Practical Ethics

Trading Organs for Freedom

2011-01-01T21:47:16+00:00

In Mississippi, sisters Jamie and Gladys Scott are to be let out of prison on the condition that Gladys donates a kidney to Jamie. (See also an article in the Guardian) They are both serving life sentences for being accessories...

Is it the thought that counts?

2010-12-22T18:30:06+00:00

There was a jolly fire in the fireplace. The snow was falling outside the windows, to the delight of children and despair of transport planners. Aristotle sipped on the mulled wine, watching while Kant meticulously wrapped another jar of homemade...

Wikileaks Rights and Wrongs

2010-12-19T03:13:00+00:00

Would it be a good thing if, far from crushing Wikileaks, governments were required to post their entire correspondence on Wikileaks? In principle, this would appear to be highly desirable. A legitimate ruler over us it might justifiably keep secrets...

Political epistemology and recent Australian experience

2010-12-17T14:45:55+00:00

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...

The quixotic prohibition of attention-enhancing drugs in sport.

2010-12-13T18:21:48+00:00

Amphetamines and major league baseball are in the news again, with a number of busts made for the prescription drug Adderall, which contains several amphetamine stimulants in its list of active ingredients. From the New York Daily News: Thirteen players...

Education is child abuse

2010-12-09T17:38:10+00:00

I took my son to school this morning. And I’m wondering if that was evil. Proponents of human cognitive enhancement are fond of saying that there is nothing very novel about their suggestions. There is no difference in principle, they say, between improving someone’s neural processing power by (for example) manipulation of the genome, and improving that power by education. It is a potent argument. Brains are very plastic things. Education increases the number of neuronal connections. You can see the effect of education with an electron microscope. Education produces change every bit as physical as the bruises produced by a violently abusive parent.

Sex and Chess

2010-12-07T10:36:26+00:00

For chess geeks (like me), it’s an exciting week. Tomorrow will see the start of the London Chess Classic. It will feature the first, second and forth ranked players in the world. Apart from their prowess over the 64 squares,...

People will behave badly if it's not too much work...and if no one is watching

2010-12-06T16:00:46+00:00

by Alexandre Erler An interesting article recently published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science concludes that people are more likely to transgress moral norms if doing so does not require an explicit action on their part. The researchers,...

Is mathematics the Christmas present of the year?

2010-12-06T15:11:05+00:00

by Anders Sandberg Is mathematics the Christmas present of the year? TheoryMine is a company that uses automatic theorem discovery and proof to generate new theorems via computer, which customers can then buy the naming rights for (for a paper...

Cloudy with a Chance of Dementia

2010-12-03T17:57:11+00:00

By Matthew L Baum “A test could indicate whether people in their 40s are more likely to develop dementia later in life, scientists say. But wouldn't many of us rather not know?” reads the picture caption from a recent BBC...