The Curious Engineer

Practical Ethics

2007–2013

1,275 posts

2014–2026 →

2013 211

December 2013

  1. Tis’ the season of pardons
  2. Emergence’s devil haunts the moral enhancer’s kingdom come
  3. Happiness, meaning and well-being
  4. Pursuing your dreams when drunk
  5. Should exceptional people receive exceptional medical treatment?
  6. Professor Tim Scanlon: When Does Equality Matter?
  7. Podcast: Genetic Parenthood, Assisted Reproduction, and the Values of Parental Love
  8. Podcast: Is Networking Immoral?
  9. Oxford Martin School Seminar: Robert Rogers and Paul Van Lange on Social Dilemmas
  10. Get your nasty Platonic hands off my kids, Mr. Gove
  11. Is it morally permissible for parents to encourage their children to play high-impact sports?
  12. Beyond 23andMe’s Shutdown: The Role of the FDA in the Future of Direct-to-Consumer Genetic Testing
  13. Is Two -Thirds of What We Say Immoral?
  14. A Puzzle about Parenting
  15. Caesarean Sections, Autonomy and Consent

November 2013

  1. In praise of insult
  2. The Situational Judgement Test – a great tool for the wrong job?
  3. Invasion from the blue planet: are we protecting Mars too much?
  4. Keeping pace?
  5. The new offence of ‘wilful neglect’ – what’s new?
  6. Lifespan Enhancement and Punishment
  7. If you’re female, your face is worth 48-67% more than mine
  8. Some Thoughts on James Burke’s Vision of the Future
  9. Ethics of Editing the Book of Life
  10. Closing down comments
  11. We should stop punishing addicted people for being addicted
  12. The Morality of Sport-Hatred
  13. Could ad hominem arguments sometimes be OK?
  14. Financial Incentives, Coercion and Psychosis
  15. Event Announcement: Serotonin influences the use of social norms in resource dilemmas” by Prof Robert Rogers and “Prosociality and trust” by Prof Paul A.M. Van Lange
  16. What Fuels the Fighting: Disagreement over Facts or Values?

October 2013

  1. Breaking the mould: genetics and education
  2. The Tragedy of Moral Mistakes
  3. Neither God nor Nature: Could the doping sinner be an exemplar of human(ist) dignity?
  4. Can we Have an Interest Theory of Rights for Animals, and a Will Theory for Humans?
  5. Winchester Lectures: Kamm and Permissibility
  6. Winchester Lectures: Kamm’s Trolleyology and Is There a Morally Relevant Difference Between Killing and Letting Die?
  7. Thorpe Park’s ‘Asylum’ maze is unrealistic. Does this make it more or less inappropriate?
  8. Should athletes be allowed to use performance enhancing drugs?
  9. Podcast: Ethics and Expectations, Seth Lazar
  10. Things look really good…if all you care about is money
  11. Can a person in a vegetative state get married?
  12. Electroceuticals and Mind Control
  13. Abortion ‘on grounds of gender’: Like it or not, the DPP was right
  14. ‘Trust Me, I’m a Doctor’: On the Unnecessity of Some Necessary Post-Mortems
  15. Announcement: “Brave New Love” in AJOB:Neuroscience – peer commentaries due October 7
  16. There are no significant facts about human beings
  17. A not-so-great escape: suicide in prison

September 2013

  1. How to get positive surveillance – a few ideas
  2. US Congress shutsdown CDC, also other unimportant agencies
  3. Stress Influences Our Moral Behaviour
  4. Is compassion a necessary component of healthcare?
  5. Ethical Enhancement
  6. A death on the border
  7. Should some people be barred from pursuing higher education?
  8. Polygraphs: placebo or trial by ordeal?
  9. Google and the G20
  10. What’s wrong with adopting out an adopted child?
  11. Teenage annihilation on an Aegean boat
  12. Burma, Myanmar and the Myth of Objectivity

August 2013

  1. In defense of the double standard for chemical weapons
  2. Twitter, paywalls, and access to scholarship — are license agreements too restrictive?
  3. Political Change and the Olympic Games
  4. Is unwanted pregnancy a medical disorder?
  5. Let’s Talk About Death: Millennials and Advance Directives
  6. Safety First? How the Current Drug Approval System Lets Some Patients Down
  7. Can Facts Be Racist?
  8. Jane Austen’s Ring: Should We Care?
  9. Would you hand over a moral decision to a machine? Why not? Moral outsourcing and Artificial Intelligence.
  10. Dangerous dogs and proportionate sentencing
  11. Not all philosophers are equal
  12. I’m Too Unsexy For My Shirt
  13. Enhanced punishment: can technology make life sentences longer?
  14. Lying in the least untruthful manner: surveillance and trust
  15. Press Release: Ethical Meat
  16. Does philanthropy propagate an unjust system?
  17. The Law on Assisted Suicide: Time for the Buck to Stop

July 2013

  1. The Ethics of Private Payment for Health Care: The Example of Vaccination
  2. What to do with the Redundant Churches After the Demise of Religion?
  3. Censorship, pornography and divine swan-on-human action
  4. I’ve warned you! But I shouldn’t have
  5. Doping…When Will We Learn?
  6. In the genetic supermarket, should parents be allowed to buy?
  7. How do you want to die?
  8. ‘Losses disguised as wins’: Slot machines and deception
  9. Pay politicians much more
  10. Killing by praying
  11. State versus parental authority: morality or efficiency?
  12. Introversion and Well-Being
  13. The Parable of the Islands
  14. Pak-Hang Wong on “Virtuous Climate Making? Towards a Virtue-Theoretic Approach to Geoengineering”
  15. Does Madeleine McCann deserve never to be found?
  16. Caught in the genetic social network
  17. Are You A Fox or A Hedgehog?
  18. Government is good for you so do what you’re told!
  19. Podcast: The Ethics of Infant Male Circumcision

June 2013

  1. Three person IVF
  2. Ethics In Finance: A New Financial Theory For A Post-Financialized World
  3. Why pet owners know as much as neuroscientists about animal minds
  4. Podcast:Attention, Action, and Responsibility
  5. Announcement: New Open Access ‘Journal of Practical Ethics’ Available
  6. What grounds paternal obligations?
  7. Are cyborgs the future of humanity?
  8. The Permissibility of Refusing the MMR Vaccine and the Issue of Blame
  9. Empathy ethics: How to get a lung for your child
  10. Skin switching, implicit racial bias and moral enhancement
  11. A WHITE MAN’S COURT
  12. Secret snakes biting their own tails: secrecy and surveillance
  13. Casinos should say: ‘Enough. Go home.’
  14. One for the Road? . . .
  15. Cry havoc and let slip the robots of war?

May 2013

  1. Podcast: David Nutt, ‘The current laws on drugs and alcohol – ineffective, dishonest and unethical?’
  2. Podcast: Folk Psychology, the Reactive Attitudes and Responsibility
  3. Ethics and the Limits of the Randomized Controlled Trial: Time to Enhance Access to Novel Therapies in Lethal Diseases?
  4. Cultural bias and the evaluation of medical evidence: An update on the AAP
  5. Why it matters whether you believe in free will
  6. Enhancement: Rat Race or Supermarket? (Podcasts)
  7. What is Effective Altruism?
  8. ‘Precarious (Bio)ethics: Research on Poisoning Patients in Sri Lanka’
  9. Why are we not much, much, much better at parenting?
  10. Frej Klem Thomsen, ‘Rescuing Responsibility from the Retributivists – Neuroscience, Free Will and Criminal Punishment’ (Podcast)
  11. Phones 4 U, Ke$ha and becoming offensive
  12. Non-consensual testing after needlestick injury: A legal and ethical drama
  13. We may need to end all war. Quickly.
  14. Forced Physical Exercise as an Intervention for Mental Disorders?
  15. How to deal with double-edged technology
  16. We voted that you should pay, so pay up— or else!
  17. Global Positioning Systems and Dementia: An Ethical Analysis

April 2013

  1. Postponed: Wellcome Lectures in Neuroethics 2013
  2. Journal of Medical Ethics special issue on the ethics of stem cell-derived gametes
  3. Paracetamol Can Soften Our Moral Reactions
  4. Thoughts on assisted suicide
  5. Politics as tribal allegiance
  6. Doing Well by Doing Good: Careers that benefit others also benefit you
  7. Popular Opinion and Gun Rights
  8. A Leader Without a Doubt
  9. Two Cheers for Laughtivism
  10. Strict-ish liability? An experiment in the law as algorithm
  11. What happens when you die
  12. Sex, Sex Surrogates, and Disability
  13. Lady Thatcher is Dead – and some people celebrate
  14. Event Announcement: 2013 Wellcome Lectures in Neuroethics
  15. Why slaughterhouses should welcome CCTV
  16. Art and Moral Taint
  17. Ethics after Leveson
  18. What’s Wrong With Believing In Nothing?
  19. So what if I would agree?

