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in title, tags, annotations or urlDoing Business With a Company That Took Jews to Their Deaths - Emma Green - The Atlantic - 2 views
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Keolis, a company that's mostly owned by SNCF, was recently invited to bid on a public contract to build a new metro line, the Purple Line, in the Washington, D.C., area. But legislators and lawyers say that the company needs to pay reparations for its conduct during the Holocaust if it's going to compete for a contract funded by tax dollars, particularly because a number of survivors and their family members live in the parts of Maryland where the line is being built.
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So where does that leave the ethical claims of this debate? The lawyers and legislators who are involved seem genuinely passionate about advocating for Holocaust victims, but only insofar as it won't jeopardize a major transportation project. And they're specifically assigning blame to SNCF, but only so long as the French government doesn't step in to pick up the tab.
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Perhaps this is indicative of the broader ethical complexity of making reparations for decades-old crimes.
Prison Architecture and the Question of Ethics - NYTimes.com - 1 views
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Today, prison design is a civic cause for some architects who specialize in criminal justice and care about humane design. There is a lot of research documenting how the right kinds of design reduce violence inside prisons and even recidivism. Architects can help ensure that prisons don’t succumb to our worst instincts — that they are not about spending the least amount of money to create the most horrendous places possible, in the name of vengeance — but promote rehabilitation and peace.Designing execution chambers is something else. They require their own deathly architecture. If architects refuse to design them, that doesn’t mean that they won’t be built, any more than the refusal by doctors and pharmaceutical companies to participate in executions has stopped executions from happening. But Ms. Dreiling said it herself: “Many, if not most, architects enter this profession because it is a calling. They believe they can make the world a better place, they believe they can enhance the lives of people on a daily basis, where they live, work and play.”
The Ethical Quandaries You Should Think About The Next Time You Look At Your Phone | Fast Company | Business + Innovation - 3 views
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To what extent can we and should we aspire to create machines that can outthink us? For example, Netflix has an algorithm that can predict what movies you will like based on the ones you've already seen and rated. Suppose a dating site were to develop a similar algorithm—maybe even a more sophisticated one—and predict with some accuracy which partner would be the best match for you. Whose advice would you trust more? The advice of the smart dating app or the advice of your parents or your friends?
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The question, it seems to me, is should we use new genetic technologies only to cure disease and repair injury, or also to make ourselves better-than-well. Should we aspire to become the masters of our natures to protect our children and improve their life prospects?AdvertisementAdvertisement This goes back to the role of accident. Is the unpredictability of the child an important precondition of the unconditional love of parents for children? My worry is that if we go beyond health, we run the risk of turning parenthood into an extension of the consumer society.
Child sex abuse victim in 20s euthanised after suffering irreparable PTSD - 0 views
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A victim of childhood sex abuse was allowed to end her life under Dutch euthanasia laws after doctors and psychiatrists concluded that the woman's post-traumatic stress disorder and physical health were incurable. The death of the Dutch woman in her 20s has fuelled the ongoing debate on the ethics of euthanasia in Britain, with some MPs arguing that allowing a victim of sex abuse to die is equivalent to punishing the victim.
If Animals Have Rights, Should Robots? - The New Yorker - 0 views
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People projected thoughts into Harambe’s mind. “Our tendency is to see our actions through human lenses,” a neuroscientist named Kurt Gray told the network as the frenzy peaked. “We can’t imagine what it’s like to actually be a gorilla. We can only imagine what it’s like to be us being a gorilla.” This simple fact is responsible for centuries of ethical dispute. One Harambe activist might believe that killing a gorilla as a safeguard against losing human life is unjust due to our cognitive similarity: the way gorillas think is a lot like the way we think, so they merit a similar moral standing. Another might believe that gorillas get their standing from a cognitive dissimilarity: because of our advanced powers of reason, we are called to rise above the cat-eat-mouse game, to be special protectors of animals, from chickens to chimpanzees. (Both views also support untroubled omnivorism: we kill animals because we are but animals, or because our exceptionalism means that human interests win.) These beliefs, obviously opposed, mark our uncertainty about whether we’re rightful peers or masters among other entities with brains.
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The big difference, they argue, is “sentience.” Many animals have it; zygotes and embryos don’t. Colb and Dorf define sentience as “the ability to have subjective experiences,” which is a little tricky, because animal subjectivity is what’s hard for us to pin down. A famous paper called “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” by the philosopher Thomas Nagel, points out that even if humans were to start flying, eating bugs, and getting around by sonar they would not have a bat’s full experience, or the batty subjectivity that the creature had developed from birth.
