Philosophy & Ethics

Apple and Facebook have an odd perquisite for their employees - they will pay for their employees to place oocytes in frozen storage — social freezing, also known as cryopreservation and egg freezing. Companies may have a mercenary desire to do so, even if it comes across as altruism. By eliminating a biological clock for women, they can keep employees working longer hours, which will close that pay gap between men and women and make them look like noble while they reduce turnover.  There has been concern about fertility resources for non-medical reasons, and that will always get…

The Discovery of the Child Erichthonius by Peter Paul Rubens  By Helen King, The Open University The science and morality of creating a life with DNA from three different individuals is hot news. The UK parliament has voted in favor of allowing trials of mitochondrial replacement therapy (MRT), otherwise also known as three-person IVF, which would allow women with mitochondrial mutations to have healthy children. Of course, commentators have been keen to stress that such a child would have only two “parents” – the people raising the resulting offspring. The third person is the woman who…

Opposing this law change is not anti-feminist. shutterstock By Pam Lowe, Aston University A campaign is underway in the United Kingdom to make it illegal to abort a child based on its gender. Proponents say they are worried about women being coerced into terminating female fetuses and that action needs to be taken to stop discrimination against baby girls. But this is a flawed argument. You cannot promote gender equality by enacting laws that place restrictions on women’s bodies. Banning sex-selective abortion opens up a world in which there is such thing as a “good” and “bad” reason for an…

Some suggest that the universe naturally produces complexity. The emergence of life in general and perhaps even rational life, with its associated technological culture, may be extremely common, argues Kelly Smith, Associate Professor of Philosophy&Biological Sciences at Clemson, in a recent Space Policy paper. What's more, he suggests, this universal tendency has distinctly religious overtones and more knowledge of astrobiology may even establish a truly universal basis for morality. Smith, who got a Masters degree in evolutionary genetics before getting a PhD in Philosophy, says he…

With the terrorist attacks in Paris fresh on the minds of Europeans (150X as many dead in a terrorist attack in Africa, not so much), politicians are reflecting the concerns of the public and becoming focused on how to better prevent them in the future. France clearly knows it needs to beef up its security agency and other European countries are worried that more scrutiny on potential Islamic terrorists will mean more violent blowback. Regardless of the risk, people want to stop homicidal miscreants before they kill 1,700 rather than 17. In the British parliament, a new bill seeks to give MI5…

Theist, gnostic, agnostic and atheist. What is the difference? Link: ben-kay.com By Mark Beeson, University of Western Australia Getting on for 14 billion years ago the universe suddenly sprang into life. I can’t actually do the math, as they say, but I’m happy to accept the word of those who can that the physics is unambiguously nailed down. But for all their undoubted brilliance, mathematicians and physicists don’t know what was going on before the big bang. There are consequently two possibilities it seems to me: mysterious matter has always existed and spontaneously blows up on occasion…

The terrorist attack of two days ago in Paris to the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo left most of us hit hard by the blow to freedom of the press and freedom of thought, which are among that core set of rights on which we have built our society and which we feel we really cannot give up. I confess I have never unfolded a copy of the Charlie Hebdo newspaper, but I am quite familiar with the work of Wolinski, the 80-year-old cartoonist, who perished in the attack along with his colleagues. I liked his sense of humor and his cartoons a lot, and I am quite pissed off by those two morons taking…

Marcus Aurelius. By Robert S. Colter, University of Wyoming Marcus Aurelius (121-180 BC) was emperor of Rome at the height of its influence and power. One can only imagine the pressures that a person in his position might have experienced. The military might of the empire was massive, and much could happen in the fog of war. Conspiracies ran rampant through the imperial court. What might be lurking right around the corner seemed unforeseeable. Economies flourished and fell into ruin. Barbarians at the Gates! And if Marcus was stressed out, how much more might the ordinary Roman suffer from…

A guy messes up his life, and the lives of those around him. We send him for rehabilitation: A jail term, AA meetings, community service, anger management classes, or restitution to victims. An organization messes up, and manages the crisis in well-accepted ways: Quick communication from top managers, rapid assumption of responsibility, quick and effective ameliorative action, ongoing transparency, and never for a moment blaming the customers. As every management student knows, Johnson&Johnson set the gold standard for crisis handling during the poisoned Tylenol episode. J&J’s good…

“Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 6.431 (emphasis added)   -- What is that even supposed to mean, “Finding eternity in the now”?   Pretty much like Eckhart Tolle described it.   -- Huh?!? But you do not like Tolle. And you do not like Tolle precisely because you abhor nonsense such as Wittgenstein’s “…