organs after their death, rather than save 6 lives with these organs. And it would cost them nothing to give those organs after their death. Our failure to give our organs to those who need them is among the greatest moral failures of our lives. At zero cost to themselves, not even having to endure a pinprick, many people choose to destroy their lifesaving organs after their death.

Read More »Death Fiction and Taking Organs from the Living