March 2013

  1. Is it rational to have children?
  2. The Cultural Cost of Placebo
  3. Julian Savulescu and Robert Sparrow debate the ethics of designer babies
  4. Announcement: Journal of Medical Ethics – Special Issue on Circumcision
  5. Male Circumcision and the Enhancement Debate: Harm Reduction, Not Prohibition
  6. Sponsoring student adventures, with added charity.
  7. A reply to ‘Facebook: You are your ‘Likes”
  8. Brief announcement: Interview about ‘love drugs’ on “Q” with Jian Ghomeshi
  9. Kyle Edwards: Methods of Legitimation: How Ethics Committees Decide Which Reasons Count (Podcast)
  10. Facebook: You are your ‘Likes’
  11. Practical Ethics and Philosophy
  12. Neil Levy: ‘Psychopaths and Responsibility’ – Podcast
  13. Should men take their wife’s last name?
  14. New Podcast: Toby Ord and Harry Shannon on Effective Philanthropy
  15. Sexy Indian Costumes on Sale!
  16. Well, he did make the trains run on time
  17. Is this the real life, is this just fantasy? When should we act against disturbing imagination
  18. What social contract?

February 2013

  1. Why advertising gay conversion therapy is like advertising make-up
  2. Wall St, Charity, and Saving the World
  3. The Ethics of Meatballs
  4. Announcement: Student Prize Competition ‘Enhancing Humanity’s Collective Wisdom’
  5. If The Jury System Is The Best Option, Can We Make it Better?
  6. The Way Forward: Mapping Brains and Finding Direction
  7. Psychosurgery: avoiding old problems, facing new ones
  8. The feminist case for gun rights
  9. Football scandal shapes the future of a one world government
  10. Your password will probably be hacked soon, and how to (actually) solve the problem
  11. Jeff McMahan and John Broome discuss the value of life and the badness of death
  12. “The Best Interests of the Family”: Parents v Baby?
  13. Live from the shooting gallery: what price impact safety?
  14. Book announcement: Death Or Disability? by Dominic Wilkinson
  15. On being private in public
  16. Too long in gestating: an overdue inquiry into the Abortion Act
  17. Jeff McMahan on What Rights Can be Defended by Means of War
  18. Yet Another Reason to Legalise Doping in Sport: Organised Crime
  19. The double standard of objections to drone strikes against US citizens
  20. Alexandre Erler – ‘Sleep and Opportunity for Well-Being’ – Talk Podcast
  21. Anthony Skelton: ‘Two Conceptions of Children’s Welfare’ – Talk Podcast
  22. Political Authority?
  23. Is progressivism the biggest threat to science?
  24. Don’t stay up and decide: sleep deprivation and the culture of late night summits

January 2013

  1. Values for Geoengineering Governance
  2. Taj’s Choice
  3. What’s Wrong with Infecting Humans?
  4. Flu researchers impartially decide dangerous flu research is safe
  5. Financial Guarantees and Fair Treatment
  6. Whom Should We Refuse to Treat? Pregnant Rape Victims? Surrogates?
  7. Where are my smart genes? Searching for intelligence in our DNA
  8. Back to the Future: The Ethics of Cloning Neanderthals and Creating Genetically Modified Animals
  9. Pedophilia, Preemptive Imprisonment, and the Ethics of Predisposition
  10. Think deep thoughts in the snow
  11. Enlightened surveillance?
  12. Amnesia and remorse: how much should we expect?
  13. Invoking and banishing the dread demon “Lead”
  14. More theory needed: why things work
  15. Armstrong Confesses: What Now?
  16. Abortion and the cognitively impaired mother
  17. An appetite for food addiction?
  18. Why We Should Pay MPs Much More
  19. Salt in the Wound, or the Sweetest Thing? On Placing Legal Limits On the Sugar, Salt and Fat Content of the Foods We Eat.
  20. Can money change the moral value of a request?
  21. Dirty Money
  22. The last sweet years or bad romance? Handling infidelity in the nursing home

2012 233

December 2012

  1. Sin Taxes and Biomarkers
  2. The Best Practical Ethics Books of the Year…
  3. When to eat the marshmallow: new perspectives on impulse control
  4. Turning the Camera Around: What Newtown Tells Us About Ourselves
  5. Stalking Cat, tiger body modification, and the limits of consent
  6. Mind-controlled limbs and redefining the self
  7. Informed consent deserves a little less respect
  8. Prank Calls and Moral Luck
  9. Sui generis, or generic gay? Pardoning Alan Turing
  10. Why a painting is as good as a photo on a passport
  11. Two Unhappy Lives
  12. Persistent Vegetative State and Futility: Should Communication by fMRI Change the Law?
  13. “HoboJacket – An Ethical Analysis”
  14. Tony Coady on Religion in the Political Sphere: Part 3 – Religious Positives for Liberal Democracies
  15. An Ethics for Maintenance?
  16. “Treating” homosexuality in minors: Protected free speech or child abuse?
  17. Brian Earp on Anti-Love Drugs
  18. Janet Radcliffe Richards on the past, present and future of sex: Part 3
  19. Terminator studies and the silliness heuristic
  20. Call for Applications: Academic Visitor Programme for Trinity Term 2013 (Start Date: 21 April)
  21. Psychopaths should not be punished

November 2012

  1. The Liverpool Care Pathway in the News: Even by the Mail’s Standards, this is Low
  2. Tony Coady on Religion in the Political Sphere: Part 2, Deliberative Restraint
  3. The best ethical ideas of the year?
  4. Don’t tax the fat!
  5. Condom County: Porn, Condoms and Liberty in Los Angeles
  6. Tony Coady on Religion in the Political Sphere: Part 1
  7. Treating ADHD may reduce criminality
  8. Armstrong the Good Giraffe and the Moral Value of Effort
  9. Janet Radcliffe Richards on the past, present and future of sex: Part 2
  10. A Dyslexic boy in a Trojan horse
  11. FGM and the Golden Rule
  12. Janet Radcliffe Richards on the past, present and future of sex
  13. The Bad Seed: Facts and Values in the Study of Childhood Antisocial Behaviour
  14. Abortion and the Senseless Death of Savita Halappanavar
  15. This company is employing children? Let’s boycott their products! Or better not?
  16. PVS Patients Communicate: BBC Report
  17. Growing Babies: The Ethics of Artificial Wombs
  18. The ethics of a chemical break-up
  19. Obama’s debt to Rawls?
  20. HARMFUL HEADLINES: The ethics of reporting health findings
  21. Fifty shades: should BDSM become part of general sexual education?
  22. A Living Wage?
  23. Do we want “genetically modified children”? Yes, of course!
  24. Four More Years . . .
  25. Notice: server back up
  26. Could there be a Third Way for Criminal Psychopaths?
  27. Personalised weapons of mass destruction: governments and strategic emerging technologies

October 2012

  1. The Fable of Speeding and Prance Legstrong
  2. When the science of sexuality meets the politics of gay rights
  3. Singularity Summit: How we’re predicting AI
  4. Too much too young?
  5. Nine to five philosophers
  6. Patient L’s Autonomy
  7. Watch your words! The challenges of law around the end of life
  8. Technology is outrunning science
  9. The Ban on Doping, Not Armstrong, Is the Problem with Cycling: Armstrong Is a Scapegoat for Cycling’s Hypocrisy
  10. Charles Camosy versus Julian Savulescu on the Ethics of Abortion
  11. Roman Catholic doctrine and abortion
  12. Armstrong and Hesch: A tale of two athletes
  13. Want to increase breastfeeding? Then shut up about how it saves money!
  14. Conjoined Twins, Cloning and Artificial Intelligence
  15. Religious vs. secular ethics and a note about respect
  16. The most important unsolved problems in ethics (Or, How to be a high impact philosopher, part III)
  17. Jeremy Hunt, Abortion, and the Sorites Paradox
  18. Physician Assisted Suicide and the Conflict Between Autonomy and Non-Maleficence
  19. A Tale of a Designer Baby and Distributive Injustice
  20. Melissa and Brad’s Story: Designer Babies
  21. Designer Babies
  22. Why strongly encouraging or legally enforcing bike helmets is not necesserily a good idea
  23. Yamanaka Wins Nobel Prize for Ethics
  24. Should you be prosecuted for feeding junk food to your child?
  25. What is the chance of an MP being wrong?
  26. Banning conversion therapies

