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 of the University. Blog authors include staff and students of Oxford… Read More »Statement from Blog Admin
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 anachronism, but no one actually thinks there is a downside. Well, I do. I think in a small way (through no fault of her own, obviously) baby Charlotte will contribute to making the world a little worse.Read More »The Pink Princess
By Nadira Faber
Why do humans help others even when it is costly and nothing is to be expected in return? This question has not only developed into a classic in different empirical disciplines, but is also of high interest for fundraisers like charities who would like to know how to increase donations.
A study recently publish in Current Biology gives interesting real-life evidence for why people help that might sound like a paradox at first: ‘competitive altruism’.
Read More »‘Competitive Altruism’ – Why attractive women are the most successful fundraisers
By Andrew Vierra, Georgia State University and Brian D Earp, University of Oxford
This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Read the original article.
Following the death of 17-year-old Leelah Alcorn, a transgender teen who committed suicide after forced “conversion therapy,” President Barack Obama called for a nationwide ban on psychotherapy aimed at changing sexual orientation or gender identity. The administration argued that because conversion therapy causes substantial psychological harm to minors, it is neither medically nor ethically appropriate.
We fully agree with the President and believe that this is a step in the right direction. Of course, in addition to being unsafe as well as ethically unsound, current conversion therapy approaches aren’t actually effective at doing what they claim to do – changing sexual orientation.
But we also worry that this may be a short-term legislative solution to what is really a conceptual problem.
The question we ought to be asking is “what will happen if and when scientists do end up developing safe and effective technologies that can alter sexual orientation?”
Read More »Born this way? How high-tech conversion therapy could undermine gay rights
A little video is circling the internet which shows the reactions of homeless people on nasty tweets about them. Apparently this is necessary to show the world that homeless people have feelings too. Research of Harris and Fiske (2010) showed that many people don’t see homeless people as real human beings. Harris and Fiske made brain scans of regular people looking at objects and human beings. When looking at human beings, the medial prefrontal cortex was activated, which is involved in social cognition. When looking at objects, the medial prefrontal cortex didn’t lit up, and the same happened when they saw pictures of heavy marginalized groups like substance dependent or homeless people. Read More »Apparently most people don’t see homeless people as human beings
Last week, the Guardian ran an article about “Russia’s Troll Army”. “Troll” is something of a misnomer here: the people in question are not out to provoke a reaction. Rather they are paid to promote the government’s line on political and social issue. They maintain blogs and social media profiles under pseudonyms, where they post made up incidents from fabricated lives, interspersed with political posts they are instructed to write, lauding Russia’s intervention in the Ukraine (for example). And of course they post comments on news stories, on Russian and foreign websites (for reasons unknown, they don’t seem to target Practical Ethics).Read More »What’s wrong with paid comment?
It has now been almost two years since Snowden. It’s time for us to admit this has little to do with privacy. Global surveillance is not global only because it targets people all over the world. Global surveillance is done for and against global interests. Privacy, by contrast, is an individual right. It’s simply the wrong description level. This is not about your internet history or private phone calls, even if the media and Snowden wish it were.
Privacy is rarely seen as a fundamental right. Privacy is relevant insofar as it enables control, harming freedom, or insofar as it causes the violation of a fundamental right. But the capabilities of intelligence agencies to carry out surveillance over their own citizens are far lower than their capability to monitor foreigners. Any control this monitoring might entail will never be at the individual level; governments can’t exert direct control over individual citizens of foreign countries.
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Framing this as an issue of individual privacy is a strategic move done against the interests of individuals. Read More »Global surveillance is not about privacy
It is with great pleasure that we can announce the winners of the Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics 2015. The winner of the Undergraduate Category is Xavier Cohen with his essay: How Should Vegans Live? The winner of the Graduate Category is Jessica Laimann with her essay: Is prohibition of breast implants a good way… Read More »Announcement: Winners of the Inaugural Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics.
On Tuesday the 10th of March, Shaun Nichols delivered the 2015 Wellcome & Loebel Lecture in Neuroethics. You can listen to the lecture here.
Nichols presented a range of intriguing empirical data on how our view of the self affects our attitudes. The common view about the self is that it is something that persists through our lives. The self is an essential part of us that remains the same from childhood to adulthood. However some views in philosophy and religion see the self as something much less permanent.Read More »Death and the Self
I have just finished a series of lectures at the University of Oxford on the topic of self-control, the culmination of my first stint in Oxford as a Leverhulme visiting professor (for which I am very grateful to the Leverhulme Trust). My theme has been self-control as a problem of self-management; taking ‘management’ seriously. The idea is that we need to think strategically about ourselves: rather than deciding how to act as temptations arise, we ought to plan for those occasions, or avoid them. That, I’ve argued, is how people who are successful at avoiding temptations when they conflict with their longer-term goals actually do it.Read More »Self-control and Public Policy.
