Author: Contributor

It starts to become obvious how value judgments infuse and implicitly guide these fiscal decisions that, unwittingly or not, involve weighing up certain lives against others, present lives against future ones, and proxies for wellbeing (such as job creation) against …

What is the mind, and how does it work? Centuries of philosophical and scientific investigation have shown that these questions are too big to be tackled once and for all with a single explanatory endeavor. The magnitude of this pursuit …

The thing to avoid in making soup, ruling a country, or trying to reconcile different things that are in tension is to have too much ‘echoing’ or ‘sameness’. For example, having too much of the same opinion in government or …

In­tro­duc­tion Note that bi­o­log­i­cal nat­u­ral­ism does not posit that con­scious­ness can only be re­alized in bi­o­log­i­cal sys­tems. In­deed, ar­ti­fi­cial hearts are not made of or­gan­ic tis­sue, and air­planes do not have feath­ers, or for that mat­ter even flap their wings. …

By Joshua Parker and Ben Davies Some examples may help. As each threshold is, to a certain degree, socially constructed the thresholds can be flexible, shifting in response to resources, demands, changes in social attitudes, and so on. Take the …

In a previous post, I discussed some of the requirements for public health institutions to count as ‘honest’. I now want to follow that up to discuss some of the ways in which public health communication seems to fall short …

He said if friendship was better prioritised by society and governments, it would also end what he called the “horror” and “tyranny” of early morning culture. “I can’t get up early because I’ve been out with friends until 3am” would …

Wickham-Crowley, K. M. 2000. “Going Native”: Anthropological Lawman. Arthuriana, 10(2), pp.5–26.  https://www.jstor.org/stable/27869541 As Lambek tells us, ethics often exists “in the movement or tension between the ostensible (manifest, explicit, conspicuous, declared, avowed, certain, normative, necessary) and the tacit (latent, implicit, …

Sparrow, Robert. “Robots and respect: Assessing the case against autonomous weapon systems.” Ethics & international affairs 30, no. 1 (2016): 93-116. (2) Out of basic respect for enemy combatants and non-combatants alike, the legitimate use of any weapon requires that …

Written by Leah O’Grady, University of Oxford The intuitive wrongness of stating the e-word arises from Speaker C’s ignorance of its status as a slur which, although indirectly, attaches similar properties to marginalised communities to stating a known slur . …