September 2012

  1. Driving Crazy
  2. Magic tricks and moral fibre
  3. How to be a high impact philosopher, part II
  4. Does committing a murder make a 13-year-old an adult? In US courts it does…
  5. Are Open-ended Sentences Unjust?
  6. Focus on the important things: reforming medical trials
  7. Dangerous Doctors and Immoral Doctors
  8. Don’t Give Money to Beggars
  9. Announcement: Making Better Babies, Pro and Con: A Debate
  10. Hillsborough, Heysel and the Availability Bias
  11. Applied Ethics Plus
  12. Spin city: why improving collective epistemology matters
  13. Refusing Treatment to the Overweight: A Case Analysis
  14. Chemical castration and homosexuality
  15. The Paralympics and Short Basketball
  16. The deadly dangers of peer review
  17. The Continuing Tragedies of Home Birth and the Rights of the Future Child
  18. The Immorality of the News
  19. Home Alone? On Being Liberal in East Asia
  20. The times they are a changing…

August 2012

  1. The AAP report on circumcision: Bad science + bad ethics = bad medicine
  2. Why Does the USADA Want Convicted Dopers to Win the Tour de France?
  3. “Legitimate rape,” moral consistency, and degrees of sexual harm
  4. How not to save the world
  5. Euthanasia and Human Rights
  6. Lie detectors and epistemic duty
  7. Asking the right questions: big data and civil rights
  8. A Lack of Olympic Spirit
  9. Organ donation is not all about the donors
  10. Advertising, Autonomy and Breastfeeding: Some Reflections.
  11. Giving priority to good people
  12. The Philosophy of Bad Badminton: Another Look
  13. Philosophy and the Badminton Scandal

July 2012

  1. Should Men and Women be segregated in professional Sports?
  2. Capturing Tragedy
  3. On being yourself
  4. The Rationalist Prejudice
  5. A Puzzle about Dementia
  6. With great documentary power comes great responsibility
  7. Replying to a critic: My last circumcision post (for a while) – with video debate
  8. In Praise of Tribalism
  9. Parkinson’s medication blamed for sexual offences
  10. Mind Over ‘Dark’ Matter – The Higgs-Boson & The Value of Theoretical Academic Enquiry
  11. Stop Persecuting Armstrong: Time for a Doping Amnesty in Cycling
  12. Should minimally conscious patients be allowed to end their lives?
  13. Reducing Religious Conflict conference podcasts now available
  14. Artificial organs: “good guys” finish last to technology

June 2012

  1. Après nous, le déluge: legislating science
  2. Can the religious beliefs of parents justify the nonconsensual cutting of their child’s genitals?
  3. Honesty and Science
  4. Let’s get rid of Heaven, Hell is what we need! (?)
  5. To kill or to violate?
  6. Cyberwarfare: No New Ethics Needed
  7. Should you take ecstasy to improve your marriage? Not so fast …
  8. The Diversity that Dare Not Speak Its Name
  9. Banning Junk Food Ads On Disney Media Outlets: A “Game-Changer”, or a Mickey Mouse Measure?
  10. Just War Theory and Cyber Warfare
  11. The Queen’s an anachronism: another problem with predicting the future
  12. Philosophical Shock Tactics

May 2012

  1. Who is to define your identity?
  2. Professional roles and private lives: How separate are they?
  3. Peter Singer and Christian Ethics: Beyond Polarization
  4. The dignity of the referee
  5. Repent, brother Dawkins
  6. Turning Cardinal Newman on his Head: Just how bad is a bad intention?
  7. A fatal irony: Why the “circumcision solution” to the AIDS epidemic in Africa may increase transmission of HIV
  8. Wellcome Lecture in Neuroethics: Wayne Hall on the brain disease model of addiction
  9. European versus US attitudes to geoengineering
  10. Crisis in the Catholic Church
  11. Key moments of supreme importance
  12. Should Peer Review be Rejected?
  13. Bad seed is a robbery of the worst kind: prolific sperm donation and screening
  14. A Girls’ Night Out
  15. ‘Marriage is ONLY between a Man and a Woman’
  16. The Kansas Anti-Abortion Bill: An Affront to Autonomy
  17. The immorality of public consolation in the face of ageing
  18. How to be a High Impact Philosopher
  19. The price of uncertainty: geoengineering climate change through stratospheric sulfate
  20. Sustainable Fish Week at Ghent University
  21. Frankenlamb
  22. Shutting people up
  23. How will the future change your politics?

April 2012

  1. Bold Private John Smith, VC, modified ‘t’ allele of TPH1 SNP rs2108977
  2. The Naked Truth?
  3. Linguistic social engineering?
  4. Is Darwinian Medicine Good for Us?
  5. Animal antibiotics
  6. When the Law Should Ignore Incest
  7. A Modest Proposal for the Media: The Science Haze
  8. Psychiatric drugs to enhance conformity to religious norms, and conscientious objection
  9. Why I study geoengineering
  10. A moral argument against the war on drugs
  11. ‘Please drink responsibly’: voluntary intoxication and generating responsibilities
  12. New Study Detects Free Will in the Prefrontal Cortex (UPDATED)

March 2012

  1. A Teeny-Weeny Baby Puzzle
  2. Nudge Drugs: should the social side-effects of medications weigh into public health?
  3. Unbelievers are bad and have defective brains
  4. Should the government have policies to deal with fear of zombies?
  5. What are ethical and unethical intentions to conceive a child?
  6. A World without Advertising?
  7. The will is caused, not free
  8. Just give me the Humbug
  9. Old threats never die, they fade away from our minds: nuclear winter
  10. Kony 2012, Malaria and Pizza
  11. Planet of the (Little) Apes
  12. Which is least unethical—buying a Mac, or buying a PC?
  13. How Tony Nicklinson Already Has the Right to Die
  14. Free Speech: Some Comments
  15. Kony 2012 and Saying What You Mean
  16. Facebook Crime and Punishment
  17. Arbitrary Execution: Why the Law Needs Help from Neuroscience, Psychology and Philosophy
  18. Is it OK to have an affair if your partner is asexual?
  19. ASSASSINATING CITIZENS: How not to fight terror
  20. In vitro meat, new technologies, and the “yuck factor”
  21. Why Did the Journal Publish an Article Defending Infanticide?
  22. The Fragility of Freedom of Speech
  23. The censor and the eavesdropper: the link between censorship and surveillance
  24. Why Infanticide is Worse than Abortion
  25. There’s No Good Argument for Infanticide
  26. Concern for Our Vulnerable Prenatal and Neonatal Children: A Brief Reply to Giubilini and Minerva

February 2012

  1. John Harris Clarifies his Position on Infanticide
  2. Rick Santorum, birth control, and “playing God”
  3. Handling Editor Defends Decision: After – Birth Abortion
  4. “Liberals Are Disgusting”: In Defence of the Publication of “After-Birth Abortion”
  5. Is there a moral argument for including more common behavioural phenomena in the DSMV?
  6. Surrendering to big brother might be the least bad option
  7. The P-Factor
  8. There’s nothing that lawyers shouldn’t do
  9. Vegetarians Have Moral Obligation to Eat “Frankenmeat”
  10. Love and other drugs, or why parents should chemically enhance their marriages
  11. EVENT: Neuroethics Seminar: Two Lectures in Neuroethics
  12. EVENT: Wellcome Lecture in Neuroethics: Neural chemical systems mediate social behaviour in the ‘Tragedy of the Commons’: implications for ethics and the clinic.
  13. Australia’s ‘Gonski Review’ of school funding
  14. Should we Encourage Atheists to get into Foxholes?
  15. Obligatory Ventilation: why Elective Ventilation should not be elective
  16. Warsi on ‘militant secularism’.
  17. Back from the grave: Should we allow Elective Ventilation?
  18. H5N1: Why Open the Stable Door?
  19. Sergei Lavrov’s Deontology
  20. Reflexiones sobre el caso Contador
  21. Reflections on Contador’s case
  22. Is Drug Addiction a Lifestyle Choice?
  23. Oxford, Warsaw and Mock Tudor
  24. Contador’s Ban: The Death of Cycling?
  25. ‘No right not to be offended’?: Part Two

January 2012

  1. Nothing to lose? Killing is disabling
  2. Practical Ethics Given Moral Uncertainty
  3. Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation: Fundamental enhancement for humanity?
  4. Choosing one’s own (sexual) identity: Shifting the terms of the ‘gay rights’ debate
  5. Skipping intuitively over the is-ought gap
  6. 10-year-old gets a tattoo, mother gets arrested
  7. Ending life and end-of-life care
  8. We ARE lords of the planet – that’s the problem
  9. Censoring Foetuses
  10. What is so bad about polygamy?
  11. Lawmaker Steals Leather Pants: Brain May Be Responsible, Lawyer Says
  12. Would you swim in Hitler’s pool?
  13. Experimenting with oversight with more bite?
  14. ‘There is no right not to be offended’: true or false?

