Nothing as It Seems

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...

Should in vitro meat replace conventional meat production?   An edited version of this article was printed in  Humanism Ireland , Nov-Dec, Vol. 143 (2013) The first public tasting of an in vitro beef burger , made from meat grown in a laboratory, using tissue engineering, was cooked and consumed at a news conference in London yesterday (5th August 2013). The burger, m ade completely from synthetic meat at a cost of €250,000, was developed by Professor Mark Post , a specialist in tissue engineering, at Maastricht University, in the Netherlands, using stem cells. It was revealed that Sergey Brin , one of the founders of Google, invested in the project. Post and his team of scientists took cells from a cow and converted them into strips of muscle that they joined to make a patty. The way it’s produced, in a sense, has more in common with how plants grow than sentient beings. One of the tasters at the London event, Hanni Rützler ,   said: "I was expecting...

A version of this article was printed in The Irish Vegetarian , Issue 137, Winter 2013 Perhaps it’s fair to say that the concept of lab-grown meat was originally conceptualised by Winston Churchill, when he declared in a 1932 essay " Fifty Years Hence " that by 1982 “we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.” Eighty years on and the idea hasn’t gone away. About five years ago the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) gave scientists until 30th June 2012 to confirm they could create "cultured" meat -- also known as in vitro or lab-grown meat -- in commercial quantities.  They launched a prize winning competition , awarding $1 million to the first scientific team that could prove that artificial chicken can be grown in large quantity, which would be impossible to differentiate from actual chicken flesh. This, you might suppose, sound...