Post Tagged with: "featured"

Three-parent children, germ-line gene manipulation and designer humans

Three-parent children, germ-line gene manipulation and designer humans

February 3, 2015 at 5:37 pm 0 comments

Today’s vote in Parliament in favour of allowing three parent children makes the UK the first country to cross internationally respected bioethical red lines. It does so first by allowing the creation of human beings using DNA from three human beings and secondly, by opening the door to germ-line geneRead More

Dangers facing the disabled in hospital

Dangers facing the disabled in hospital

January 21, 2015 at 7:57 am 0 comments

We have the best healthcare in the world, so we are told, free at the point of use. So why would there be any dangers facing the disabled in hospitals as they enter for healthcare? Well, perhaps British healthcare was once the best in the world but it most certainlyRead More

Some cultural contradictions of liberalism

Some cultural contradictions of liberalism

December 29, 2014 at 12:59 pm 2 comments

‘Liberalism’ is not a term that admits of straightforward definition. To quote Nietzsche, ‘only something which has no history can be defined’ (On the Genealogy of Morality II.13), and liberalism has a complex and to some degree incoherent history. The liberalism of John Stuart Mill, for instance, is differently contouredRead More

Against Immanuel Kant — and Brendan O’Neill

Against Immanuel Kant — and Brendan O’Neill

December 20, 2014 at 9:15 pm 1 comment

Once upon a time — say, before the 1980s or 1990s — in quite a number of countries, people led normal lives: cases were argued, judicial decisions issued, laws enacted and conflicts solved without resort to reasoning of specifically or allegedly Kantian, or indeed Enlightenment/Kantian, types. Kant’s importance was foundRead More

Modern democracy as spivocracy

Modern democracy as spivocracy

November 29, 2014 at 11:38 am 1 comment

Generally speaking, a watershed between the right and the left in politics is formed by the Enlightenment.

People I’d describe as real conservatives detest it, while those on the left feel exactly the opposite.

The sexual revolution  Brave New World or hell repackaged?

The sexual revolution Brave New World or hell repackaged?

November 17, 2014 at 7:55 pm 0 comments

November 2013 marked fifty years since the assassination of John F. Kennedy, but also the passing of Aldous Huxley and C. S. Lewis, each prophetic in his own way.

Huxley’s most famous work Brave New World (1932) predicted that people would be bred like animals and graded according to their pre-destined place in society. As we will see, the idea had already been canvassed in fiction, and the Eugenics Society was busy working on the scientific breeding of humans. But has Huxley’s ‘brave new world’ come to pass?

The slow death of Christian Europe

The slow death of Christian Europe

October 7, 2014 at 9:21 am 0 comments

Renaissance, Reformation, Revolution The philosopher Antony Flew told me an engaging story about Wittgenstein at a meeting of the Moral Science Club in Cambridge in the late 1940s. The speaker began his talk on Descartes: “Cogito ergo sum…” Whereupon Wittgenstein said in a loud stage whisper, “That’s a f****** stupidRead More