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Pluralism

The Football World Cup in Qatar

 

By Alberto Giubilini

 

The forthcoming World Cup in Qatar is perhaps the most controversial in football history.  Qatari social, religious, and legal norms clash with values that many people from other parts of the world hold dear.  For example, things like extramarital sex, same-sex behaviour, and importation of religious books are illegal in Qatar. A Qatari ambassador for the World Cup said that homosexuality is a ‘damage of the mind’ and a ‘spiritual harm’. He added that people going to Qatar will have to accept their rules.

This flies in the face of the fact that many players, commentators, and other stakeholders who will go to Qatar have been openly condemning Qatari social, religious, and legal norms in many ways. For example, Australian footballers have released a video condemning human rights violations in Qatar, including the treatment of migrant workers. German defender Leon Goretzcka said that by displaying messages against Qatari norms players want to “set an example for the values we want to stand for”. Is this hypocritical?

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An Ambitious Vision for Bioethics – Some Reflections on Professor Jing-Bao Nie’s St Cross Seminar

Written by Ben Davies

Many readers of the Practical Ethics blog will remember the astounding announcement last November by Chinese researcher He Jiankui that he had used CRISPR-cas9 technology to edit into two healthy embryos a resistance to developing HIV, later resulting in the birth of twins Lulu and Nana. As Professor Julian Savulescu expressed in several posts on this blog, the announcement spurred widespread ethical condemnation.

The first in this year’s series of St Cross Special Ethics seminars saw the University of Otago’s Professor Jing-Bao Nie (who is also currently a 2019/20 Fellow of Durham University’s Institute of Advanced Study) get behind the headlines to consider the political and social context of He’s experiment. At the core of Professor Nie’s presentation was that the decision to engage in genetic editing of healthy embryos could neither be written off as the act of a ‘rogue researcher’, nor dismissed as merely the product of a uniquely Chinese disregard for ethics, as some have argued.

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