Displaying posts tagged: ethics

Pay-sithanatos

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Well, at least one can hardly accuse this ethicist of mere armchair philosophising:

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“Because it’s our job.”

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Apparently the latest controversial morsel on the FFVII remake is:

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The Sizzle of Space

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I interviewed Tony Milligan (K.C.L.) about the ethics of space exploration for Pod Academy. It was his work on cultural value in space I built on/responded to in my piece for Commercial Space Exploration: Ethics, Policy and Governance, and as things turned out we were co-contributors to that volume, so it was particularly interesting to have …

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Strange Company

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To the fashion for seeking to employ ‘rockstars’ and ‘ninja’ and ‘Jedi’ and so on we can apparently add ‘ethicists’. Riot Games (of League of Legends fame) is advertising for an Executive Assistant (North America). In the ‘you are’ section, right after ‘a communications black belt’, we have the following novel definition:

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Intention Care

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While I’m in sympathy with the conclusion I’m not sure about the reasoning:

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Future Imperfect

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Until recently I thought the trickiest thing about long-term intergenerational ethics was the need to peer into distant, largely unpredictable futures. I have changed my mind. After pondering sentences like ‘Unborn generations depend on us’ (will depend? are going to depend? will be already depending? are yet going to have used to depend? will have been …

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Space Storage Space

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The BBC recently ran a short article on the ethics of leaving stuff on the Moon. It draws mainly on environmental ethics and space law; not much on space heritage, although it does note the historical value of the remnants at the Apollo landing sites.

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Spending Motivation

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Here’s a piece of guesswork about moral psychology. Suppose you are aware that purchasing antiquities without a clear provenance might result in money going to organisations like Hamas and ISIS/Islamic State. Suppose you've seen remarks like this one from Conflict Antiquities:

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Immature Plans

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Here’s a hypothesis about the moral psychology involved in deciding priorities in the politics of child safety: it must create a huge sense of responsibility, mustn’t it? The kind where you’d lie awake at night, wondering whether children had been left endangered because you chose a wasteful use of resources? The kind where you’d want to …

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Two Weeks

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I remember an undergrad. who did his final year dissertation on the practicality of Utilitarianism:His original plan was to attempt a comparative experimental study of Utilitarianism and Kantianism, before he scaled down his ambitions. his idea was that he would live for a week as a Utilitarian and then report on his experiences. He happened to …

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Afters

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Here are some recent book titles: Philosophy After Hiroshima (2009); Moral Philosophy After 9/11 (2005); Ethics for a Broken World: Imagining Philosophy After Catastrophe (2011); The Contract of Mutual Indifference: Political Philosophy After the Holocaust (1999); Ethics After the Holocaust: Perspectives, Critiques, and Responses (1999); The Double Binds of Ethics After the Holocaust: Salvaging the Fragments …

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Virtue and Virtuality

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I’ve been correcting the typesetters’ proofs for Getting ‘Virtual’ Wrongs Right, which is basically an extended gripe at the way in which loose talk of ‘virtual murder’ and the like managed to migrate from tabloid headlines to ethics papers. (The final, typeset version will be paywalled somewhere; I’m more sanguine than usual about this aspect of …

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A Broad Church

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Google reports about 8,190 results for the search term "ethics, broadly construed". Even allowing for the fact that some of those are for more specific variants like ‘business ethics broadly construed’ (and for the schism which has evidently opened between those who embrace the comma and those who decline), it’s a fair number. I wonder how …

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Some Great Ideal

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Let us... state, in view of the fact that all knowledge and every pursuit aims at some good, what it is that we say political science aims at and what is the highest of all goods achievable by action. Verbally there is very general agreement; for both the general run of men and people of superior …

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Pre-Post-Natal Harm?

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Let’s assume that poisoning your child is wrong, whether it’s wilfully or negligently done. Let’s further posit, as many people do, that a foetus has broadly comparable moral standing to that of a baby after birth. Some possible implications...?

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