2011 172

December 2011

  1. Giving isn’t demanding*
  2. NeuroLaw: Do we have a responsibility to use neuroscience to inform law?
  3. Conjoined Twins: Who Should Live and Who Should Die?
  4. Why philosophers should celebrate Christmas
  5. A Slave to Christmas Pudding?
  6. Taking drugs to help others
  7. Go for Bronze!
  8. Ferretting out fearsome flu: should we make pandemic bird flu viruses?
  9. When politicians are undemocratic, there’s something to learn
  10. Female Philosophers and Sexual Harassment
  11. Can Olympics costs be ethically justified?
  12. To 1750 – or beyond?
  13. The subtle line between conscientious objection and sabotage

November 2011

  1. Water, food or energy: we won’t lack them
  2. Banking as an ethical career
  3. Gender Competition Preserves Natural Traits of Competitive Sports
  4. What Moral Virtues Should We Enhance?
  5. The NHS should Stop Wasting Money on Homeopaths and Homeopathic Hospitals and should Offer Placebo Pills to Patients Requesting Homeopathic Treatments
  6. Sam Harris is wrong about science and morality
  7. The cost of living and the cost of dying
  8. Cabs, censorship and cutting tools
  9. Celebrity Culture
  10. What is feasible?
  11. World funds: implement free mitigations
  12. Discovering Consciousness in the “Permanently Unconscious”: What Should We Do?
  13. Holier and happier than thou?
  14. Wellcome Lecture in Neuroethics: Moral enhancement? Evidence and challenges, Dr Molly Crockett, University of Zürich
  15. The moral case for elective caesarean section

October 2011

  1. Killing With Drones, Proportionality, and Trolley Problems
  2. On the summary execution of murderous tyrants and the good of a timely accounting.
  3. Overpopulation or Underpopulation
  4. Ban on ES Cell Patents Deeply Immoral
  5. Gaddafi is dead—but don’t cheer
  6. My son’s dyslexic, and I’m glad
  7. Has Violence Declined? John Gray on Steven Pinker
  8. JOB: postdoc in law for the “Enhancing Responsibility” project- TU Delft and University of Oxford
  9. Meat is Murder?
  10. Settling the Final Reckoning for Organ Donors
  11. Are Dopers better Sports(wo-)men?
  12. Pheasant Shooting: Bad for Pheasants, Worse for Humans?
  13. Don’t be objective about your subjectivity
  14. Using Close Genes: A Suggestion
  15. Prize After Death

September 2011

  1. Should ‘Ecocide’ Be a Crime?
  2. Legalize heroin
  3. Is a child a blessing?
  4. Fellow-Citizens, Foreigners, and Statistical Lives
  5. Buying authenticity: plagiarism checking and counter-checking
  6. Should one have a tummy tuck?
  7. Robot Girl: A Survey
  8. Why Pro-Life Counsellors Ought to Lie
  9. The Experience Machine: A Survey

August 2011

  1. Geoengineering, Science, Consequentialism and Humility
  2. Unpalatable Theories about Falling Crime
  3. Is the non-therapeutic circumcision of infant boys morally permissible?
  4. Evidence on Evidence Based Policy
  5. The nym wars: how many identities are enough?
  6. Is Half an Abortion Worse than a Whole One?
  7. Philosophy is the transformation of sheep
  8. Announcement: International Neuroethics Society Annual Meeting
  9. Ableist Language
  10. Abortion and Equality
  11. “Focus Pocus” and Beyond: consumer brain computer interfaces for health, self-improvement and fun
  12. The Myth of Elite Sport
  13. Danegeld

July 2011

  1. Creating Non-Human People
  2. Considering the Instrumentalization and Exploitation of Elite Athletes
  3. Blaming victims, individuals or social structures?
  4. Enhanced Consequentialism: Up, Up… and Away?
  5. What is the point of being a doctor when conscience overrules professional duties?
  6. The unexpected turn: from the democratic Internet to the Panopticon
  7. Announcement: An international conference on human embryo research
  8. Government encourages traumatic brain injury on city streets?
  9. The Need for a Progressive Neuroethics
  10. “The Madness of Normality” – On why the DMS-5 is fundamentally wrong
  11. When it’s unethical to be a well-published academic
  12. The Ethics of Etiquette
  13. Ban the beets?

June 2011

  1. Artificial meat – the best idea you’ve heard all year!
  2. “Tourists are ambassadors in bathing suits” – On the ethics of choosing a holiday destination
  3. Shocking behavior: Government scare tactics, smoking, and public health
  4. A Reflection on Confronting Evil
  5. Panopticon Problems: Purists rather than Privacy?
  6. What is it like to be a bee?
  7. Choosing To Die
  8. Uterine transplants: applaud, and then shut up
  9. What is my “true self”?
  10. Sequel to ‘Human Centipede’ Refused Certification
  11. Announcement: Welcome to members of the International Neuroethics Society
  12. The Savage in Us All
  13. Excitement vs Importance: Do we have any sense of proportion?
  14. Should the Danish Ban on Marmite be Spread?
  15. Annoucement: Bio-ethics Bites

May 2011

  1. Should we be able to know how long we have to live?
  2. A New Life Unexamined may be More Worth Living
  3. Strauss-Kahn, Schwarzenegger, and the Failure of Public Discourse
  4. Charity: Why It’s the Thought That Counts
  5. From Ivory Coast to Ivory Tower
  6. Belgium: where rapists and muffin thieves are treated alike
  7. Should Journalism be Amoral?
  8. ‘No smoking’ signs trigger urge to light up: Communism, Marriage, Evidence-Based Medicine and the Fate of the World
  9. Should the US have Killed Osama Bin Laden?

April 2011

  1. Why Wills and Kate must breed
  2. Would the End of the World really be so Bad?
  3. Could Groupons Save the World?
  4. For sale: one womb
  5. How are future generations different from potential persons?
  6. Was France right to ban the burqa?
  7. A Judge’s Breakfast
  8. What makes a good football player?
  9. Banks: Liberty or Regulation
  10. Stop bullfighting but carry on bullrunning, really?
  11. Knowing is half the battle: preconception screening
  12. The Second Coming of the Placebo Treatment

March 2011

  1. Autonomy: amorphous or just impossible?
  2. Above and Beyond …?
  3. Suicide for sale in Oregon: a “valuable service”?
  4. Should surgeons other than cardiac surgeons publicise performance information?
  5. Catholic bishops condemn France’s first ‘bebe medicament’
  6. The patient vanishes
  7. Libya and Moral Responsibility
  8. Murder in an English Village
  9. A tale of two reactors
  10. Galliano, Westboro Baptists, and the question of free speech
  11. How to Stop the Medical Killing Spree
  12. Does euthanizing animals lead to the devaluing of human life?
  13. Should Conservative Christians be Allowed to Care for Our Children?
  14. Who should be allowed to foster?
  15. Nothing is like mother’s ice cream

February 2011

  1. Ethical Lessons From Locked-In Syndrome: What Is a Living Hell?
  2. Can forced sterilization ever be ethical?
  3. 61-year-old woman gives birth to her own grandchild, and so what?
  4. Nursing profession and the ethics of care.
  5. Herbal Placebos
  6. Civil Partnership, Religion and the BNP
  7. In Brief: New Evidence Shows Expectations Influence Pain
  8. What is the Big Society?
  9. Pulp Friction in Tasmania: when is a little dioxin to much dioxin?
  10. Intolerance we ought to encourage?
  11. Should we breed smarter children?
  12. Affirmative Action in Social Psychology?
  13. Good Grief?
  14. Moralism and Reproduction: Ten Infringements of Liberty
  15. Ad usum Delphini: should we Bowdlerize children’s books?
  16. Will the protection of animals be left to corporations?
  17. Reminder: Everyday philosophy
  18. All between the ears? Homeopathy and experimental treatments for chronic fatigue syndrome
  19. ‘Spend a day with Charlie Teo’
  20. You want to publish? Let’s hear all your dirty secrets
  21. The Ethics of Gamification: Little Rewards for Everything

January 2011

  1. Forgiveness: respect, autonomy and sovereignty
  2. Solving the Puzzle of the Moral Status of the Embryo and Fetus
  3. Penzions and Politicians
  4. Joking about ‘the Unluckiest Man in the World’
  5. New work on neuroethics in Spain.
  6. How to feed people dioxin and get away with it
  7. Beauty, brains, and the halo effect
  8. Stop that painting!
  9. Do We Confuse Surrogacy With Prostitution?
  10. Nazi Eugenics Returns to Germany: The Paradox of Eugenics
  11. Hypothetically donated organs
  12. If North Africa Starves Next Year, I’ll be Rich!
  13. Why we should accept genetically modified chickens
  14. On Forgiveness
  15. On rebuilding Noah’s Ark and drinking old Burgundy
  16. Can Liberals Support a Ban on Sex Selection?
  17. Predictors of Alzheimer’s vs. the Hammer of Witches
  18. Neurotrash and Neurobabble
  19. Vegi-quette
  20. DIY enhancement: morphological freedom or self-harm?
  21. Addiction by design
  22. Trading Organs for Freedom

2010 244

December 2010

  1. Is it the thought that counts?
  2. Wikileaks Rights and Wrongs
  3. Political epistemology and recent Australian experience
  4. The quixotic prohibition of attention-enhancing drugs in sport.
  5. Education is child abuse
  6. Sex and Chess
  7. People will behave badly if it’s not too much work…and if no one is watching
  8. Is mathematics the Christmas present of the year?
  9. Cloudy with a Chance of Dementia
  10. Is Discounted Therapy Fair?

