Vittorio Bufacchi & Xiao Ouyang discuss some philosophical & linguistic difficulties. China has long been a soft target for Western human rights activists. Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, between 1966 and 1976, was attacked at the time and is still demonized today for the innumerable violations of fundamental human rights that then occurred. In 1989 the …
Jesse Tomalty considers what human rights are and how they’re justified. A few months ago there was a spate of headlines announcing that the UN had made internet access a human right. It turns out that this claim was rather misleading. What the UN did was pass a resolution emphasizing the importance of internet access …
Ray Tallis peers into the future, without fear. “Tereza is staring at herself in the mirror. She wonders what would happen if her nose were to grow a millimetre longer each day. How much time would it take for her face to become unrecognizable? And if her face no longer looked like Tereza, would Tereza …
Mary Midgley argues that Security is not about the size of your military. The Shock of Khaki During a series of colonial wars in the nineteenth century, the British army gradually changed the colour of its soldiers’ uniforms from the traditional scarlet to khaki. Its reasons for doing this are perhaps fairly obvious, but the …
Dr E. R. Klein says we should reconsider the value of space exploration and start getting ready to leave the nest. Everyone is familiar with the giant stone heads of Easter Island, a tiny and remote island in the South Eastern Pacific, about 1800 miles off the coast of Chile. Nearly a thousand of these …
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Eric Dietrich looks forward to the extinction of humanity. Recently on the History Channel, artificial intelligence (AI) was singled out, with much wringing of hands, as one of the seven possible causes of the end of human life. I will argue that this wringing of hands is quite inappropriate: the best thing that could happen …
Brenda Almond on why the gay adoption debate isn’t really about sexual morality. Politicians and others would reach sounder conclusions if they could bring themselves to see the current debate about gay adoption and discrimination as part of a broader debate about the family. This debate is as much philosophical and sociological as it is …
Russell Powell says it’s not easy using genes to enhance humanity, even in theory. On display in the National Portrait Gallery of London is a ‘DNA portrait’ of geneticist Sir John Sulston. The work is billed by the artist as “the most realistic portrait in the gallery” because it “carries the actual instructions that led …
Brian D. Earp explains how chemical enhancement could save your marriage. What do you do when your marriage lasts less than two months? That was the predicament faced by Natasha Nelson, a thirty-five-year-old public relations executive, after she found out that her brand-new husband had been carrying on a relationship with his ex-girlfriend: throughout their …
Michael Selgelid offers a cautionary perspective on genetic enhancement. Revolutionary developments in biomedical science, particularly in genetics, may lead to new cures or preventative therapies for a wide variety of human diseases. Just about everyone agrees that this would be a good thing. However, the very same kinds of developments that may be used to combat …