Nothing as It Seems

In 2001 the Netherlands made history by becoming the first country in the world to legalise same sex marriage (SSM); this feat was soon followed by their closest neighbour, Belgium. Since then several other countries have also amended their laws to permit same-sex couples to marry; they include: Spain, Canada, South Africa, Norway, Sweden, Portugal, Iceland, Argentina, Denmark, Brazil, France, Uruguay, New Zealand, Great Britain, and Luxembourg. In addition, 36 states in the US, at present, allow SSM and over 70 percent of its citizens live in places where gay couples can marry.  There’s a good chance Ireland will soon also join this list. In December the Government announced that a referendum on legalising SSM will take place sometime in May. Public opinion in support of the move has remained steady over the past couple of years: one Irish Times /Ipsos MRBI poll taken just before the Cabinet announcement said that 71 percent support SSM and just 17 percent are agains...

An edited version of this article was printed in  Humanism Ireland , November-December, Vol. 149 (2014)   E mpathy is the capacity to recognise the feelings of others in such a way that one can identify and understand the experiences of another being’s circumstances. It is where one can transfer one’s own feelings and emotions onto the subjective experiences of another.  The term ‘empathy’ has been only around for less than a century, and is a translation of a German psychologist's neologism whose exact definition is ‘feeling into’. One remarkable thing about humans is their ability to empathise with the suffering of others. The idea of empathy being a positive trait is widely accepted, since it normally stimulates motivation for moral and altruistic behaviour. As expected, many believe that if people had more empathy and moral motivation the world would be a much better place. In his book,  Zero Degrees of Empathy: A New Theory of H...

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...