November 2010

  1. If you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve got nothing to fear: Wikileaks and RIPA
  2. Our Future as Human Lobsters
  3. Advance notice: Everyday philosophy
  4. Is it ethical to force-feed prisoners on a hunger strike?
  5. Who wants to be an abortionist?
  6. Opt-Out Day and Consequences
  7. Opt-Out Day and Rights
  8. Data or life? Ethical obligations to present and future patients.
  9. The Poison of Hate Speech Law
  10. Arik Sharon Back in the Sycamore Ranch
  11. X Factor Abortion: Is it Wrong?
  12. Unintentional contraception
  13. Reframing Sacred Values and Making Political Compromises
  14. Against Open Mindedness
  15. Stem Cell Trial for Stroke: Is It Cannabilizing Human Beings?
  16. Lethal Ethics: When Philosophical Distinctions Kill
  17. Focussing on diseases
  18. Palmistry for the genome: genetic fundamentalism fights on
  19. Living in Plato’s Cave
  20. Smoking and yellow teeth
  21. Is your mobile phone part of your body?
  22. Would you shock your brain to cope with culture shock?
  23. How Many Lives Should I Save?
  24. Death Aquatic
  25. Retaining privacy: the EU commission and the right to be forgotten
  26. Why Bioenhancement of Mathematical Ability Is Ethically Important
  27. What is a pet worth?
  28. Why god isn’t really a teapot.
  29. Trolleyology

October 2010

  1. Could a ban on homebirth be justified?
  2. Inviting invasion: deep space advertisments and planetary security
  3. Are some temperaments “better” than others?
  4. Is professional integrity a futile argument?
  5. Break my bones, but don’t let me die! Should doctors provide ‘futile’ CPR?
  6. Counterfeit Placebos
  7. Is Low Libido a Brain Disorder?
  8. Anti Addict Mummy Money
  9. Kidneys and the Ultimatum Game
  10. Is the Rescue of the Chilean Miners a Miracle?
  11. Free speech in the marketplace of ideas.
  12. Is it legitimate to ask opponents of embryonic stem cell therapy whether they support IVF?
  13. Sam Harris, the Naturalistic Fallacy, and the Slipperiness of “Well-Being”
  14. Individual privacy and the conduct of web users
  15. Benefit cuts for large, workless families
  16. Should I love you as you are?
  17. Virtue is back, and I’m worried about my mortgage
  18. Trying to get to the bigger moral picture
  19. Science and Morality
  20. Should we force parents to vaccinate their children? No: let’s just scare them instead
  21. Spying on people for fun and profit
  22. KILLING 100 IS LESS BAD THAN KILLING 10?
  23. Why aren’t you a vegetarian?
  24. Incidentally… avoiding the problem of incidental findings

September 2010

  1. Should we rid the world of carnivores if we could?
  2. An Obama Appointee’s Plan to Undermine the 9/11 Conspiracy Theory
  3. Procreative liberty
  4. Religion and Virtue: The Pope’s Truncated Vision
  5. Robots as companion for human beings, a reflection on the information revolution
  6. Is the UK’s HPV vaccination programme unethical and/or unlawful?
  7. Un-Mixing the Sexes
  8. When you prick me do I not cry?
  9. Enhancement – Keep the Game, Change the Basis

August 2010

  1. A law that should not be
  2. Broken hearts and obsession, why giving up on your ex mate is so hard as overcoming drug addiction
  3. Should doctors come clean? Religion makes a difference to end-of-life decisions
  4. Ethics and Economics
  5. Cosmetic Surgery – What is the Matter with Dr Salesman?
  6. The NHS Should Make and Sell its own Homeopathic Remedies and Homeopaths Should be Paid the Minimum Wage
  7. Numeracy vs feel-good
  8. Is it criminal not to breastfeed?
  9. Why We Should Criminalise Dangerous Sexual Behaviour
  10. Demedicalising and decriminalising drugs
  11. Off- and on-line, an outdated distinction
  12. The ethics of prescribing antibiotics
  13. Competing against Mutants
  14. Do we harm our children by revealing their sex?
  15. Blow the Whistle and be Damned?
  16. Publish and be Damned
  17. Ethicists unite: you have nothing to lose but your non-citation

July 2010

  1. Is there any point in worrying about the tedium of immortality?
  2. Why public health campaigns should not promote enhancement
  3. Organs and obligations
  4. Is it easy to debunk religious belief?
  5. Democracy and false information: some bad news
  6. Facilitating, Condoning, and Preventing HIV
  7. Performance Enhancement – Athletes are Victims not Delinquents
  8. Greeks and geeks
  9. Between Life and Death…
  10. The Age of the Genome – on BBC radio tomorrow night
  11. Artificial Performance Enhancement in Sports – Are we Overreacting?
  12. The Costs of a Right to Demand Treatment
  13. Special Guest Blog – The problem of militarism
  14. Critical Care ethics series – the ethics of maxiple pregnancies
  15. Robolove – Robot Machines as Companions
  16. On Knowing (or Not)
  17. Don’t forget to vote in the Drugs in Sport debate
  18. Drugs in sport debate: Moderator’s closing comment
  19. Drugs in sport debate: Opposer’s closing statement
  20. Drugs in sport debate: Proposer’s closing statement
  21. The Rational Bigot
  22. Survey on community attitudes on early and late abortion
  23. Australians support women’s access to late abortion
  24. An Ethical Approach to Abortion
  25. Special Edition: Should we allow late abortion?
  26. Motherhood and the ticking clock
  27. Will you live to 100? Should we tell people that they have (or lack) the genes for long life?
  28. The Charade of Blood Dope Testing
  29. Roman Infanticide, Modern Abortion

June 2010

  1. Ethical questions surrounding the BP Oil Spill
  2. Drugs in sport debate: Opposers response 2
  3. Foetal pain and the abortion debate: believing what you want to believe
  4. Drugs in sport debate: Proposer’s update 2
  5. A Universal Moral Code?
  6. Choosing how to live: death row inmates and terminally ill patients
  7. Drugs in sport debate: Opposer’s update
  8. Sex and the minimally conscious state
  9. Goodbye to Josè Saramago, genius, novelist and (sometimes) a bioethicist
  10. How wrong may we be?
  11. The Cost of Non-Cash Incentives for Organs
  12. A costly separation between withdrawing and withholding treatment
  13. Against Equality
  14. Critical Care ethics grand round
  15. Drugs in sport debate: Proposer’s update
  16. Religion, Tolerance and Intolerance Conference resources available online
  17. Drugs in sport debate: Proposer’s response to comments
  18. Whether to die, or when to die? The distinction between assisted suicide and ‘aid in dying’
  19. Oxford Debates — Performance-Enhancing Drugs Should be Allowed in Sport — Moderator’s Opening Statement
  20. Oxford Debates – Performance enhancing drugs should be allowed in sport – Opposer’s opening statement
  21. Oxford Debates – Performance enhancing drugs should be allowed in sport – Proposer’s opening statement
  22. Is it any of your doctor’s business whether you text and drive?
  23. Torture, but do no harm
  24. Drugs in Sport debate and special edition
  25. The ethics of geoengineering – comments welcome
  26. Ethics commentary – Fraught with peril
  27. The Brainy or the Rich: who should inherit the Earth?
  28. Paying people to lose weight
  29. Bioethics and enhancement – an interview with Julian Savulescu
  30. Putting GM in a Lead Coffin
  31. Philosophers’ Carnival CIX
  32. A Sting for Absolutes
  33. Reminder – carnival next week
  34. Mining your past to justify your terminal care: the idea of a ‘retrospective QALY’

