Worldwide media have been all over a case at the Strasbourg human rights court this week as it dismissed a man’s complaint over convictions for incest with his sister. Faced with a delicate moral question, the court ducked the issue, saying it fell within the ‘margin of appreciation’ (ie the area of discretion that the court leaves to member states in some areas of law). I think the law’s involvement in this case is a problem.
I guess I should say, firstly, that I don’t. Or at least, not directly. I am a research fellow looking at the ethics and governance issues: the moral and political implications of geoengineering research and eventual deployment, should there be any. I have a long-standing interest in global justice and climate change. Climate change raises enough moral and political questions and I never thought any subject could be more complex until I heard about geoengineering. Information about geoengineering can be found on the Oxford Geoengineering Programme’s new website: http://www.geoengineering.ox.ac.uk/ Read More »Why I study geoengineering
I have been thinking about babies recently, for various reasons (let’s call them Saul). It had always struck me that procreation was a classic example of a prisoner’s dilemma. It was good for each couple to have children, but if everyone churned out these resource-chomping monsters it was disastrous for us all.
That was until friends (philosophers) kindly pointed out that study after study shows that having children actually makes people unhappy.Read More »A Teeny-Weeny Baby Puzzle
By Charles Foster
You’d better believe that believers are better.
So far as religiosity is concerned, humanity, say Cooper and Pullig , is divided fairly neatly into three clusters: Skeptics, Nominals and Devouts. The bulk of the evidence suggests that there is a relationship between religiousness and moral reasoning. That relationship, though, is complex. Its anatomy needs a lot of exploration. Cooper’s and Pullig’s exciting and audacious paper, which concerns broadly Christian religiosity amongst marketing students in the US, suggests that narcissism is a factor in explaining why individuals make wrong ethical decisions. That in itself isn’t surprising. Narcissism, for instance, is a predictor of white-collar crime in business: narcissistic individuals tend to think that they are above the laws that govern the behaviour of lesser mortals. What is perhaps surprising is that ethical decision-making was affected by narcissism only in Nominals and Devouts. The reasons for that can be speculated about very entertainingly. But I want to highlight one almost incidental observation: ‘Notably, Skeptics in general exhibit worse ethical judgment than respondents in either of the other two clusters.’
By Brian Earp
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The will is caused, not free
Everyone is talking about free will these days. Sam Harris has a new book out. Eric MacDonald has weighed in on that. Jerry Coyne, Paul Bloom, and some philosopher-types have a debate going on in the Chronicle of Higher Education. And way back in 2009 the Society for Personality and Social Psychology hosted a “showdown” between psychologists Roy Baumeister and John Bargh on the topic: What does the ‘free’ in ‘free will’ really mean? [A video of Bargh’s half can be seen here. Baumeister is here.]
The SPSP conference led to a fiery exchange of blog posts between the two principles, and then to a more sedated pair of papers in the society’s newsletter, Dialogue. Baumeister enlisted Kathleen Vohs to co-author his piece, and Bargh (for some reason) enlisted me. Here is what Professor Bargh and I had to say — after this delightful FoxTrot comic by Bill Amend.
According to a BBC report, Tony Nicklinson, 58, from Melksham, Wiltshire, has “locked-in syndrome” after a stroke in 2005 and “is unable to carry out his own suicide.” “He is seeking legal protection for any doctor who helps him end his life.”
In fact, it is not quite correct that Tony Nicklinson “is unable to carry out his own suicide.” He could at present refuse to eat food or drink fluids. Hunger strikers do this for political reasons. He could do it for personal reasons. People should not be force fed against their own autonomous wishes.
Now suppose that Tony did refuse to eat or drink, because he wanted to die because he found a life locked-in to be intolerable. He would die in weeks, perhaps less. Given that he will die, he should be given medical treatment to make his last weeks as comfortable as possible. He should be given sedation and analgesia. He could even be given such doses that render him unconscious.
Such a process already happens, int he UK, in a slightly different way. In the famous case of Tony Bland, law lords authorized the removal of a feeding tube that was keeping Tony Bland, who was permanently unconscious. They, his family and doctors all judged that continued life was not in his interests.
The issue of free speech has been directly addressed by at least one recent post and raised during the course of a number of other discussions. So, here are some of my own observations on the subject.
1 As a rough generalisation, I would say that those who discuss the subject tend to fall into one or the other of two categories. On the one hand, there are those who take a tough line and insist upon the right to express an opinion openly, however unpopular or offensive to others it may be. On the other hand, there are more tender souls who express worries over – e.g. – speech which is threatening, inflammatory, or in some way offensive. Members of the latter group are sometimes prone to argue that, while the freedom of speech and expression may be of great importance, it is necessary to ‘strike a balance’ between it and other values.
The trouble is that Read More »Free Speech: Some Comments
[This is a revised version of the Editorial which appears on the JME home page. It will replace that version.] I am personally opposed to the legalisation of infanticide. However, as the Editor of the Journal I would like to explain why the Journal would publish an article defending infanticide. The ethical discussion of infanticide… Read More »Why Did the Journal Publish an Article Defending Infanticide?
By Brian Earp
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Rick Santorum, birth control, and “playing God”
Rick Santorum thinks that birth control is immoral. Santorum, a former Senator from Pennsylvania, is one of two human beings – if the polls have it right – likeliest to become the Republication nominee for President of the United States this election cycle.
“Shyness, bereavement and eccentric behaviour could be classed as a mental illness under new guidelines, leaving millions of people at risk of being diagnosed as having a psychiatric disorder, experts fear,”
reads the title of a news article earlier this month in the wake of the publication of the most recent draft of the American Psychiatric Association’s proposed revision to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), which is used as a handbook for psychiatrists in the United States.
With this blog post, I hope that we can begin a discussion of a) the reasons undergirding fears of being “diagnosed as having a psychiatric disorder” and b) whether – counter intuitively – there might be a moral reason to include common behaviors in the DSM, because doing so might help us avoid these feared consequences.
Read More »Is there a moral argument for including more common behavioural phenomena in the DSMV?
