Philosophy & Ethics
New research on the treatment of 'hardcore' female Mau Mau prisoners by the British in the late 1950s sheds new light on how ideas about gender, deviancy and mental health shaped colonial practices of punishment.
The treatment of the Mau Mau by the British has led to compensation claims in the courts. Last year the British government agreed to pay out £19.9m in costs and compensation to more than 5,000 elderly Kenyans who suffered torture and abuse during the Mau Mau uprising in the 50s. Two of those involved in the recent case were women and further female compensation cases are pending.…
Is morality and happiness determined by how you affect the people around you? Credit: Shutterstock
By Peter Bowden, University of Sydney
It is a word we hear from time to time, but few of us know what it means.
Utilitarianism is the method most people use to decide whether an action is right or wrong. We decide the moral merits of what we do on whether the consequences of that action are good or bad. But utilitarianism has recently been in the firing line of the press and radio and by some moral philosophers.
Utilitarianism has been around a long time. John Stuart Mill, the 19th-century…
A Liberian nurse disinfects a looted mattress taken from an elementary school that was used as an Ebola isolation unit in West Point, Monrovia, Liberia. AHMED JALLANZO/EPA
By Ian Kerridge, University of Sydney and Lyn Gilbert, University of Sydney
The extent of the current Ebolavirus outbreak in West Africa has belatedly focused the attention of non-governmental organizations, local and Western governments, and international media. What we haven’t caught up with though, is the extent to which these outbreaks and their devastating effects are predictable and preventable.
The spread of Ebola…
Getting informed consent from desperate people and their families for experimental treatments is quite easy.
When the latest Ebola outbreak hit, there was criticism that experimental treatments were only given to Westerners, but they were the only ones able to give informed consent. It wouldn't just be a financial penalty if pharmaceutical companies enrolled people from other cultures, the CEO would go to jail. In back to back weeks there will be mainstream news articles complaining that developing world people are too easy to exploit for treatments while complaining that children and…
Isaac Asimov's Three Laws Of Robotics, from the story "Runaround" in 1942, are arguably the most famous example of fictional ethics becoming so fundamental they are adopted spontaneously by everyone in an industry that hadn't even been created yet.(1)
Now that robots are widely used in caring for older people, as well as in military and industrial applications, scholars want to give them a 21st century update.
This cover of I, Robot illustrates the story "Runaround" by Isaac Asimov, the first to list all Three Laws of Robotics. Credit: Wikipedia
The six values are designed address the…
In 312, Roman Emperor Constantine was told in a dream to paint a cross on his army’s shields.[1]
Based on that dream, he commanded his generals to slap crosses on
pretty much everything. If it went into battle, it had a cross on it.
And lo, when his army faced the rebel army that was twice the size of
his, his soldier guys smote them other soldier guys real bad and got all
pre-medieval on their butts; and Constantine did declare, “Hot
Damascus, it worked!” (Obviously, I am paraphrasing; I don’t speak
Latin.) So, Constantine remained emperor of Rome and a Christian, sort of.
He, being the…
vongehr |
Today is my 43rd
birthday. When I was 34 years old, I walked along a narrow river through the city
of Nanning in the south of China. I was lonely and depressed,
no matter the PhD degree I had recently obtained, my freedom, the beauty all
around, the women I could easily befriend wherever.
I came to the conclusion that my
life is not worth its suffering, and that it must either change, that I must
change, or it is idiotic to go on living. I asked myself:
“How long will you go on just because you are afraid of dying? Will you
go on and on just…
Steve Jobs was a good CEO, a visionary. He was also known as a monster driven to fits of rage and a known SEC law violator who gave himself stock options without bothering to tell anyone. He gave nothing to charity. He was in both a personal and a business sense, greedy.
But he was good for shareholders.
When is a greedy CEO bad for business instead of good? An article in the Journal of Management examines the effects of greed on shareholder wealth and looks at whether various contextual factors, like a strong board of directors, CEO tenure and discretion make the situation better…
In the modern American political climate, we see echoes of 40 years ago, when Richard Nixon was president. Federal agencies are being used as hatchetmen for the administration, copies of messages mysteriously get lost when subpoenaed by Congress, and if anyone objects to domestic spying, we are told it's to stop terrorism.
Stopping terrorism seems to be an agreeable notion to people, that is why it has become a blanket excuse for all kinds of government conduct.
And it has even become a way to use medical care.
There has been a surge in murders of polio vaccination workers in Pakistan…
Compassion can produce counterintuitive results, challenging prevailing views of empathy's effects on moral judgment, say philosophers in a new paper
To understand how humans make moral choices, the philosophers asked subjects to respond to a variety of moral dilemmas, such as whether to stay and defend a mortally wounded soldier until he dies or shoot him to protect him from enemy torture and enable you and five other soldiers to escape unharmed.
Ethicists say people make choices based on a struggle within their brains between thoughtful reason and automatic passion.
"But this simple reason…