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If animals suffer, the philosopher Peter Singer noted in “Animal Liberation” (1975), shouldn’t we include them in the calculus of minimizing pain? Such an approach to peership has advantages: it establishes the moral claims of animals without projecting human motivations onto them. But it introduces other problems. Bludgeoning your neighbor is clearly worse than poisoning a rat.
Elizabeth Loftus: The fiction of memory | Video on TED.com - 0 views
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"Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus studies memories. More precisely, she studies false memories, when people either remember things that didn't happen or remember them differently from the way they really were. It's more common than you might think, and Loftus shares some startling stories and statistics, and raises some important ethical questions we should all remember to consider. Memory-manipulation expert Elizabeth Loftus explains how our memories might not be what they seem -- and how implanted memories can have real-life repercussions."
Whose Picture Is It, Anyway? - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Could social media awareness be a new developmental milestone? And if so, is my son part of the first wave of children who are nearing adolescence, and all the social awareness that entails, to realize their parents have been posting embarrassing pictures of them online since they were minutes old?Legally, I’m well within my rights as my son’s guardian, but what about ethically? Howard Cohen, a chancellor emeritus and a professor of philosophy at Purdue University Calumet in Hammond, Ind., said that depended upon whether I agreed with the teachings of Aristotle or those of Immanuel Kant.
Jaron Lanier on Lack of Transparency in Facebook Study - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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SHOULD we worry that technology companies can secretly influence our emotions? Apparently so.
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Research with human subjects is generally governed by strict ethical standards, including the informed consent of the people who are studied. Facebook’s generic click-through agreement, which almost no one reads and which doesn’t mention this kind of experimentation, was the only form of consent cited in the paper. The subjects in the study still, to this day, have not been informed that they were in the study. If there had been federal funding, such a complacent notion of informed consent would probably have been considered a crime. Subjects would most likely have been screened so that those at special risk would be excluded or handled with extra care.
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It is unimaginable that a pharmaceutical firm would be allowed to randomly, secretly sneak an experimental drug, no matter how mild, into the drinks of hundreds of thousands of people, just to see what happens, without ever telling those people. Imagine a pharmaceutical researcher saying, “I was only looking at a narrow research question, so I don’t know if my drug harmed anyone, and I haven’t bothered to find out.” Unfortunately, this seems to be an acceptable attitude when it comes to experimenting with people over social networks. It needs to change.
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Dehumanization and terrorism | Practical Ethics - 0 views
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Most people would agree that terrorism is no good. The word itself is rich with moralized connotations. It is true that some have argued that terrorism might sometimes be justified, but in popular discourse, terrorism is typically deemed obviously horrible. What are the consequences of branding some action an act of terrorism, or of branding some group a terrorist group? Note, in connection with this question, the ratcheting up of rhetoric surrounding ‘cyberterrorism,’ with many government officials now listing it as a major ongoing threat (e.g., here and here). A recent study by Adam Feltz and Edward Cokely of the Michigan Institute of Technology found that describing a group of people as ‘terrorist’ had far-reaching results. In general, participants in their study were less willing to “understand the group’s grievances,” less willing to “negotiate with the group.” Further, participants in their study found violence directed towards a group described as terrorist more permissible, and perceived such a group as less rational when compared to a group not described as terrorist.
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So it is important to be aware of the ways labels such as terrorist subtly influence the way we perceive other groups of people, and also of the way we perceive people we implicitly associate with such groups.
Can Moral Disputes Be Resolved? - The New York Times - 1 views
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What makes moral disagreements so intractable? Ethics shouldn’t be as hard as rocket science. Can religion help? It might seem that if morality is a matter of obeying divine commands, we could make short work of moral disagreement, if only we knew which was the true faith. Of course, we don’t. But 2,300 years ago Plato showed that appeals to God’s wisdom, no matter which faith, is irrelevant to what makes for moral rightness.
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What about reason? Many philosophers have argued that rational beings can reason their way to the right answers in morality. Kant and Mill both tried to do this, but ended up building incompatible moral theories by reasoning from two quite different starting points.
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In recent years some thinkers have argued that the foundations of morality are given by what science, especially evolutionary biology, shows us about the conditions of human flourishing. These philosophers, social psychologists and evolutionary anthropologists argue that there was strong selection for a core set of moral norms that are so widespread they are absent only in psychopaths.
