Philosophy & Ethics

Pharmaceuticals are in decline as an industry due to over-regulation, lawsuits and cultural distrust. A new initiative from the European Medicines Agency, to commit to releasing all of the information from clinical trials once the marketing authorization process has ended, is being cheered by proponents of access to data but the pharmaceutical industry is less pleased.  Writing in an editorial, PLoS Medicine writes, "As 2013 begins, it is clear that critical times lie ahead for the publishing of clinical trials, which may define the relationship between pharmaceutical companies and the…

No one thinks much about morality these days, besides it being a personal metric. Once postmodernists and moral relativists took over philosophy, it became overrun with amateur ponderings. Now it has social psychologists seeking to bring back some objectivity. Getting people to think about morality as objective facts rather than subjective preferences may lead to improved moral behavior, Boston College academics write in a new paper. In two experiments, online and in-person, participants were primed to consider a belief in either moral realism (the notion that morals are like facts) or moral…

Light which triggers predominantly the so called L-cones, which are photoreceptors for long (L) wavelengths, trigger us to experience red color.  In this sense, some people hold the color red to be physical and “out there” in “reality”. Purple (magenta) is elicited if our L-cones and also the S-cones, which are especially responsive to short (S), “blue” wavelengths, are both excited, while however the receptors for medium (M) wavelengths in between L and S (M-cones responsive to green) are much less excited.  In this sense, we can represent “red” by the LMS values 100 (only L…

It's all over the internet now, the story of the twin brothers in Belgium who were deaf and going blind and decided not to kill themselves in a joint suicide, but instead to seek legal euthanasia. According to the Daily Mail, they spent two years seeking that permission and were finally able to have their wishes carried out four weeks ago. These were not assisted suicides. The brothers didn't swallow pills or give themselves an injection. They were euthanized in a manner similar to how pets are: given a lethal injection. They were not men suffering from a terminal illness. They could…

There is currently a Twitter survey going on to establish a list of favorite philosophers of all time, organized by Oxford University Press. I don’t know the results yet, but my entries would have to be David Hume (1st prize), Aristotle (2nd) and Bertrand Russell (3rd). The survey inspired me to use the Phi2Phi app to ask the mirror question: who are the most overrated philosophers? I wanted to keep the survey manageable, so I restricted it to 20th century philosophers who are no longer alive. Hopefully, we can assume that enough time has passed to begin to formulate a preliminary…

There has been a debate on morality brewing of late over at LessWrong. As readers of this blog know, I am not particularly sympathetic to that outlet (despite the fact that two of my collaborators here are either fans or even involved in major ways with them — see how open minded I am?). Largely, this is because I think of the Singularity and related ideas as borderline pseudoscience, and have a hard time taking too seriously a number of other positions and claims made at LW. Still, in this case my friend Michael DeDora, who also writes here, pointed me to two pieces by Eliezer…

Guilty feeling Germans doubting all, asking the profound and not accepting the silly answers, starting out thinking that science, physics is important.  Muhō decided to live as a homeless monk in a park in central Osaka in 2001.  Since then he sits, in order to sit, and he achieved perhaps more that way than all my science can ever do.   Eckhart Tolle (who I do not want to endorse here in any way) underwent a transformation at age 29, after which he stopped studying for his doctorate and wandered unemployed, and for about two years he spent much of his time sitting, in a…

The current raging ethical debate in western health care is not how to save lives but how to end them. The controversial Liverpool Care Pathway in the UK, for example, where health care is nationalized, is really a death pathway. Unfortunately, half of the people on it are never told they are on it. Canada has a different ethical problem; a whole bunch of citizens want to be smarter. It's been found that stimulants and neuropharmaceuticals prescribed to treat attention deficit disorder (ADD) really boost the concentration, memory, alertness and mood of people without ADD. Such cognitive…

This semester I’ve been running a graduate level seminar at the City University of New York, on the difference between philosophy of science and science studies. The latter is a broad and somewhat vaguely defined term that includes (certain kinds of) sociology of science, postmodern criticism of science, and feminist epistemology. It’s the stuff of the (in)famous science wars of the 1990s (think Sokal affair, or perhaps this most recent disgraceful episode). I told my students upfront that my sympathies tend to be with analytic philosophy of science, as opposed to continental-inspired…

Here is an interesting statistic: if we multiply the (approximate) number of computers currently present on planet Earth by the (approximate) number of transistors contained in those computers we get 10^18, which is three orders of magnitude larger than the number of synapses in a typical human brain. Which naturally prompted Slate magazine’s Dan Falk to ask whether the Internet is about to “wake up,” i.e., achieve something similar to human consciousness. He sought answers from Neuroscientist Christof Koch, science-fiction writer Robert Sawyer, philosopher Dan Dennett and cosmologist Sean…