Philosophy & Ethics

Bryn Jarald Henderson, D.O. (osteopath), claimed his stem cell treatments at Regenerative Medical Group and Telehealth Medical Group using amniotic fluid from women who have given birth via C-section could cause the lame to walk and cure kidney disease and whatever else.  That was enough to get slapped down by the Federal Trade Commission and rightly so. Though the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has been forced to allow all manner of suspect claims in the food and supplement industry due to President Clinton's 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Law exempting supplement…

Which corporation lets executives commute to work on emissions-belching airplanes, damages native landmarks while putting up advertising, speculates on international bank trade while saddling consumers with their losses, and writes policies for its customers that it then defies in its own practices? It must be some evil robber baron, right? It's Greenpeace, a non-profit corporation which lays claim to being environmentally, ethically, and morally superior to everyone else.  Their latest fiasco was disposal of Rainbow Warrior II, a ship they used for decades to harass fishermen,…

Our job at The Conversation is to work with scholars to publish analysis that helps readers make sense of the world. And if we demolish a few popularly held – but erroneous or misplaced – ideas and assumptions in the process, that makes me especially happy. Hence my list, here, of stories from 2018 that use facts to interrogate popular wisdom – and the ideas they proved wrong: 1. Women can’t possibly vote for Republicans In an era when leading Republican political figures – from the president to a Supreme Court nominee – are accused of sexual assault, can women “both be Republican and insist…

Though vitriol and outrage are common in western culture in 2018, when it comes to claims that a researcher in China used CRISPR technology to edit a human embryo, bloggers, journalists and scientists on social media have taken it to another level. Without even reading the paper. Because there isn't one. Nor is there any data. It's just some guy claiming he did it, not once but twice. And based on that people are going on tirades about how it violates ethics - well, their subjective notion of ethics, none of which have anything to do with the culture of China.  The United States is…

Because its spirit seeks truth objectively rather than by imposition, science must enjoy academic freedom to be useful. The spirit of science is dialectic, in perpetual open discussion and debate about the nature of things. It is the opposite of religion, the opposite of fundamentalist positions and dogma, the opposite of politics or diplomacy. Only within this freedom can it advance and produce new ideas. Nonetheless, there are epochs in which science, academia and all intellectual activity are constrained by an ideological system to create monsters at the beck and call of political or…

George Washington may be the only popularly elected ruler in History who, when his supporters offered to crown him King, relinquished his power, instead. Politically speaking, that was a very unnatural thing to do. Historically, federal agencies have not surrendered their power, even after their congressional mandates were accomplished. Instead, they have invented new problems to solve, thereby justifying their continued existence. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was created by Congress in 1970 to write and enforce regulations designed to protect the environment and, by extension,…

Should we be afraid of artificial intelligence? For me, this is a simple question with an even simpler, two letter answer: no. But not everyone agrees – many people, including the late physicist Stephen Hawking, have raised concerns that the rise of powerful AI systems could spell the end for humanity. Clearly, your view on whether AI will take over the world will depend on whether you think it can develop intelligent behavior surpassing that of humans – something referred to as “super intelligence”. So let’s take a look at how likely this is, and why there is much concern about the future…

Center for Food Safety, a controversial litigation group that has been shown on numerous occasions to be conspiring to manipulate the public about American agriculture, is in the news again. This time for paying former Democratic Congressman, former race-baiting Cleveland mayor, and current Ohio gubernatorial candidate Dennis Kucinich to promote organic food and products by undermining the competitors of CFS clients. Unsurprisingly, Russia Today likes Kucinich. He endorsed the Russian-supported military campaign in Syria. He also claimed the CIA orchestrated the Russian incursion into Crimea…

Many people are addicted to a stimulant. Lawyer-driven groups like Center for Science in the Public Interest have long wanted to sue coffee companies over caffeine but haven't gained much traction despite their efforts to claim it causes things like breast cancer. Unlike caffeine, nicotine gets no such free pass, and a new paper in PLOS Medicine seeks to invoke Big Tobacco stigma to claim a conspiracy to undermine knowledge of the addictive qualities of nicotine. The scholars, from University of California, San Francisco (which has received generous grants from the pharmaceutical giants…

Any justification is fundamentally deception because there is no link from fundamental meaninglessness to why I should go on living. My a priori finding myself embodied in a world and the necessary physical causal creation myth involving emergence by algorithmic evolution necessitates my finding myself evolved to keep on living as one main irrational basis underlying all my rationalizations (for any evolved observer in any possible world). Also quite inevitably found by any acting conscious observer is his seeking embedding in social structure, because that is the substrate where the illusive…