Over at Pea Soup, Ralph Wedgwood makes an interesting claim: I suspect that on several issues that are the focus of fierce moral controversies today – such as homosexuality and the death penalty – there is significantly less disagreement among contemporary philosophers than in the population as a whole. Indeed, I tentatively suggest, the historical […]
Category: Blogosphere
On the subject of Mephedrone…
I think that it’s worth pointing out that the way the media have handled mephedrone has been generally pathetic. This is not wholly a surprise, because the way the media handle any drugs story tends towards the pathetic. […]
Resource: Bioethics in NewsFilm Online
By David Hunter This seems like a useful new resource. There is an archive :NewsFilm Online (NFO, www.nfo.ac.uk). This archive now hosts some 60,000 news clips produced by ITN and Reuters in collaboration with the British Universities Film & Video Council and EDINA went live in October 2008. Despite the fact that NFO includes footage […]
Don’t Go Outside… You Might Break the Baby
A couple of days ago, I made a post about Nicaragua’s abortion laws and their – ahem – unfortunate consequences. However, it would appear that the atmosphere that generated them is a model of liberalism in comparison to the atmosphere further north. I have in mind here Utah’s Criminal Homicide and Abortion Amendments (HB12), recently passed […]
Wakefield – the Cooked-up “Controversy” that Will Not Die
I didn’t pay much attention the Wakefield MMR paper when it first started generating controversy: I wasn’t bothered whether its conclusions were correct or not, because I figured that it’s in the nature of science for certain putative discoveries later to be debunked. But the years passed, and as I paid a bit more attention, […]
Killing, Letting Die, and Epistemology
David Shoemaker has an interesting post on PEASoup about the epistemology of advance directives. Starting from a fairly standard thought-experiment about an older, dementing person who wants to accept treatment that her younger, pre-demented person had refused, he adds to the standard metaphysical arguments a claim that the real puzzle for ADs isn’t metaphysical, it’s […]
The Freethinker: Circumcision “should be abhorred”
Someone once told me that, if you want a paper to be heard by a large, fractious audience, make sure it’s about circumcision. Peter Breibart considers it over at The Freethinker, and he’s not a happy bunny. You may have heard that there are medical advantages for circumcision – and it is true that the […]
A Very Small Post about Homeopathy
I know I keep stressing the distinction between ethics and activist – and how it’s usually just before I witter on about something vaguely activistic. However, I do think it’s worth popping over to look at the 10:23 Campaign, which takes a robust and sceptical attitude to homeopathy. If you’re not sure about why it’s […]
Chuck Norris on why Obamacare is Bad
You know Chuck Norris: martial-arts-film-star-bloke-turned-right-wing-commentator-and-walking-internet-meme. Yep. Him. Well, he’s identified exactly what’s wrong with Obamacare. It might mean publicly funded terminations of pregnancy. And imagine what state the world’d be in if the Virgin Mary had had an abortion. Go on. Imagine it. [A]s we near the eve of another Christmas, I wonder: What would have […]
Too Braney by Half?
One of my favourite blogs is spEak You’re bRanes, “dedicated to the dribble-spattered lunacy of BBC ‘Have Your Say’ discussions”. It’s splenetic, merciless and very, very funny in its dissections of the bigoted, ill-considered and illiterate bilge that gets posted under the guise of “discussion” on the BBC news website. To be fair, the Beeb has to […]