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 ….
But there’s a scenario where things get more interesting with emergence. Let’s consider here the possibility that in some (or possibly many) cases regions do not carry out well defined functions. Instead, two or more regions working together instantiate the…
If emergence of this type does happen in the brain, it will be very difficult to figure out how processes depend on functional circuits. In reality, of course there is no oracle, so what can be done? Empirically, neuroscience can…
He continued: “It tells us a lot about our own psychology, our struggles with our own history, and how we regard ourselves as a people that he is so little celebrated. This may be partly about who we are conditioned…
The property of complexity is a reminder that systems behave in ways that are substantially more varied and nuanced than at first entertained. Small changes of input or perturbations to their state can lead to qualitatively different behaviors and outcomes….
Undergraduate: Tanae Rao (Oxford): Why the Responsibility Gap is Not a Compelling Objection to Lethal Autonomous Weapons Leah O’Grady (Oxford): What is wrong with stating slurs? Thomas Long (University of Manchester): The Ambiguous Ethicality of Applause: Ethnography’s Uncomfortable Challenge to…
Defining thick concepts is particularly tricky. Those definitions are not just judged for their descriptive plausibility but whether they imply acceptable moral practices. In the debate on personhood, philosophers have repeatedly drawn boundaries on the descriptive level that lead to…
Several years later, Professor Lin felt that he should pursue an overseas Ph.D. degree to catch up the recent development of the analytic philosophy and to improve his professional ability. He went to the US to study logic and philosophy…
Another reason to avoid moral terminology in philosophical ethics is that morality functions through the emotions, especially that of anger, of which the primary moral species is blame. The emotions, though they may have some cognitive content, are passions, and…
