Practical Ethics

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...

Metaphors We Moralize By

2010-03-02T14:31:42+00:00

“He has a heart of gold.” “There’s not a mean bone in her body.” “They’re rotten to the core.” “We’re going to show them what we’re made of.” What do all these statements have in common? They all cluster around...

Sleepy 'Ordinary Ethics'

2010-03-01T14:14:47+00:00

It has often struck me how the most common ethical issues surround us like smog, yet we never see them. And how science and some fairly simple and uncontroversial values could go a long way to solving them. How should...

How many friends do you need?

2010-03-01T14:11:26+00:00

The title of Robin Dunbar’s recently published book asks a good question: How many friends does one person need? (http://www.faber.co.uk/work/how-many-friends-does-one-person-need/9780571253425/) Dunbar suggests that a human being can’t have more than about 150 friends (or ‘acquaintances’, as the book itself somewhat...

Shall Ape be Allowed to Kill Ape?

2010-02-26T18:13:06+00:00

It is widely accepted that it is immoral to cause gratuitous harm to animals, and indeed there are many charities that have been set up around the world, such as the RSPCA (see: http://www.rspca.org.uk/home) to prevent harm to animals and...

Eugenics or 'reprogenetics'? Call it what you will, but let's do it

2010-02-24T23:57:07+00:00

As The Times recently reports: “British couples are to be offered a groundbreaking genetic test that would virtually eliminate their chances of having a baby with one of more than 100 inherited diseases. The simple saliva test, which identifies whether...