Published on
29 February 2012
1. Introduction A great deal of morality is concerned with the public arena: examining what is required for a just and fair society, and trying to map out the nature and extent of our obligations to our fellow citizens and to the wider world. The concepts of conscience, guilt and shame, by contrast, seem primarily […]
Published on
7 December 2011
A consistent message and direction often expressed in the actions and teaching of Pope Benedict XVI is the need for an ongoing dialogue between religious faith and the secular mind, based on the role of reason. Indeed, this was central to the appeal he made during the Visit to the UK in September 2010. And […]
Published on
12 October 2011
Two events tend to occur more or less regularly throughout history: wars and epidemics. Sometimes they occur separately and sometimes together. Both have caused and indeed continue to cause, devastating damage in terms of loss of life, physical and psychological suffering, famine, mass emigration and overall impoverishment of the affected populations. Although numbers do not […]
Published on
6 April 2011
I think we shall all agree that in recent years we have been through a number of crises. There has been, first of all, the financial crisis when we discovered that the people we trusted with our money were not, after all, to be trusted, and that those who were going to make us and […]
Published on
16 March 2011
Any discussion of ‘new aspects of sovereignty’ makes it appropriate to start speaking of what the ‘old aspects of sovereignty’ imply and of what sovereignty traditionally means. We are dealing with a word derived from Latin, superus, which means what is above or higher; and ‘sovereignty’ thus points to ‘the top authority’. Before the rise of […]
Published on
26 January 2011
Parents and religious leaders who want to express an opinion in favour of what is often called the ‘traditional’ family – a man, a woman and their children – tend to support their position either on religious grounds, or on the basis of empirical evidence, and there is indeed a wealth of evidence to support […]
Published on
7 December 2010
Transcript coming soon.
Published on
26 September 2010
Food and Fluids: Human Law, Human Rights and Human Interests 4.1 Introduction Academic discussion about nutrition and hydration tends to concentrate on conceptual matters intrinsic to the ethics of removing food and fluids in individual cases. It is, for example, undoubtedly important to distinguish between vitalistic and utilitarian excesses in understanding the rights and wrongs […]