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A sitcom may seem like an unlikely vehicle for serious discussions about moral philosophy, which viewers might expect to find in medical and legal dramas (albeit in less literal, didactic forms). But the subject and medium are surprisingly compatible. A comedy can broach otherwise tedious-sounding ideas with levity and self-awareness, and has more leeway to use contrived or exaggerated scenarios to bring concepts to life

bringing digestible ethics lessons to the masses can be seen as a moral act, ensuring that those who don’t spend hours poring over Kant and Judith Jarvis Thomson are also privy to what’s gained from understanding how people think.

The Good Place’s focus on ethics wouldn’t mean as much if it weren’t also remarkable in other ways—the performances, the top-notch writing, the wordplay and pun-laden jokes, the willingness to formally experiment with the sitcom genre.

In Houston, as millions suffered power and water outages, food shortages and subfreezing temperatures, another problem confronted families: price hikes.Steep increases in the price of food, gas and fuel have been reported across Texas. And as millions of Texans lost power, exorbitant prices were being asked for hotel rooms with power, with some climbing to US$1,000 a night.

Disaster creates a scarcity of basic necessities; retailers and providers respond by sharply raising the price tags on sought-after commodities.

Contrarian voices argue that price hikes are good – they provide incentives for sellers to bring extra supplies and prevent hoarding.

Should schools be teaching morals? What does it mean to be moral or ethical?

So the Mueller Report is finally out. President Trump has called it a “total exoneration,” but we don’t have to take his word for it. After special counsel Robert Mueller’s comprehensive, two-year investigation into serious allegations of Russian electoral interference, conspiracy, and obstruction of justice, we’re free to read what the special counsel’s findings actually are, if we so choose—albeit with a number of careful redactions from William Barr that along with his four-page summary, framed public conversations about the report in important ways.

It can persuade us one way or another by using certain rhetorical or linguistic means. What’s more, a particular framing doesn’t just arise spontaneously to the top of the public consciousness from its own legitimate merits, because it happens to be the neutral truth. We would be naive to think so, yet many people do. When it comes to the power of states, in sociologist Christopher A. Bail’s view, it has to be knowingly crafted, with two realities. One is a front stage presentation for public consumption and the other a secret collective coordination behind the scenes. Their reality becomes your reality, one way or another.

To Dwight Bolinger, “literal truth—the kind one swears to tell on the witness stand—permits any amount of evasion.” He explains: “The most insidious of all concepts of truth is that of literalness. The California prune-growers tell us that prunes, pound for pound, offer several times more vitamins and minerals than fresh fruit; literally true. The oil industry advertises that no heat costs less than oil heat, which has to be true because no heat costs nothing at all.” Those savvy enough to see through it will simply eat fewer prunes and heat their homes differently to those who fall for it. But declaring that you didn’t lie but told the literal truth in this way seems a kind of hollow ethic, a careful weaselling around the words that some lawyers seem particularly adept at.

“I did not comprehend that ChatGPT could fabricate cases,” he told Judge Castel.

At times during the hearing, Mr. Schwartz squeezed his eyes shut and rubbed his forehead with his left hand. He stammered and his voice dropped. He repeatedly tried to explain why he did not conduct further research into the cases that ChatGPT had provided to him.

For nearly two hours Thursday, Mr. Schwartz was grilled by a judge in a hearing ordered after the disclosure that the lawyer had created a legal brief for a case in Federal District Court that was filled with fake judicial opinions and legal citations, all generated by ChatGPT.

we fear that the most popular and fashionable strain of A.I. — machine learning — will degrade our science and debase our ethics by incorporating into our technology a fundamentally flawed conception of language and knowledge.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s Sydney are marvels of machine learning. Roughly speaking, they take huge amounts of data, search for patterns in it and become increasingly proficient at generating statistically probable outputs — such as seemingly humanlike language and thought

if machine learning programs like ChatGPT continue to dominate the field of A.I

Scientists from Britain and Japan shared a Nobel Prize on Monday for the discovery that adult cells can be transformed back into embryo-like stem cells that may one day regrow tissue in damaged brains, hearts or other organs.

discovered ways to create tissue that would act like embryonic cells, without the need to harvest embryos.

"These groundbreaking discoveries have completely changed our view of the development and specialization of cells," the Nobel Assembly at Stockholm's Karolinska Institute said.