Corrupting the Chinese Language - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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The default lingo of high party officials, even on the most solemn occasions, includes banal aphorisms like, “to be turned into iron, the metal must be strong.” Official proclamations and the nightly newscasts speak of “social harmony” and the “Chinese spirit.” In addition to promoting the “China Dream” and a strong work ethic, President Xi Jinping is known for uttering lines like, “Never allow eating the Communist Party’s food and then smashing the Communist Party’s cooking pots.”The government’s propaganda and education machinery moved past the revolutionary bloodthirsty bitterness. Our textbooks are litanies of brutal heroic deeds: “Stop a gun with your chest, hold a bomb in your hands, lie on a fire without moving, until you burn to death.” Nearly every Chinese child still wears a red scarf, “dyed with martyr's blood,” and many grow up singing the young pioneers’ songs: “Always prepared, to perform noble feats, to wipe out our enemy.”
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Two years ago, in a small town in central Shanxi Province, I overheard two old farmers debating whether a bowl of rice or a steamed bun was more satisfying. As the argument became more heated, one farmer accused the other, without irony, of being a “metaphysicist.”Mao was skeptical of metaphysics and thus, over the years, it became a dubious concept, used in Chinese propaganda as a pejorative term. It’s fair to assume these two farmers didn’t know much about metaphysics, yet they were using the term as an insult, straight out of the party lexicon. Other phrases like “idealist” and “petit bourgeois sentimentalist” have become everyday terms of abuse, even when those who use them clearly have no real idea what they mean.
Whole Foods is taking heat for selling rabbit - Quartz - 0 views
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But worrying about data is probably just a distraction, because, ultimately, “pet” is a relative term—there are more fish in our home aquariums than there are pet dogs, and any category that lumps the two together feels inadequate.
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Herzog started thinking about this 20 years ago, when he was sitting in a hotel bar having a beer with the psychologist and animal rights activist, Ken Shapiro. Herzog knew Shapiro was a vegan; Shapiro knew Herzog ate meat. Both men had read all of the same psychology and animal-rights literature, and both spent a lot of time working through the same philosophical questions. But somehow, they came to different conclusions about how to live their lives. + “Hal, I don’t get it: why aren’t you like us?” Shapiro suddenly asked. Herzog didn’t have an answer. He still doesn’t. + “I’ve been struggling with this for a long time,” Herzog says. “I can handle moral ambiguity. I can deal with it. So I don’t have that need for moral consistency that animal activists do.” He laughs a little. “And I know that their logic is better than mine, so I don’t even try arguing with them. They win in these arguments.” +
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Rabbits, as this passer-by is implying, are widely consumed in other countries. Western Europeans love rabbit sausage, slow-cooked rabbit stews, and braised bunny dishes, while the Chinese—who account for 30% of global rabbit consumption—consider rabbit’s head a delicacy. + Rabbit was even a staple of the American diet at one time. It helped sustain the European transplants who migrated west across the frontier, and during World War II, eating rabbit was promoted as an act of patriotism akin to growing a victory garden. But as small farms gave way to large-scale operations, rabbit meat’s popularity melted away and other meats took over.
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The cold, hard truth about the ice bucket challenge - Quartz - 2 views
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People who had previously purchased a green product were significantly more likely to both lie and steal than those who had purchased the conventional product. Their demonstration of ethical behavior subconsciously gave them license to act unethically when the chance arose. + Amazingly, even just saying that you’d do something good can cause the moral self-licensing effect. In another study, half the participants were asked to imagine helping a foreign student who had asked for assistance in understanding a lecture. They subsequently gave significantly less to charity when given the chance to do so than the other half of the participants, who had not been asked to imagine helping another student.
The Moral Instinct - New York Times - 3 views
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It seems we may all be vulnerable to moral illusions the ethical equivalent of the bending lines that trick the eye on cereal boxes and in psychology textbooks. Illusions are a favorite tool of perception scientists for exposing the workings of the five senses, and of philosophers for shaking people out of the naïve belief that our minds give us a transparent window onto the world (since if our eyes can be fooled by an illusion, why should we trust them at other times?). Today, a new field is using illusions to unmask a sixth sense, the moral sense.
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The first hallmark of moralization is that the rules it invokes are felt to be universal. Prohibitions of rape and murder, for example, are felt not to be matters of local custom but to be universally and objectively warranted. One can easily say, “I don’t like brussels sprouts, but I don’t care if you eat them,” but no one would say, “I don’t like killing, but I don’t care if you murder someone.”The other hallmark is that people feel that those who commit immoral acts deserve to be punished.
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Until recently, it was understood that some people didn’t enjoy smoking or avoided it because it was hazardous to their health. But with the discovery of the harmful effects of secondhand smoke, smoking is now treated as immoral. Smokers are ostracized; images of people smoking are censored; and entities touched by smoke are felt to be contaminated (so hotels have not only nonsmoking rooms but nonsmoking floors). The desire for retribution has been visited on tobacco companies, who have been slapped with staggering “punitive damages.” At the same time, many behaviors have been amoralized, switched from moral failings to lifestyle choices.
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