Practical Ethics

Going Green Makes You Mean ... and Distracts You

2010-03-16T14:21:05+00:00

When doing something is worse than doing nothing By: Julian Savulescu According to a study reported in the Guardian, when people feel they have been morally virtuous by saving the planet through their purchases of organic baby food, for example,...

The Great Egg Raffle - Why Everyone's a Winner If We Price Life and Body Parts

2010-03-16T11:58:16+00:00

By: Julian Savulescu Imagine someone offered you £1 000 000 to cross a busy road. There is a small chance you might lose your life or a limb. But most people would accept the chance. I certainly would. We do...

Cyber-war - the rhetoric of a disruptive and non-destructive warfare

2010-03-16T11:28:35+00:00

Mariarosaria Taddeo BBC news (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8511711.stm) reported yesterday that the US Senate is about to appoint Lt General Keith Alexander as head of the U.S. Cyber Command (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Cyber_Command). This is a United States armed forces’ sub-unified command. The USCybercom, as it...

A Secular Foothold?

2010-03-15T16:34:07+00:00

“Insofar as modern liberal discourse rests on a distinction between reasons that emerge in the course of disinterested observation — secular reasons — and reasons that flow from a prior metaphysical commitment, it hasn’t got a leg to stand on.”...

Hysteria over a hysterectomy

2010-03-10T22:38:08+00:00

The Family Court in Brisbance this week authorised a hysterectomy for a severely disabled 11 year old girl. Disability groups have branded the decision an abuse of human rights and called for a law prohibiting the sterilisation of disabled children....

Breakfast with Satan

2010-03-09T10:44:04+00:00

At the beginning of my journalistic career I went to interview a chap called Magnus Malan. It was in Pretoria, and early in the morning. General Malan had been at the heart of South Africa’s apartheid government. He’d been head...

Castration and conscience

2010-03-05T14:34:54+00:00

A recent editorial in the British Medical Journal (Grubin D, Beech A, BMJ 2010; 340:c74) discusses the efficacy and ethics of chemical castration for sex offenders. Its efficacy is not in doubt. Recidivism rates of less than 5% over long...

Jumping the Shark

2010-03-04T20:00:35+00:00

Julian mentioned in passing the other day that he thought it would not obviously be immoral, and perhaps even morally desirable, to eliminate all shark species from the earth. The reasons he gave related to their limited ecological role, the...

Our Lethal Moral Ideals: Having a Child to Save Another

2010-03-04T14:48:32+00:00

By: Julian Savulescu In an article in the New York Times, Lisa Belkin relates the story of Laurie Strongin Allen Goldberg who tried to use PGD to create a sibling to provide bone marrow to treat their son, Henry, suffering...

Do the Arts and Humanities need to justify their existence?

2010-03-03T19:02:49+00:00

There has been a recent controversy in the UK over proposed cuts to university Arts and Humanities budgets (see here, here, here). These cuts are to the scale of £600 million by 2013 and are joined with a call for...