By Shalom Chalson and Julian Savulescu On April 16, 2025, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom ruled that when interpreting the UK’s Equality Act (2010)—which details legal protections against discrimination—the terms ‘man’, ‘woman’, and ‘sex’ refer to biological sex, and not gender identity. Some have argued that the Court’s judgement represents a “significant […]
Category: Discrimination
Structural racism and coercion in Germany
By Mirjam Faissner and Esther Braun. William is a Black student with chronic schizophrenia under voluntary treatment in a German psychiatric hospital. The night before his death, William experiences a mental health crisis: he is screaming loudly, shadow boxing, lashing out. The doctors on the ward judge him to be a danger to himself and […]
Are terminally ill patients disabled?
By Philip Reed. Asked to name groups of individuals who commonly face discrimination, most of us would probably come up with roughly the same list: racial minorities, people with disabilities, certain religious groups, women, and LGBTQ persons. If we have extra time to think, we might also mention heightism, sizeism, and lookism as lesser-known or […]
The discriminatory consequences of the Dobbs decision
By Claire Gothreau, Joona Räsänen, Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the constitutional right to abortion has sparked intense backlash and condemnation from the American public. In the 100 days since the Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that overturned Roe v. Wade, total abortion bans that criminalize the […]
Discrimination on the basis of vaccination status (is inherently wrong)
By Michael Kowalik. The worldwide spread of SARS-CoV-2 has re-invigorated the debate about the ethical permissibility of vaccine mandates and immunity certification. Public attitudes towards this complex issue are nevertheless dominated by fear, half-truths and ungrounded value-judgements, limiting the scope of rational deliberation in favour of ideological partisanship. My paper, ‘Ethics of Vaccine Refusal’, is […]