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Last week, Steven Farrow was convicted of murdering a grandmother and a vicar. 77 year old Betty Yates was stabbed in the face. He had planned to crucify the vicar but had left behind his hammer an nails, instead covering his dead body in pornographic DVDs, party poppers and condoms. Though Farrow is likely to spend the rest of his life in jail, the family members questioned why he had been free in the first place.
Read More »Could there be a Third Way for Criminal Psychopaths?
Imagine that the Teetotaler party came to power. They stood for family, safety and old fashioned values. Their first target was the car and the speeding culture. They wanted driving to be as safe as possible. Indeed, they would have preferred it if there were no driving cars at all and people returned to bicycles or horsedrawn carts. But they knew that was impossible. People were used to driving cars.
So they slashed the speed limits from 100km/hr to 50 on open roads, and 60km/hr to 20 in built up areas. This, it was proven, was a safer speed to drive at.
Nearly everyone, however, sped. It was just more convenient – you could do so much more. And it cut down travelling times for work, so people could get a competitive advantage by getting to work earlier and leaving later.
Some professions involved speeding. Couriers, truck drivers, and salesmen all sped. There were a few speed cameras but they picked up people only rarely and many had camera detectors installed in their cars. People continued to drive at 100km/hr, just as they always had. Those who were caught were punished heavily – banned for a couple of years.
However, the benefits of speeding, or going at what was the previous limit, vastly outweighed the punishments.
One particularly successful courier was Prance Legstrong. He used to speed and deliver packages quicker than any other service. He established DEEHL, a courier service that became more successful than US postal. Pretty soon, he was a multimillionaire.
By Brian Earp
See Brian’s most recent previous post by clicking here.
See all of Brian’s previous posts by clicking here.
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Gay genes and gay rights: On the science and politics of sexuality
If homosexuality has a genetic basis, and if gay sex produces no offspring, why hasn’t the culling force of natural selection bred it right out of the species? Neuroscientist Simon LeVay has recently taken to the electronic pages of the Huffington Post to tout his latest book and offer a few hypotheses.
In light of the article’s popularity, Professor LeVay was asked to join a panel of speakers to discuss not only the genetics of sexual preference, but also the social and political implications of such research. Since I had written on this topic on the Practical Ethics blog, I was invited to take part as well.
Read More »When the science of sexuality meets the politics of gay rights
When will we have proper AI? The literature is full of answers to this question, as confident as they are contradictory. In a talk given at the Singularity Institute in San Francisco, I analyse these prediction from a theoretical standpoint (should we even expect anyone to have good AI predictions at all?) and a practical one (do… Read More »Singularity Summit: How we’re predicting AI
The International Cycling Union has stripped Lance Armstrong of his 7 Tour de France wins . UCI president Pat McQuaid said: “Lance Armstrong has no place in cycling. He deserves to be forgotten.”
The UCI is acting in response to a “Reasoned Decision” by USADA , which claims Armstrong presided over “the most sophisticated, professionalised and successful doping programme that sport has ever seen”.
The decision includes the findings that:
“He was not just a part of the doping culture on his team, he enforced and re-enforced it.”
And the conclusion that, with their disposal of Armstrong:
“So ends one of the most sordid chapters in sporting history.”
Public condemnation has been swift, and harsh:
“Lance Armstrong has made it hard for anyone to trust cycling”
(British Cycling boss Dave Brailsford) .
“LANCE Armstrong is a creep. A liar, cheat and a bully. So awful is Armstrong, you are right to question whether all his work for cancer patients is not just calculated camouflage to protect his abuse of drugs, his competitors, teammates and supporters.
He is not just part of the drug regime that saturated cycling when he was at his peak, but he has been that culture’s bodyguard. Its enforcer. And he remains so today, arrogantly dismissing the US Anti-Doping Agency findings by telling the world through Twitter that he was “unaffected” by the release of the 1000-page investigation findings. No one in sport has lived a bigger lie.”
It is hard in the face of the evidence presented to imagine that Armstrong rode clean. Nevertheless, he has become a scapegoat for endemic problems in cycling and sport that go far beyond the purview of any one rider, however successful and charasmatic.
By Brian Earp See Brian’s most recent previous post by clicking here. See all of Brian’s previous posts by clicking here. Follow Brian on Twitter by clicking here. This is a rough draft of a lecture delivered on October 1st, 2012, at the 12th Annual International Symposium on Law, Genital Autonomy, and Children’s Rights (Helsinki, Finland). It… Read More »Religious vs. secular ethics and a note about respect
In 1900 the mathematician David Hilbert published a list of 23 of the most important unsolved problems in mathematics. This list heavily influenced mathematical research over the 20th century: if you worked on one of Hilbert’s problems, then you were doing respectable mathematics.
There is no such list within moral philosophy. That’s a shame. Not all problems that are discussed in ethics are equally important. And often early graduate students have no idea what to write their thesis on – and so just pick something they’ve written on for coursework previously, or pick something that’s ‘hot’ at the time. I don’t know for sure, but I imagine the same is true of many other academic disciplines. Read More »The most important unsolved problems in ethics (Or, How to be a high impact philosopher, part III)
Controversy erupted last week when the UK Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, said that the law on abortion should be changed. But before looking at what he said, can I ask what you think? Here are some options:
Melissa and Brad’s story is a heart wrenching one. Having to sell the family car in order to have a healthy baby.
From the government’s perspective, this is a bizarre situation. The care of a baby born with cystic fibrosis can cost over half a million dollars or more. Melissa and Brad both saved the government, and all of us, quite a lot, perhaps over half a million dollars. Yet they had to spend tens of thousands of dollars. They have, in effect, donated several hundred thousand dollars to the Australian public. Thanks Melissa and Brad.
This situation is profoundly immoral. People should have children born without disabling genetic disorders and they should be given support and encouragement to do so. If someone said to a person having IVF, “ We have two viable embryos, one is healthy and the other has a major disease. Would you like us to flip a coin, choose the healthy one or choose the one with the disease?” What should you do? What is the right thing to do?
Read More »A Tale of a Designer Baby and Distributive Injustice