May 2010

  1. Creating Headlines, Artificial Life, Ethical Concerns, and Ontological Perplexity
  2. Should Believers Trust Atheists?
  3. Views and interviews on addiction
  4. Are addicts addicts?
  5. The Fiction of Affliction in Addiction
  6. Is “playing God” just a meaningless phrase?
  7. Are addicts responsible? Leverhulme lecture 25/5/10
  8. Addiction special edition
  9. Chillin’ with the Texas Board of Education
  10. The hammer or the nail – are addicts morally responsible?
  11. Today we lost the drug war
  12. Synthetic life special edition
  13. Synthetic biology: eroding the moral distinctions between animate and inanimate.
  14. Playing God for the first time…
  15. Venter creates bacterium controlled by a synthetic genome
  16. A nick for Nick, but nix to nicks for Nickie?
  17. The carnival is coming…
  18. Should bio-scientists think about bio-weapons?
  19. A steamy calamari: trans-species eroticism and disgust
  20. Comments on Practicalethicsnews
  21. Is anti-ageing worth it?
  22. Comments policy
  23. How to Prescribe Smart Drugs to Children Ethically
  24. George and the British election
  25. Organ Donation Euthanasia
  26. Lord Justice Nero?
  27. Is it wrong to vote tactically?
  28. The privacy of the shrew
  29. Response to Embrace the controversy: let’s offer Project Prevention on the NHS
  30. For Sale: Body Parts?
  31. Oklahoma pro-life measures: preventing abortions and promoting sadism

April 2010

  1. Embrace the controversy: let’s offer Project Prevention on the NHS
  2. The end of conscientious objection?
  3. Did Eyjafjallajokull Kill the Precautionary Principle?
  4. What intelligent alien life can tell us about morality
  5. Are We Future Evil Aliens?
  6. Morality: what’s disgust got to do with it?
  7. Political Responsibility
  8. I’m a taxpayer, I want my data!
  9. Upcoming Events in May 2010
  10. The equal air-time solution for controversial research
  11. Arguing about moral responsibility
  12. Volcano Ethics: Should we be Flying the Unfriendly Skies?
  13. Tuberculosis: the return of the white plague?
  14. Holidays in Death Camps
  15. The real scandals in organ donation consent
  16. The Christian Right is Wrong
  17. Experience and self-experimentation in ethics
  18. Is Morality Flimflam?

March 2010

  1. Climate scientists behaving badly? Part 6: Conclusion
  2. Should the NHS pay for homeopathic remedies?
  3. Choose Your Sex: Male, Female or Neither … or Both
  4. ‘Happiness is not the only thing’
  5. Should parents be allowed to pick their children’s sex for non-medical reasons?
  6. How should we address the organ shortage problem?
  7. I Don’t Care Too Much for Money, Money Can’t Buy Me Lungs
  8. Going Green Makes You Mean … and Distracts You
  9. The Great Egg Raffle – Why Everyone’s a Winner If We Price Life and Body Parts
  10. Cyber-war – the rhetoric of a disruptive and non-destructive warfare
  11. A Secular Foothold?
  12. Hysteria over a hysterectomy
  13. Breakfast with Satan
  14. Castration and conscience
  15. Jumping the Shark
  16. Our Lethal Moral Ideals: Having a Child to Save Another
  17. Do the Arts and Humanities need to justify their existence?
  18. Metaphors We Moralize By
  19. Sleepy ‘Ordinary Ethics’
  20. How many friends do you need?

February 2010

  1. Shall Ape be Allowed to Kill Ape?
  2. Eugenics or ‘reprogenetics’? Call it what you will, but let’s do it
  3. Cognitive enhancers: unfair at any dose?
  4. Coma Confusion Resolved
  5. Climate scientists behaving badly? Part 5: virtue in testimony.
  6. What is the most moral way to use embryos?
  7. Ending It, in Paternia
  8. Renaming a Disorder
  9. The worth of a life and a life worth living
  10. Court compels woman to go to bed
  11. The Racist Shopper
  12. Easing the passing: Death booths, misrepresentations and the ‘Ugh factor’
  13. Brain imaging and PVS: How excited should we be?
  14. Is the brain half full – or half empty?
  15. Persons of the Sea?
  16. Mind the Gap?

January 2010

  1. Professor George’s Unnatural Reasoning
  2. Climate scientists behaving badly? Part 4: what is owed to other enquirers.
  3. Aid Beyond Belief
  4. Obesity and Responsibility
  5. The judge is out on juries
  6. The Disease Industry
  7. Killing is killing – or is it?

2009 189

December 2009

  1. Shame on Bioedge
  2. We’re all guinea pigs, and it’s not so bad
  3. Climate scientists behaving badly? Part 3: the conduct of enquiry.
  4. LIES AND THE IRAQ WAR
  5. Climate scientists behaving badly? Part 2: Objectivity
  6. When Patients Should be Obliged to Participate in Medical Research
  7. Of Mothers and Fetuses and Abortionists
  8. Second-hand and second-class organs. Should the patient know?
  9. Copenhagen
  10. Why the minaret ban?
  11. AUTHORS
  12. The Swiss Minaret Controversy: Religion and the Tyranny of the Majority
  13. More on Religion and Harm
  14. Diluted evidence: is there anything special with homeopathy?

November 2009

  1. News from the future: you will have in vitro meat hamburgers within five years
  2. Climate scientists behaving badly? (Part 1)
  3. A Controversial Use of Taxpayer Funds
  4. Belgian coma confusion
  5. Happiness and the Dragon King
  6. Is your fingerprint part of you?
  7. Are some ethicists really really ethical?
  8. Should Psychiatrists Pray with Their Patients?
  9. Is Religion Good or Bad for Society?
  10. Should parents decide? The case of RB
  11. Science, drugs, policy and Hume
  12. God and Chance
  13. Switzerland gets tough on suicide clinics
  14. Speaking truth to power

October 2009

  1. The least bad mass murderer
  2. Authenticity and Enhancement
  3. Will Down syndrome disappear?
  4. “Trust Me, I’m an Ethicist”
  5. The ventilator lottery: rolling the dice in the face of difficult choices
  6. If God hates the Higgs boson, we can build paradise on Earth
  7. Can We Rely on Science to Catch Up?
  8. The ethics of mind-reading
  9. Protecting our borders with snake oil
  10. Cheating Darwin? The Ethics of Sexual Selection
  11. Non-resisted suicide and depression
  12. Suicide woman allowed to die
  13. Reshaping the financial system after the storm
  14. Living Wills and Assisted Suicide

September 2009

  1. Should we be afraid of virtual reality?
  2. T-illegal actions and the case for legal ambiguity
  3. Supercoach and the MRI machine
  4. Assisted Suicide and Accusations
  5. Why pander to the pandas?
  6. Wealth versus Happiness
  7. Anaesthe-steak™: pain-free meat and the welfare paradox
  8. Academic freedom isn’t free
  9. Should Bankers Repent?
  10. The Accused or the Accuser?
  11. Longer life, more trouble?
  12. The ideal man is a rich housewife
  13. Efficiency versus capacity in intensive care
  14. Premature death or wrongful death?
  15. Curbs on Alcohol Ads?
  16. Vacancy: Postdoc Research Fellow, Future of Humanity Institute
  17. Justice and Mercy
  18. The Age of Enhancement
  19. How to be happy
  20. Genocide: just a word?

August 2009

  1. When politics meets bioethics
  2. Telling porkies: should the doctor tell her patient where the medicine comes from?
  3. Should NHS Medical Services be Rated Like TripAdvisor?
  4. Non-lethal, yet dangerous: neuroactive agents
  5. How not to criticize the NHS
  6. Should early non invasive prenatal testing be opposed?
  7. The party line and the flu-line
  8. Symposium Announcement: Human Enhancement: What should be permitted?
  9. Should we forget about organic food?
  10. Artificial Brains and Personal Identity
  11. Four… three… two… one… I am now authorized to use physical force!
  12. Is it wrong to raise money for charity?
  13. R. v Dudley & Stephens

July 2009

  1. A change of heart
  2. What’s special about selling gametes?
  3. Feetility – should we pay egg and sperm donors?
  4. A tiny step forward
  5. In a world of low risk obstetrics, is home birth unethical
  6. Revisiting the Moon
  7. The Poverty of Philosophy at Melbourne
  8. Animal experimentation vs factory farming
  9. The Independent Safeguarding Authority
  10. Pandemic ethics: Mild flu and Tamiflu – the patient’s dilemma
  11. Arificial sperm: a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle?
  12. Does self-help make you feel worse?
  13. Pandemic Vaccination: Who to Vaccinate?
  14. Refusing Cochlear Implants: Is It Child Neglect?
  15. Hunger for long life: the ethics of caloric restriction experiments
  16. Is it Worth Living Longer?
  17. Informed consent in the Googlesphere
  18. Oxford Debates Cont’d – Opposer’s Closing Statement
  19. Oxford Debates Cont’d – Proposer’s Closing Statement
  20. Oxford Debates Cont’d – Opposer’s update 2
  21. Who defines a Jew?
  22. ‘But it will happen anyway’
  23. Oxford Debates Cont’d – Proposer’s update 2
  24. How bad are heatwaves and flu epidemics?

