WARSAW/MELBOURNE: Jenna Talackova reached the finals of Miss Universe Canada last month, before being disqualified because she was not a “natural born” female. The tall, beautiful blonde told the media that she had considered herself a female since (...)
MELBOURNE: We are getting fatter. In Australia, the United States, and many other countries, it has become commonplace to see people so fat that they waddle rather than walk. The rise in obesity is steepest in the developed world, but it is (...)
PRINCETON: Last year, I told a colleague that I would include internet ethics in a course that I was teaching. She suggested that I read a recently published anthology on computer ethics — and attached the entire volume to the email.
Should I (...)
PRINCETON: Forty years ago, I stood with a few other students in a busy Oxford street handing out leaflets protesting the use of battery cages to hold hens. Most of those who took the leaflets did not know that their eggs came from hens kept in (...)
PRINCETON: Three significant events relating to the death penalty occurred in the United States during September. The one that gained the most publicity was the execution in Georgia of Troy Davis, who had been convicted of the 1989 murder of Mark (...)
PRINCETON: The small Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan is known internationally for two things: high visa fees, which reduce the influx of tourists, and its policy of promoting “gross national happiness” instead of economic growth. The two are related: (...)
MELBOURNE: Two new movies released this month — one a science-fiction blockbuster, the other a revealing documentary — raise the issue of our relations with our closest non-human relatives, the great apes. Both dramatize insights and lessons that (...)
OXFORD: Can moral judgments be true or false? Or is ethics, at bottom, a purely subjective matter, for individuals to choose, or perhaps relative to the culture of the society in which one lives? We might have just found out the answer.
Among (...)
PRINCETON: When the earthquake and tsunami hit Japan in March, Brian Tucker was in Padang, Indonesia. Tucker was working with a colleague to design a refuge that could save thousands of lives if — or rather, when — a tsunami like the one in 1797 (...)
MELBOURNE: Scholars have long dreamed of a universal library containing everything that has ever been written. Then, in 2004, Google announced that it would begin digitally scanning all the books held by five major research libraries. Suddenly, the (...)
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MELBOURNE: The world has watched in horror as Libya's Colonel Muammar Qaddafi uses his military to attack protesters opposed to his rule, killing hundreds or possibly (...)
MELBOURNE: Sometimes we know the best thing to do, but fail to do it. New Year's resolutions are often like that. We make resolutions because we know that it would be better for us to lose weight, or get fit, or spend more time with our children. (...)
PRINCETON: At Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson, who was president of the university before he became president of the United States, is never far away. His larger-than-life image looks out across the dining hall at Wilson College, where I am a (...)
PRINCETON: Diamonds have an image of purity and light. They are given as a pledge of love and worn as a symbol of commitment. Yet diamonds have led to gruesome murders, as well as widespread rapes and amputations.
Charles Taylor, a former (...)
PRINCETON: In 2000, the world's leaders met in New York and issued a ringing Millennium Declaration, promising to halve the proportion of people suffering from extreme poverty and hunger by 2015. They also pledged to halve the proportion of people (...)
PRINCETON: Transparency seems to be the word of the day in a wide array of policy domains. But is greater transparency always good?
Ever since the financial crisis erupted in 2008, there has been a call for “greater transparency” in financial (...)
MELBOURNE: Shortly before half-time in the World Cup elimination match between England and Germany on June 27, the English midfielder Frank Lampard had a shot at goal that struck the crossbar and bounced down onto the ground, clearly over the goal (...)
MELBOURNE: In the sixteenth century, the alchemist Paracelsus offered a recipe for creating a living being that began with putting sperm into putrefying “venter equinus.” This is usually translated as “horse manure,” but the Latin “venter” means (...)
PRINCETON: When airports across Europe reopened after the closure caused by the eruption of Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull volcano, it was not because the amount of ash in the atmosphere had dropped, but because the risk that the ash posed to airplane (...)
MELBOURNE: Google has withdrawn from China, arguing that it is no longer willing to design its search engine to block information that the Chinese government does not wish its citizens to have. In liberal democracies around the world, this decision (...)
MELBOURNE - All over the world, people have responded generously to the devastating earthquake that struck Haiti. In just three days, more than a million Americans had donated $10 with the aid of text messages from their cellphones. People with very (...)
MELBOURNE: Did you make any New Year's resolutions? Perhaps you resolved to get fit, to lose weight, to save more money, or to drink less alcohol. Or your resolution may have been more altruistic: to help those in need, or to reduce your carbon (...)
PRINCETON and WARSAW: Last month, Gecko Systems announced that it had been running trials of its "fully autonomous personal companion home care robot, also known as a "carebot, designed to help elderly or disabled people to live independently. A (...)
PRINCETON: Of all the arguments against voluntary euthanasia, the most influential is the "slippery slope : once we allow doctors to kill patients, we will not be able to limit the killing to those who want to die.
There is no evidence for this (...)
PRINCETON: What we are doing to our planet, to our children and grandchildren, and to the poor, by our heedless production of greenhouse gases, is one of the great moral wrongs of our age. On October 24, you can stand up against this (...)