Suggested readings, 7th March 2021

Here are some interesting articles I've read over the past week I think are worth checking out.

Zeynep Tufekci, “5 Pandemic Mistakes We Keep Repeating.” 26 Feb, The Atlantic.

"Despite all these good intentions, much of the public-health messaging has been profoundly counterproductive."

Yuval Noah Harari, “Lessons from a year.” 26 Feb, Financial Times.

"Information technology has made us more resilient in the face of organic viruses, but it has also made us far more vulnerable to malware and cyber warfare."

Thomas Douglas, “There is no fundamental ethical objection to vaccine passports.” 27 Feb, Brussels Times.

"[T]he case for vaccine passports is clear: they could allow us to end some lockdown and distancing measures for vaccinated individuals sooner than it would be safe to end them for everyone."

James Conca, “Irrational Nuclear Fear Puts Sweden In Danger Of Succumbing To Stupidity.” 28 Feb, Forbes.

"An early phase-out of nuclear would add over 2 billion tons of CO2 emissions, cause the loss of $120 billion in taxes and undermine their grid reliability in an area of the world that gets really cold."

Tom Chivers, “Don’t worry about your sperm count.” 3 Mar, UnHerd.

Review of Count Down: How Our Modern World Is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, and Imperilling the Future of the Human Race by Shanna Swan and Stacey Colino.

Hannah Ritchie, “If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares.” 4 Mar, Our World in Data.

"Research suggests that if everyone shifted to a plant-based diet we would reduce global land use for agriculture by 75%. This large reduction of agricultural land use would be possible thanks to a reduction in land used for grazing and a smaller need for land to grow crops."

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Should We Use Neuroenhancement Drugs to Improve Relationships?

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Should we repeal the Eighth Amendment?

Ireland will have a referendum on whether abortion should be permitted on 25th May. A referendum has to be held in order to alter the constitution. In 1983 voters approved of the Eighth Amendment – which created a constitutional recognition that gives equal status to the unborn and the mother – but requests to have it repealed have been steadily increasing in the past number years. In January, the Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, said Ireland’s abortion laws are “too restrictive and need to be reformed”. If the amendment is repealed, the government may introduce legislation permitting unrestricted abortion up to 12 weeks of pregnancy. At present, terminations are only permissible when the life of the mother is at risk, and under law anyone who seeks an abortion could potentially face 14 years in prison. Opponents of abortion, to be sure, see this as a moral horror, but the 12-week limit being proposed is fairly similar to abortion laws across Europe. Abort...

Intuitions and Ethics

A version of this article was printed in Humanism Ireland , May-June, Vol. 146 (2014) The notion that our moral intuitions possess epistemic authority has been associated with a number of philosophers within the canon of Western thought. Roughly speaking, these thinkers have argued that our intuitions have recourse to a unique authority of perception that yields special access to a sphere of moral legitimacy. Others, however, have claimed that our intuitions are incredibly diverse and often conflict with each other—for example, your intuition says assisted suicide is morally permissible and my intuition says it’s wrong. But it seems the two contrasting intuitions cannot both be right. At the same time, most of us think our own moral intuitions are right : they do not seem inconsistent to us, and we have a strong sense to believe them. Accordingly, they strike us as correct. Undoubtedly, moral intuitions can be shaped by our particular culture, environment or co...

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