June 2009

  1. Pandemic ethics: Party to the flu (or vigilante vaccination)
  2. Don’t be Evil — and prove it.
  3. Oxford Debates Cont’d – Opposer’s update 1
  4. Trackr the Most Cloneworthy Dog: Best Friends Again?
  5. Jackson, Enhancement and the American Dream
  6. The good example
  7. Oxford Debates Cont’d – Proposer’s update 1
  8. To Prosecute or Not to Prosecute: Torture, Politics and the Rule of Law
  9. Umbilical cord blood donation: opt out or work on Sundays?
  10. Economic uncertainty and epistemic humility
  11. Oxford Debates Cont’d – Opposer’s Opening Statement
  12. Oxford Debates Cont’d – Proposer’s Opening Statement
  13. Oxford Debates – The NHS should not treat self-inflicted illness (Moderator’s Introduction)
  14. Happiness is love, full stop?
  15. Sometimes justice wears a mask: blogging, anonymity and the open society
  16. More on drugs…
  17. Prenatal sex selection – When prenatal testing can threaten social harmony
  18. Nice People Take Drugs (Too)
  19. Not better than the alternative: an informal experimentation tragedy
  20. Pandemic Pandemonium
  21. Is it simply “Killing a Mass Murderer”? Why anti-abortion zealots need to reconsider their arguments.
  22. Decisions, decisions.
  23. Precrime in Camden: using DNA profiles for crime prevention
  24. Disagreement about value or about the facts?
  25. Neonatal euthanasia without parental consent
  26. Why Talk about Ticking Time-Bombs?
  27. Coercion, compulsion and immunisation
  28. Is it OK to Eat Neanderthals?

May 2009

  1. On a happier note
  2. Shining monkey, sadistic conclusion?
  3. Forensic Failure
  4. Free will and brain stimulation
  5. facial transplantation and identity
  6. A ‘bonkers waste of money’?
  7. Self-control matters – but to what extent can it be taught?
  8. | Practical Ethics
  9. Decimating Democracy?
  10. How much should we care about MPs’ expense claims?
  11. Biting into the sour apple: liberal society, abortion rights and sex selection
  12. Yad Vashem and the Pope
  13. Pandemic ethics: all pigs are equal
  14. The flu paradox: is the WHO focusing too little on flu?
  15. Ian Plimer’s climate change skepticism
  16. Pandemic ethics: The boy who cried ‘flu’!

April 2009

  1. 2009 Uehiro Lectures: Allen Buchanan on The Ethics of Biomedical Enhancement
  2. Epistemic duty and conspiracies against the laity 2
  3. Intuitive pirates: why do we accept file sharing so much?
  4. An earthquake in the theodicy doctrine
  5. Tortured logic
  6. Be mindful of results, not the method
  7. Ecclesiastical gaydar: should churches be allowed to discriminate priests?
  8. Contradicting Nature

March 2009

  1. Conspiracies against the laity and wishful thinking
  2. Overruling parents and allowing infants to die
  3. Is Reality Just a State of Mind?
  4. The Abuse of ‘Ethical’
  5. What kind of happiness?
  6. Life or no-life on the ventilator: the argument from parental freedom
  7. Bad doctor, bad prosecutor or bad laws?
  8. The weight of conscience
  9. Just lose it?
  10. Designer Babies and Slippery Slopes
  11. Lotteries and Fairness

February 2009

  1. Is doodling a form of cheating?
  2. Brain training and cognitive enhancement
  3. Is Science Close to Defeating Religion?
  4. Event Announcement: Direct to Consumer Genetic Testing Workshop May 21
  5. Am I allowed to throw away *my* memories: does memory editing threaten human identity?
  6. The Ethics of Keeping a Child from its Parents
  7. A kidney for a heart – some thoughts on ownership of biological material
  8. In search of lost heterosexuality
  9. Special lecture: Jeff McMahan on Cognitive Disability and Cognitive Enhancement
  10. Transparent brains: detecting preferences with infrared light
  11. Born believers?
  12. Educating children on matters of food
  13. Achievement and the welfare of children
  14. Which issues are moral issues? The Case of Egg Freezing
  15. Eight Fourteen is enough
  16. Lies, libel and layered voice analysis

January 2009

  1. Why We Need a War on Aging
  2. Allen Buchanan: Leverhulme Lectures 2009′ Ethics in Political Reality’
  3. Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do. Does it matter if I give a name to you?
  4. Sid Vicious, Julieraptor, and the Ownership of Fossils
  5. Tennis and Sex
  6. Polar exploration: small steps towards cheaper, safer, easier IVF?
  7. Stem Cell Trials – Should They Go Ahead? Why Harm to Patients Is Not a Reason to Stop Them
  8. Announcement of Neuroethics Lectures: Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
  9. A wonderful, unspecific day
  10. What if oestradiol could really affect the relationships of highly attractive women?
  11. The Lost Genius objection to pre-natal testing for autism

2008 201

December 2008

  1. Non possumus?
  2. Tattoos and taboos: making end of life preferences known when it matters
  3. Why boost brains?
  4. Climate Change, Abortion, and Impersonality
  5. I just don’t care about animals that much!
  6. Open source censorship
  7. Statutes of limitations for serious offences: why Europe needs a reform
  8. The perfect cognition enhancer
  9. The root cause
  10. To Leak or Not to Leak?

November 2008

  1. Universal AIDS testing: should we save the many at the cost of harm to the few?
  2. Keeping Viagra in the bedchamber and out of the arena?
  3. The reason why it’s time to be silent about the Englaro Case
  4. The Future of Making Organs for Self-Transplantation
  5. Status quo bias and presumed consent for organ donation
  6. Animal experimentation: morally acceptable, or just the way things always have been?
  7. Reliably sinful – how to maximise profit
  8. Teenagers and the right to be wrong
  9. Much ado about nothing
  10. Hacking the spammers
  11. The Great Botox Experiment in Mood Enhancement
  12. Top hats and top-ups: better health for the better off
  13. Re-creating mammoths and the family dog: two different cases
  14. Election ex machina: should voting machines be trusted?
  15. Should We Be Erasing Memories?
  16. From doomed lamb to potential phoenix – the story of a modern sacrifice

October 2008

  1. The Morality of Suicide Bombing
  2. Euthanasia and Perverse Incentives
  3. Travelling for Treatment
  4. Compulsory chemical castration for sex offenders
  5. Death Fiction and Taking Organs from the Living
  6. Preimplantation Genetic Screening: One Step Closer to the Perfect Baby?
  7. The objections to assisted suicide are misguided
  8. Finding holes in the brain: to test or not to test for Creutzfeldt-Jakob?
  9. The paradox of organ donation consent
  10. Drop the cane and listen!
  11. Saving pennies and saving premmies
  12. Protectionist deities vs. the economy of fun: ownership of virtual possessions
  13. Why the cheating objection to smart drugs doesn’t work
  14. The voluntary termination of pregnancy: a snapshot of the Italian situation
  15. Bailing out banks
  16. If evolution grinds to a halt, we move on
  17. Identifying Sperm Donors, Genetic Privacy and Public Benefit: How to Have Your Cake and Eat It Too
  18. Time to get virtuously enhanced?
  19. Fishing outside the reef: the illusion of control and finance
  20. Refusing to refer: thus conscience doth make cowards of us all

September 2008

  1. Knowledge may be power, but is it healing?
  2. The price of ignorance: the Durham study and research ethics
  3. Why object to improving prenatal tests?
  4. Publishing Negative Research Results
  5. DON’T PANIC
  6. Philosophers’ Carnival LXXVIII
  7. Cognitive Science Advice for Republicans and Democrats?
  8. I suggest it was Professor Plum, in the library, with the arsenic: the unreliability of brain experience detection
  9. Testing choices: weighing up risks of death and Down syndrome for fetuses
  10. Needles in Haystacks and Individuals in DNA Pools
  11. National Borders
  12. ‘Anyone who thinks the Large Hadron Collider will destroy the world is a t**t.’
  13. Practical Ethics News to host Philosophers’ Carnival
  14. Geo-engineering: an essential part of our toolkit
  15. Abortion is No Place for the Law
  16. A Nasty Dilemma for NICE

