Philosophy & Ethics

More than 1,500 audiocassette tapes taken in 2001 from Osama bin Laden's former residential compound in Qandahar, Afghanistan, are yielding new insights into the radical Islamic militant leader's intellectual development in the years leading up to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Flagg Miller, an assistant professor of religious studies at the University of California, Davis, and the first academic researcher to study the tapes, will present his preliminary observations in a lecture at the Center of Modern Oriental Studies in Berlin on Sept. 18. The first research paper stemming from Miller's…

'Framing the debate' had its 15 minutes of fame, somewhere early in 2006, and since then has been revealed as little more than another word for 'spin' and, in a new study published in the journal Communication, Culture & Critique, Barbara Barnett of Kansas University lays out how framing was used in the Duke lacrosse players rape allegation. In Spring 2006, when three White Duke University lacrosse players were charged with raping a Black female student from nearby North Carolina Central University, Duke University officials framed the crisis in terms of institutional reputation rather…

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All countries should take steps to govern organ donation and transplantation, thereby ensuring patient safety and prohibiting unethical practices, according to an article appearing in the September 2008 issue of the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (CJASN). The document is a consensus of more than 150 representatives of scientific and medical bodies from around the world, government officials, social scientists, and ethicists, who met in Istanbul, Turkey, this spring. Unethical practices related to transplantation include organ trafficking (the illicit sale of human…

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Let me start with the story of South African sprinter and double-leg amputee Oscar Pistorius, the “fastest man on no legs.” He wants to be the first runner with an amputee to compete in the Olympics. There’s an interesting story about it here in the NY Times. The International Association of Athletics Federations originally tried to bar him from competition in the Olympics because his prosthetic legs gave him an unfair advantage—a decision that was recently overturned in the Court of Arbitration for Sport. He didn’t quite make the Olympic qualifying time to compete in Beijing, but he’s…

Recently there was a post on this site that generated a lot of feedback, Conversation with a modern creationist. This was posted by Professor Lee Silver June 4, 2008. It is the record of an exchange between Professor Silver and Josh Pepper who is a very articulate and well read creationist. Maybe this exchange should be a warning sign, a shot across the bow of science. There were an incredible number of comments on this post including my comment below. I have been thinking about the entire debate since then and have some additional comments. "You (Professor Silver) have more patients than…

In 1990, Theresa (Terri) Schiavo had a cardiac arrest that caused irreversible brain damage which led to a persistent vegetative state diagnosis. A few years later, this diagnosis became a source of conflict over the interruption of artificial nutrition. The "Schiavo Case" was widely discussed from a medical, ethical and social standpoint in the United States and elsewhere. In an article to be published in the September 23 issue of Neurology, , a team of bioethicists composed of Dr. Éric Racine of the Institut de recherches cliniques de Montréal (IRCM) and experts from Stanford University,…

I apparently missed this little episode in June, when a creationist (with no scientific credentials) read a news piece on the recent work of Michigan State biologist Richard Lenski, and then wrote an obnoxious letter demanding Lenski's data. Lenski has had a long-running bacterial evolution project, and recently published a paper on the evolution of citrate-metabolizing bacteria in his lab. Lenksi has long been the focus of creationist attacks, because much of his in-the-lab evolutionary experiments strike right at the heart of the claims of the intelligent design movement. This latest issue…

David Chalmers is a famous philosopher of mind. His fame rests in great part on his 1996 book, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. It’s too bad that the crucial idea behind the book, dualism, is hopelessly flawed, and -- more surprising yet -- that Chalmers got away with one of the most idiotic thought experiments ever, which a lot of people inexplicably seem to think is oh-so-very clever. This all came back to (my) mind because of a recent article in Philosophy Now by Rebecca Hanrahan (an assistant professor of philosophy at Whitman College in Washington…