Published on
9 June 2016
The recent killing of a gorilla at a zoo in Cincinnati has provoked a wildly disproportionate social-media reaction. In some widely viewed footage of the occurrence, a four-year-old boy falls into the gorilla’s enclosure and is subsequently grabbed and dragged through water by the animal. Alarmed by understandably loud shouting from the boy’s mother and […]
Published on
11 March 2014
Liberty is a premise upon which physician-assisted suicide is routinely advanced. Some of those suffering from serious and incurable illness or distress seek to argue the case that their suffering is a bondage from which only death can free them. Such suffering is, of course, naturally subjective in the sense that what one person might […]
Published on
4 November 2013
Posted in Culture, Ethics Online
The composer Sir Harrison Birtwistle, after being presented with an Ivor Novello award for classical music, asked the assembled song-writers and pop performers, ‘Why is your music so effing loud?’. Posterity does not record what answer, if any, may have been given on the night, but there may in fact be a good, if subtle, […]