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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

Neurotrash and Neurobabble

Colourful images of brain scans tend to dominate the science sections of the popular media, and it is now fashionable to affix ‘neuro’ to most words of English. But there is a predictable grumpy backlash. The philosopher Roger Scruton finds the recent wave of neuroscience rather distasteful. It is all merely (in a phrase he borrows from Raymond Tallis*) ‘neurotrash’–which wonderfully evokes lurid synthetic pop manufactured in some disco den in Berlin (is Neuropop–or God forbid, the Neurovision–the next step?). Although Scruton makes a cursory reference to some arguments against current neuroscience**, it seems clear enough that what provokes his outrage isn’t some philosophical disagreement. It is that this new wave of neuroscience–or if you prefer, neurotrash–is just so obnoxiously vulgar.

Read More »Neurotrash and Neurobabble

Vegi-quette

A group of us often meet at our friend Mohammed’s place – and we normally order in a takeaway. Mohammed’s a devout Muslim, but I always get a pepperoni pizza. I did this again last night. We use Mohammed’s plates and cutlery, and he looks a little pained at having pork in his house, but I figure as I’m not forcing Mohammed to eat it himself, he’s just being silly and over-sensitive and there’s no reason for him to be offended.

Read More »Vegi-quette

Political epistemology and recent Australian experience

One of the growth areas in recent analytic philosophy is social epistemology. Epistemology is concerned with the nature of knowledge, but social epistemology often has a more applied focus. It asks about the conditions under which groups produce knowledge, and one of its central claims is that groups are often better at discovering truths than are individuals.

This comforting claim seems, at first sight, to be challenged by contemporary political events. The recent electoral success of Tea Party candidates in the United States, following on the heels of strong showings for hard right parties in the Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe, as well as an increase in xenophobic rhetoric from centre right leaders like Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel, seem to cast serious doubt on the ability of the electorate to rationally assess policies. The problem is sharpest in the US case, since the Tea Party seems to have mobilized the white working class to vote against their own economic interests. In these circumstances, it is tempting for the social democrat or even the moderate conservative to say, with Brecht, that the government should dissolve the people and elect another one.

Read More »Political epistemology and recent Australian experience