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ethics

The automated boycott

The dating site OKCupid displays a message to visitors using the web browser Firefox asking them to change browser, since “Mozilla’s new CEO, Brendan Eich, is an opponent of equal rights for gay couples”. The reason is that Eich donated $1,000 to support Proposition 8 (a California ban on same sex marriages) six years ago. He, on the other hand, blogs that he is committed to make Mozilla an inclusive place and that he will try to “show, not tell” in making it so. The company at large is pretty firmly on the equality side in any case.

Will the technologisation of boycotting lead to consumer pressure being applied in a better way?

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Female genital mutilation (FGM) and male circumcision: should there be a separate ethical discourse?

Female genital mutilation (FGM) and male circumcision: should there be a separate ethical discourse? This month, the Guardian launched a campaign in conjunction with Change.org (the petition is here) to end “female genital mutilation” (FGM) in the UK—see Dominic Wilkinson’s recent analysis on this blog. I support this campaign and I believe that FGM is impermissible. Indeed, I think that all children, whether… Read More »Female genital mutilation (FGM) and male circumcision: should there be a separate ethical discourse?

Exposing criminals and punitive justice: is it time to reconsider the penal code?

During the last years, we have seen a rapid increase in websites devoted to publicly exposing convicted criminals. Some sites claim that the purpose is to “shame” criminals. Some claim the purpose is to make available information that will increase the safety of you and your family. Some are legal and operate within the framework of the law; others violate the law. Regardless of purposes and legal status, consequences for ex-convicts are clearly negative, and potentially disastrous. What this means in terms of punitive justice is often overlooked: what is an appropriate reaction to a situation where the expected consequences of a criminal conviction go far beyond the intended punishment?Read More »Exposing criminals and punitive justice: is it time to reconsider the penal code?

Beyond 23andMe’s Shutdown: The Role of the FDA in the Future of Direct-to-Consumer Genetic Testing

Kyle Edwards, Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and The Ethox Centre, University of Oxford Caroline Huang, The Ethox Centre, University of Oxford An article based on this blog post has now been published in the May – June 2014 Hastings Center Report: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/hast.310/full. Please check out our more developed thoughts on this topic there!

Could ad hominem arguments sometimes be OK?

By Brian D. Earp

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Could ad hominem arguments sometimes be OK? 

You aren’t supposed to make ad hominem arguments in academic papers — maybe not anywhere. To get us on the same page, here’s a quick blurb from Wikipedia:

An ad hominem (Latin for “to the man” or “to the person”), short for argumentum ad hominem, is a general category of fallacies in which a claim or argument is rejected on the basis of some irrelevant fact about the author of or the person presenting the claim or argument. Ad hominem reasoning is normally categorized as an informal fallacy, more precisely as a genetic fallacy, a subcategory of fallacies of irrelevance.

Some initial thoughts. First, there are some clear cut cases where an ad hominem argument is plainly worthless and simply distracting: it doesn’t help us understand things better; it doesn’t wend toward truth. Let’s say that a philosopher makes an argument, X, concerning (say) abortion; and her opponent points out that the philosopher is (say) a known tax cheat — an attempt to discredit her character. Useless. But let’s say that a psychologist makes an argument, Y, about race and IQ (i.e., that black people are less “intelligent” than white people), and his opponent points out that he used to be a member of the KKK. Well, it’s still useless in one sense, in that the psychologist’s prior membership in the KKK can’t by itself disprove his argument; but it does seem useful in another sense, in that it might give us at least a plausible reason to be a little bit more cautious in interpreting the psychologist’s results.

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What Fuels the Fighting: Disagreement over Facts or Values?

In a particularly eye-catching pull quote in the November issue of The Atlantic, journalist and scholar Robert Wright claims, “The world’s gravest conflicts are not over ethical principles or disputed values but over disputed facts.”[1]

The essay, called “Why We Fight – And Can We Stop?” in the print version and “Why Can’t We All Just Get Along? The Uncertain Biological Basis of Morality” in the online version, reviews new research by psychologists Joshua Greene and Paul Bloom on the biological foundations of our moral impulses. Focusing mainly on Greene’s newest book, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them, Wright details Greene’s proposed solution to the rampant group conflict we see both domestically and internationally. Suggesting that we are evolutionarily wired to cooperate or ‘get along’ with members of groups to which we belong, Greene identifies the key cause of fighting as different groups’ “incompatible visions of what a moral society should be.”[2] And his answer is to strive for a ‘metamorality’ – a universally shared moral perspective (he suggests utilitarianism) that would create a global in-group thus facilitating cooperation.

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Announcement: “Brave New Love” in AJOB:Neuroscience – peer commentaries due October 7

Announcement: “Brave New Love” – peer commentaries due October 7 Dear Practical Ethics readers, The paper, “Brave new love: the threat of high-tech ‘conversion’ therapy and the bio-oppression of sexual minorities” by Brian D. Earp, Anders Sandberg, and Julian Savulescu has been accepted for publication in the American Journal of Bioethics: Neuroscience. Proposals for open peer commentaries are… Read More »Announcement: “Brave New Love” in AJOB:Neuroscience – peer commentaries due October 7

How to get positive surveillance – a few ideas

I recently published an article on the possible upsides of mass surveillance (somewhat in the vein of David Brin’s “transparent society”). To nobody’s great astonishment, it has attracted criticism! Some of them accuse me of not knowing the negative aspects of surveillance. But that was not the article’s point; there is already a lot written on the negative aspects (Bruce Schneier and Cory Doctorow, for instance, have covered this extremely well). Others make the point that though these benefits may be conceivable in principle, I haven’t shown how they could be obtained in practice.

Again, that wasn’t the point of the article. But it’s a fair criticism – what can we do today to make a better surveillance outcomes more likely? Since I didn’t have space to go through that in my article, here are a few suggestions:Read More »How to get positive surveillance – a few ideas