August 2008

  1. The truth about saving water
  2. Doctors or Resource Allocators?
  3. Radical organ retrieval procedures
  4. The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of
  5. How to Improve on Bolt’s Performance
  6. Silicon dreams: digital drugs and regulation
  7. When the heart stops: harvesting organs from the newly (nearly) dead
  8. Postcode lotteries
  9. Would you rather be invisible or be able to fly? (Or: are you a sneaky superhero?)
  10. Cold and Calculating NICE
  11. One step closer to human cloning
  12. The point of death

July 2008

  1. Slaves to consent?
  2. Are falling house prices good or bad?
  3. Saving the planet by reducing birth rates
  4. How to Win the War on Drugs in Sport
  5. Should Karadzic be Punished?
  6. The world’s failure to fulfill its goals
  7. Reproductive science: is there something we’re missing?
  8. Testing alternative therapies
  9. Art or child porn?
  10. What’s wrong with the hermaphrodite world?
  11. Care for the Dying and Cost-effectiveness
  12. Unpopular policy and public rationality
  13. Paying to top up NHS treatment
  14. Sport, Sudden Cardiac Death and Liberty
  15. Activists and acts of mercy
  16. Comprehensive treatment for all: The NHS Constitution
  17. Education and the Fairness of Capital Punishment

June 2008

  1. Here’s why you’re not smart enough
  2. Duck and cover: how expensive does impact safety have to be?
  3. Behavioural Internet Advertising
  4. When autonomy trumps sense: the costs of refusal to allow withdrawal of life support.
  5. The Clash of Environmental Values
  6. Discrimination and infertility treatment
  7. “Reanimation” and Taking Organs from Living People
  8. My Genes, not a Doctor’s
  9. Setting a Minimum Price for the Sale of Organs
  10. Helping others to save the rainforest
  11. A pill-full of sugar helps the medicine go down
  12. Lex Orwell: When is a Surveillance Society OK?
  13. Same species, different needs: could ‘genes for’ improve the way we treat animals?
  14. Is there a duty to execute prisoners humanely?
  15. Who is watching the watchmen?
  16. Cloned Animal Meat
  17. Abortion for Fetal Abnormality?
  18. Cloning and animal exploitation
  19. Betting on bad health (with inside information)
  20. Two approaches to climate control

May 2008

  1. Conditional gifts for the NHS
  2. Personal Carbon Credits and Fairness Considerations
  3. False Hope? Greenpeace on Carbon Capture and Storage
  4. Legal Abortion Time-Limits: Arbitrary Limits Harm Women
  5. Preventing Polka-Dot Problems: Should Measles Vaccination be Compulsory?
  6. Brain Boosting and Cheating in Exams: Four Responses
  7. HFEA and Regulating Reproduction:Triumph for Rationality and Victory for Secular Ethics
  8. The new asbestos?
  9. The New Law on Admixed Embryos and the Genetic Heritage of the Living Kingdom
  10. Saviour Siblings Saved!
  11. Viability and the abortion debate – what really matters?
  12. Humane Evolution
  13. The Ethics of ‘Human Admixed Embryos’: Concerns and Responses
  14. A Second Human Singularity?
  15. A Pipeline to Truth? Fighting Absenteeism with Voice Analysis
  16. Looking for Biopolitical Trouble
  17. Lesbians and male role models
  18. Kissing Cousins
  19. Hunger is the best spice
  20. The viability of fetuses and the abortion debate
  21. Global Warming and the Hidden Costs of Aviation
  22. Towards Ethical Foie Gras?
  23. Sleeping policemen and garden sheds
  24. The Apeman and the Scotsman: the slippery slope to humanzees
  25. Genetic discrimination and the future of health insurance
  26. The Choice to Have Artificial Blood: Less than the Best?
  27. Reverse Prostitution: cognitive biases and conditional cash transfers

April 2008

  1. Football screens and genes: Should genetic discrimination in sport be banned?
  2. New hope or false hope for vegetative patients?
  3. The Dignity of the Carrot
  4. The Lewis wind farm and the need to compromise environmental values
  5. What computer simulations can tell us about the success of international treaties
  6. Do we own our bodies? Should we?
  7. Ban Cosmetic Surgery in Children?
  8. Trading on Testosterone: Doping and the Financial Markets
  9. Academic Integrity and Vioxx
  10. Who’s this ‘we’, Dr Soon? Unconscious Action and Moral Responsibility
  11. These are not the probabilities you are looking for
  12. Three arguments against turning the Large Hadron Collider on
  13. The Pregnant Man, And Other Conceptual Curiosities
  14. Policy, Uncertainty and Global Warming
  15. Expert advice
  16. The stresses of 24 hour creative work: How much would Aristotle blog?
  17. The case against love: A recent legislation on incest
  18. Helping human-animals to die
  19. Junk science reporting
  20. Catholic Conscience and Hybrid Embryos

March 2008

  1. Extinction Risks and Particle Physics: When Are They Worth it?
  2. Peering into the mind and ‘new threats to privacy’
  3. PatientsLikeMe.com
  4. Are artists, writers, sportsmen, academics, scientists, politicians, and businessmen addicts?
  5. A National Health Database
  6. Adoption and the golden rule
  7. Remembering what happened vs. remembering what it meant
  8. Killing the goose that laid the golden egg
  9. Is it Wrong to Deliberately Select Embryos which will have Disabiltites?
  10. ‘Reasonable steps’ to prevent gambling
  11. Small is beautiful, ain’t it? The EU’s Code of Conduct for Responsible Nanosciences and Nanotechnologies Research
  12. Bagging the bag
  13. The Transparency of Clinical Trials
  14. Methuselah’s planet: the population cost of longer life
  15. Placebos as cognitive enhancers?

February 2008

  1. Doublethink and double effect; donation after cardiac death
  2. The Transplant Case in Real Life
  3. Changing the Building Blocks of Life: Playing God and Being gods
  4. Stairlifts, wheelchairs, and radium-powered toasters
  5. Come Mr Branson Mon, Tally me Biofuel
  6. Neuro-babble
  7. The perils of cheap alcohol
  8. Post-mortem punishment and public dissection.
  9. Obesity and genes
  10. The Rogue Senator and the Protection of Genetic Information
  11. Dangerous ‘drugs’: the war on fake malaria pills
  12. Earache for teenagers
  13. A Knee-Jerk Reaction?
  14. Preventing birth to teenage parents is discriminatory
  15. Fluoride and the Future: Population Level Cognitive Enhancement
  16. Corrupted Science. Peer reviewer leaks information to drug manufacturer
  17. A child of many parents: a new way to have two mothers
  18. | Practical Ethics
  19. Meet Mom, Mom and Mom: is there anything wrong with same-sex genetic parents?
  20. Hybrid Embryos and Dying Children

January 2008

  1. The bread of life: should we enhance our food?
  2. Funding cuts for homoeopathy
  3. I won’t be coming to work today – I’d rather go back to sleep
  4. Synthetic life
  5. Paying for better health: Should patients be able to pay for expensive cancer drugs?
  6. A presumed consent system for organ donation
  7. Objective Research Funding? An Approach to quantify the Value of Experiments
  8. I’m Not a Number; I’m a Human Being: RFID Tags and Our Personas

2007 25

December 2007

  1. To push or not to push? Choosing to deliver by caesarean section.
  2. Lights out! For our Climate! For what else?
  3. Race, IQ and James Watson
  4. Who is your hard drive working for?
  5. Private genetic tests, and the case for ‘Genetic education’
  6. Restoring Sensation to Amputees’ Lost Limbs
  7. Exercise Cures Depression: Mens Sana In Corpore Sano

November 2007

  1. Dirty work but someone hasn’t got to do it anymore
  2. Unjustified asymmetries in the debate on GM crops
  3. Honest Opinions or Bullying?
  4. Feeling good about the failure of others
  5. Our Obligations to the Poor
  6. The importance of life extension
  7. Is this the end of the debate for human embryo research?
  8. Hands off my non-existent furniture!
  9. It is 10 O’clock, do you know what your cells are?
  10. Imaging the Political Brain
  11. Wilmut Gives Up Cloning
  12. Lie-detection using functional MRI
  13. Good drug, bad drug?
  14. Reproductive Cloning Reconsidered
  15. Clone human embryos not monkey embryos
  16. Home medical diagnosis
  17. Fat Taxes and the Nanny State
  18. Supermouse and Superman: The Dawn of Biological Liberation

2014–2026 →