Ethics

Ethics

a large group of pigs in a pen.
Within a month of that initial conversation, Peter Singer became a vegetarian.
a person cooking hot dogs on a grill.
The first-of-its-kind approval could change how we think about gene-edited foods.
a group of penguins standing on top of a rock.
If you think everyone around you is terrible, the joke may be on you.
a drawing of a clown wearing a red and blue hat.
Rather than sending serial killer art to auctions, it should be sent to abnormal psychologists for research.
Painting of Dorian Gray
You can learn a lot about life through literature's most unrespectable and heinous characters.
A pair of scissors appears to cut through a black and white illustration of a DNA double helix.
4mins
Forget AI. Gene editing is still our most powerful — and dangerous — technology.
a black and white photo of a man sitting on a rock.
Far from being a “dead” pursuit that focuses on old ideas, modern philosophy proposes and debates important, new concepts. All of us can learn from it.
the cover of a magazine with a picture of a man's face.
5mins
Why do the worst people rise to power? University College London professor Brian Klaas responds.
How does the mind interact with the body? Nobody really knows — but these philosophers ventured an answer.
a woman's head with a circuit board on it.
5mins
“All the plausible paths to a really great future, involve the development of machine superintelligence at some point.”
a man in a red tie and a hand pointing at him.
Being a jerk gets you rich, promoted, and laid (if you're a man). But there is a downside.
a stack of books sitting on top of each other.
Some classic books, like Mark Twain’s "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," remain controversial to this day.
Virtually anyone can now create convincing deepfakes. That doesn't mean you should.
A low polygon model of the thinker
An innovation's value is found between the technophile’s promises and the Luddite’s doomsday scenarios.
Lonely humans will become infatuated with AI-fabricated personas.
There's a link between dark personality traits and breaches of battlefield ethics.
A white king defeated by a black pawn in chess
Everyone loves a good underdog story, but the lessons we derive from them depend on how they’re told.
Science will lead us to a universal morality and a cosmic religion.
Fear of being scammed can lead us to make decisions that go against our values and goals — both as individuals and as a society.
Some effective altruists “earn to give” — they make as much money as they can and then donate most of it to charities.
Adopting a healthy scepticism towards inherited ideas means “emptying the container of the Self.”
Pederasty
In many city-states, it was perfectly acceptable for older men to have sexual relationships with young boys.
To the Greek philosopher, all of our actions ultimately aim at our own pleasure.
great books
These five great books should prompt us to work on what needs fixing the most in the world: ourselves.
If aliens are driven mostly by biological imperatives, humanity could be in big trouble if we ever meet technologically advanced beings.