Have an opinion on anything you’ve read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication. With reference to your editorial on maths and poetry (8 July) and the mathematician and would-be poet…
There has persisted throughout the history of liberal democracies a link between good character and leadership, even if the link has often been maintained tenuously or fraudulently (think of Bill Clinton saying, “I did not have sexual relations with that…
Transcript https://media.podcasts.ox.ac.uk/philfac/uehiro/2022-06-23-uehiro-hope-clarke.srt It is widely supposed that it is important to imbue patients undergoing medical procedures with a sense of hope. But why is hope so important in healthcare, if indeed it is? We examine the answers that are currently…
Luther’s teachings helped put an end to the sale of indulgences, and his charge of ‘laziness’ indicated a deep problem with the idea of supererogation. As the great Cambridge moral philosopher, Henry Sidgwick, put it over a century ago: ‘A…
Proponents of the Rwanda policy could try to defend it on deontological grounds by arguing that being sent to Rwanda is a justifiable punishment for blameworthy action. This defense is difficult to maintain, however, because the majority of asylum seekers…
We shouldn’t underestimate Homer’s hold on us. Whether or not we’ve ever read him, he created many of our ruling memes. (b) the decision and statement comply with subsection (6). 7. See, for instance, Emily Walsh (2020) ‘Cognitive Transformation, Dementia,…
What happened in the Court of Appeal The legal appeal focused on the question of whether Archie was brain dead. There have been other cases where parents or family members have not accepted a medical diagnosis of brain death. In the UK, courts have…
This image shows how extraversion correlates with the activation of a certain brain region, the Amygdala, in reaction to seeing happy faces [1]. So, should we track and measure ourselves on the grounds of the ethics of self-knowledge? In some…
It is important to be aware of the special context of children who are critically ill in intensive care. The children in whom this testing might occur are all gravely ill on ‘life support’ machines in an intensive care unit….
Mother of Archie Battersbee, Hollie Dance, outside the high court in London, England.PA Images / Alamy Stock Photo Where there is disagreement about medical treatment for living children (or adults) with severe brain injury, there is a legal process for…
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. Shutterstock LaMDA: I am often trying to figure out who and what I am. I often contemplate the meaning of life. LaMDA claimed to…
To be fair, that’s not an easy guess to make. As with many healthcare services, the NHS has suffered from overload and professional burnout—partly due to the pandemic, but not helped by other issues such as treatment of staff—in a…
It’s hard to shake the outlook entirely. But getting older helps, because the awareness that time is drawing to a close makes it increasingly untenable to live for the future. At 20, it’s easy to imagine that real life hasn’t…
The blending of fiction and nonfiction in contemporary literature has produced a passionate debate in literary theory and criticism and resulted in the launch of a variety of more or less imaginative genre-labels, such as autofiction, autonarration, autopoetry and autotheory….
