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Book announcement: Death Or Disability? by Dominic Wilkinson

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We are pleased to announce that Dr. Dominic Wilkinson, the previous blogmaster for the Practical Ethics blog, has just launched his book: Death or Disability? The ‘Carmentis Machine’ and decision-­making for critically ill children. The book, published by Oxford University Press, deals with advances in brain scans and other technologies, and their influence on decisions about… Read More »Book announcement: Death Or Disability? by Dominic Wilkinson

The double standard of objections to drone strikes against US citizens

On Monday, NBC News released a bombshell memo from the US Department of Justice justifying the killing of American citizens who are believed to be senior al-Qaida leaders. That in itself is not necessarily news – the US famously used a drone strike to kill its own citizens, Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, in 2011. The memo, though, is attracting much attention in large part because it reveals that the Obama administration believes such actions are justified even if there is no intelligence of an active plot to attack the US. The target must still pose an ‘imminent’ threat, but that condition can be fulfilled so long as there is evidence the target is “personally and continually involved in planning terrorist attacks against the US.” This stretches to the breaking point the plausibility of the government’s claim that such drone strikes are acts of self-defense analogous to police killing an assailant to protect an innocent. But I’ve found a tacit assumption in the debate over this memo rather objectionable: it is more legitimate for the US government to kill a foreigner than a US citizen. This assumption is thoroughly flawed, a sort of double standard that makes many commenters recoil at the assassination of al-Awlaki and Khan but shrug off the numerous other lethal drone strikes against senior al-Qaida operatives. Still, the concerns that motivate the double standard are worth taking seriously and can help shed light on what makes the memo so disturbing.   Read More »The double standard of objections to drone strikes against US citizens

Is progressivism the biggest threat to science?

In the latest New Scientist, Alex Berezow and Hank Campbell attempt to redress what they see as an imbalance in perceptions of how political views affect attitudes to science. It is widely held today – in the wake of books like The Republican War on Science, Christian conservative opposition to evolution and well-documented interference into science policy… Read More »Is progressivism the biggest threat to science?

Values for Geoengineering Governance

Geoengineering as a response to anthropogenic climate change is of increasing interest to members of the scientific community.  The challenges of developing technologies powerful enough to manipulate the global climate are considerable and varied.   As well as the scientific and technical issues, many people (understandably) have concerns about geoengineering.  Hence issues of governance are key. As the technologies are in their infancy, it is futile at present to propose detailed regulatory structures, but one place to start is to discuss the  values by which the development of geoengineering technologies must be guided.   The Oxford Principles, originally proposed in 2009, were one of the first attempts to do so.

A paper now out in the journal Climatic Change, available here, gives an explanation of the values behind the Oxford Principles:Read More »Values for Geoengineering Governance

What’s Wrong with Infecting Humans?

Earlier this month, I attended a conference on Controlled Human Infection Studies in the Development of Vaccines and Therapeutics. These studies involve deliberately infecting healthy volunteers with a disease (such as malaria, typhoid, norovirus, or salmonella) in a controlled environment. This research has significant benefits for the development of vaccines [some of the benefits are set out here]. Given that these studies could result in the development of new vaccines, they could serve a crucial role in saving many lives. Nevertheless, intentionally infecting humans with diseases is potentially risky. The degree of risk for the volunteers will vary case to case, depending on the disease and the efficacy of treatment.Read More »What’s Wrong with Infecting Humans?

Financial Guarantees and Fair Treatment

            An interesting article from the Guardian has been bouncing around my Facebook feed of late. The author, Damien Shannon, was offered a place to read for an MSc in economic and social history at Oxford University (St. Hugh’s College). Shannon managed to find sufficient scholarships to pay the required fees, but he was not permitted to take up his place because he only had managed to put together £9000 per annum for living expenses, less than the £12,900 required. Shannon is now suing Oxford on the grounds that the required funds are excessive and unfairly exclude students who have neither the resources nor the need for the lifestyle that £12,900 brings. Whether Shannon’s suit has legal merit is far beyond my own competence, but I believe he nevertheless has a point that the required expenses are excessive and unfair. And while this blog post will be primarily discussing the issue of Oxford graduate student living expenses, the general issues will apply to any school with a similarly inflated living expense requirement.  Read More »Financial Guarantees and Fair Treatment

Enlightened surveillance?

New York City contemplates using aerial drones for surveillance purposes, while North Korea buys thousands of cameras to spy on its impoverished population. Britain has so many cameras they cease being newsworthy. The stories multiply – it is trivial to note we are moving towards a surveillance society.

In an earlier post, I suggested surrendering on surveillance might be the least bad option – of all likely civil liberty encroachments,  this seemed the less damaging and hardest to resist. But that’s an overly defensive way of phrasing it – if ubiquitous surveillance and lack of privacy are the trends of the future, we shouldn’t just begrudgingly accept them, but demand that society gets the most possible out of them. In this post, I’m not going to suggest how to achieve enlightened surveillance (a 360 degree surveillance would be a small start, for instance), but just outline some of the positive good we could get from it. We all know the negatives; but what good could come from corporations, governments and neighbours being able to peer continually into your bedroom (and efficiently process that data)? In the ideal case, how could we make it work for us?Read More »Enlightened surveillance?

More theory needed: why things work

We have a lot of good theories as to why government policies don’t work. Regulatory capture explains why regulating agencies cosy up to the industries they’re suppose to reign in. Politicians’ relentless focus on short term economic growth and desperate chasing of positive headlines causes them to embrace ill-advised short-term measures (and forget about action on things like climate change!). Meanwhile, the civil service’s tenure and lack of accountability allows it to indulge in exuberant nest-feathering wastes of taxpayers’ money. Issues of status and pride saturate the decisions of all ranks of government officials.

These theories are not only intuitive, they are also backed up by research and evidence. And yet…

And yet…Read More »More theory needed: why things work