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A New Life Unexamined may be More Worth Living

Suppose that you’re part of an interracial, black African and white Caucasian, couple. You have a baby together, and immediately after the birth you phone around your friends and family to tell them the happy news. They all seem to have just one question, which you keep hearing over and over, immediately after you tell them that you have a new baby: “What skin tone does it have?”

As soon as you consider replying “light” or “dark” or “in-between”, you begin to wonder why the people you love are so strangely focussed on an unchosen and ultimately unimportant feature of your baby’s physical make-up. Do they think that your baby should be thought of or treated differently, merely on account of its skin colour? Instead of answering the question, you tell them this: “What does it matter? It’s not for us to impose our categories and expectations on the child. Let’s leave the child the freedom to form and choose its own identity as it grows old enough to do so.”

Read More »A New Life Unexamined may be More Worth Living

Belgium: where rapists and muffin thieves are treated alike

Some recent prison sentences in Belgium, as reported in several articles in De Standaard, one of the major Flemish newspapers:

Repeated rape of 13-year old stepdaughter: 2,5 years
Repeated rape of 15-year old girl:2 years
Rape of 2 mentally disabled girls: 2,5 years
Repeated rape of 2 girls younger than 15, making one pregnant: 2 years
Violent rape of a student: 3 years
Rape of 3 boys by a bishop: o years (but he lost his job)
Stealing 2 bags of muffins from a supermarket’s rubbish container: 6 months
(Prisoners are often released after doing half of their sentence)

Is it just me, or is something not right here?

Banks: Liberty or Regulation

Gordon Brown has just said that he made a big mistake about financial regulation. His remarks are in line with many politicians on the financial crisis: regulation failed therefore we need more regulation. But do we?

Frideswide Square is a notorious traffic junction in Oxford, and it’s a nightmare. It has about 20 sets of traffic lights and small problems here lead to long tailbacks in many directions, tripling journey times for many otherwise short trips. So you can imagine how awful it was when the traffic lights all broke down recently.

Except it wasn’t.Read More »Banks: Liberty or Regulation

Autonomy: amorphous or just impossible?

By Charles Foster

I have just finished writing a book about dignity in bioethics. Much of it was a defence against the allegation that dignity is hopelessly amorphous; feel-good philosophical window-dressing; the name we give to whatever principle gives us the answer to a bioethical conundrum that we think is right.

This allegation usually comes from the thoroughgoing autonomists – people who think that autonomy is the only principle we need. There aren’t many of them in academic ethics, but there are lots of them in the ranks of the professional guideline drafters, (look, for instance, at the GMC’s guidelines on consenting patients) and so they have an unhealthy influence on the zeitgeist.

The allegation is ironic. The idea of autonomy is hardly less amorphous. To give it any sort of backbone you have to adopt an icy, unattractive, Millian, absolutist version of autonomy. I suspect that the widespread adoption of this account is a consequence not of a reasoned conviction that this version is correct, but of a need, rooted in cognitive dissonance, to maintain faith with the fundamentalist notions that there is a single principle in bioethics, and that that principle must keep us safe from the well-documented evils of paternalism. Autonomy-worship is primarily a reaction against paternalism. Reaction is not a good way to philosophise.Read More »Autonomy: amorphous or just impossible?

61-year-old woman gives birth to her own grandchild, and so what?

The “news” is that a 61 year old from Illinois served as a surrogate mother for her daughter’s son, carrying in her womb the embryo created using her daughter’s and her son-in-law’s egg and sperm.

Anyone shocked?

I guess no, and this is instead a (nice) surprise to me.

When I started my first class in Bioethics, in 2001, surrogate motherhood was still a very controversial topic, at least in Italy. People were passionately debating about the moral legitimacy of such  kind of “unnatural” practice. Also, people were really worried about the fact that women who had already passed menopause could procreate.

Read More »61-year-old woman gives birth to her own grandchild, and so what?

Affirmative Action in Social Psychology?

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has attracted some controversy recently over his call for affirmative action in social psychology. Haidt polled his colleagues over their political affiliation during a lecture and found that only a tiny minority identifies as conservative. Of course, as he well knows, this isn’t strong evidence for the claim that social psychologists are overwhelmingly ‘liberal’ (in the American sense of that word), but the available data would suggest that this is overwhelmingly likely to be the case. If this is correct, social psychology would be unrepresentative of the general population (given that around 40% of Americans identify as conservatives). Hence Haidt’s call for affirmative action: aim to have at least 10% of the membership of the professional organization be conservative.Read More »Affirmative Action in Social Psychology?

‘Spend a day with Charlie Teo’

Over the last few days the Australian media has been covering Sydney based Charlie Teo’s auction of ring side seats in his operating theatre. The auction is reported as raising about $1500 for a children’s cancer charity and while this might raise some eyebrows Teo has been clear about his commitment to ensuring that patient care is not compromised in any way.

He is a highly regarded neurosurgeon who has pioneered minimally invasive techniques and has a reputation for taking on very difficult cases. He’s also a prominent and respected public figure: he was a State finalist for Australian of the year in 2010, is the founder of the Cure for Life Foundation and was awarded Member of the Order of Australia. (The Australian Jan 26th 2011) Despite his high profile and assurances, he has attracted criticism from his peers.
Read More »‘Spend a day with Charlie Teo’

On rebuilding Noah’s Ark and drinking old Burgundy

By Charles Foster

In North Kentucky, forty miles from its Creation Museum (where you can see Eve riding on a triceratops and videos in which weeping girls blame their moral degeneracy on their failure to believe in the verbal inerrancy of Scripture), ‘Answers in Genesis’ is building a full-size replica of Noah’s Ark. It’s an expensive business. The total bill will be $24.5 million, of which $845,910 has been raised to date. ‘Partner with us in this amazing outreach by sponsoring a peg, plank or beam…’, pleads the website. A peg will cost you $100, a plank $1000, and a beam $5000. But if you buy a beam, you’ll also get a model of the Ark personally signed by Ken Ham, the President of ‘Answers in Genesis’.Read More »On rebuilding Noah’s Ark and drinking old Burgundy