Does an individual have the right to professionally define who she is, or is that designation dictated by other people? Is there an ethical responsibility to describe oneself in a standardized, universally accepted context?

Most titles are self-applied. This is generally fine, because most titles are meaningless. If you declare yourself a futurist or a farmer or a musician (or an ethicist), that’s what you are, even if reasonable people can disagree. Most titles indicate only intent (“I call myself a ____ because that is what I aspire to do”). Failure to fulfill that intent has no significant impact on other people; as such, ethics aren’t really in play

But this is not the case for those rarefied professions in which strangers rely on someone they’ve never met to possess essential, functional, nonnegotiable knowledge that no normal person could attain without intense schooling or specialized experience. I would place neurosurgeon near the top of this tier.

Nietzsche, who wrote in Human, All Too Human, under the rubric “Art dangerous for the artist,” about the particular ill-suitedness of the artist to flourishing in a modern scientific age: When art seizes an individual powerfully, it draws him back to the views of those times when art flowered most vigorously.... The artist comes more and more to revere sudden excitements, believes in gods and demons, imbues nature with a soul, hates science, becomes unchangeable in his moods like the men of antiquity, and desires the overthrow of all conditions that are not favorable to art.... Thus between him and the other men of his period who are the same age a vehement antagonism is finally generated, and a sad end

What is modern is the sense of the superiority of the artist’s inferiority, which is only possible when the artist and the intellectual come to see the values of ordinary life—prosperity, family, worldly success, and happiness—as inherently contemptible.

Art, according to a modern understanding that has not wholly vanished today, is meant to be a criticism of life, especially of life in a materialist, positivist civilization such as our own. If this means the artist does not share in civilization’s boons, then his suffering will be a badge of honor.

Many observers saw quite quickly that Trump’s personality was highly disordered.

The opportunity for everyone to learn a lot about this domineering, exploitative, unstable and superficially charismatic personality type has presented itself on a grand scale.

All the neuroimaging, all the psychological theorising, all the psychiatric experimentation with pharmacology, it’s already prompting a huge need for careful, scientifically anchored engagement with the ethical and philosophical debate about what it is to be human.

For the first time, biologists have succeeded in growing human stem cells in pig embryos, shifting from science fiction to the realm of the possible the idea of developing human organs in animals for later transplant.

Since the organ would be made of a patient’s own cells, there would be little risk of immune rejection.

They would be generated by implanting human stem cells into an early pig embryo, resulting in an animal composed of mixed pig and human cells.

Brand helped to establish in 1996 to support projects designed to inspire “long-term responsibility.”

The theme of the talk was “Is Mass Extinction of Life on Earth Inevitable?”

the resurrection of extinct species, like the woolly mammoth, aided by new genomic technologies developed by the Harvard molecular biologist George Church.

How do people reconcile a belief in individual autonomy with nationwide wage stagnation?

“Many middle-class wage earners are victims of the economy, and, perhaps, of that great, glowing, irresistible American promise that has been drummed into our heads since birth: Just work hard and you can have it all.”

This sentiment taunts at two sacred and quintessentially American convictions—that success is self-determined and that advancement is inevitable for anyone with a serious work ethic. According to a 2014 Pew Global Attitudes Study, people in the United States are much more likely to hold these two beliefs than many of their European counterparts.

In 2001, President George W. Bush issued an executive order banning federal funding for new sources of stem cells developed from preimplantation human embryos. The action stalled research and discouraged scientists.

re-energized the field by devising a technique to “reprogram” any adult cell, such as a skin cell, and coax it back to its earliest “pluripotent” stage. From there it can become any type of cell, from a heart muscle cell to a neuron.

But it’s a double-edged sword. After multiple cell cycles, the chances of mutations increases.

The lawyers tasked with policing Donald Trump’s potential conflicts of interest are grappling with an oversight system that’s disjointed and ineffective -- and one they say is mostly unnecessary.

The only thing you leave this world with is your reputation,” he said. “I’m very concerned about my reputation. But I’m also committed to making sure I can do it in the right way. I’m confident I can do it in a way that doesn’t diminish my reputation or the reputation of the president.”

Scientists at the University of Manchester have developed a new type of self-replicating computer that uses DNA to make calculations, a breakthrough that could make computing far more efficient.

It seems plausible that humans, like rats, are spread along a continuum of readiness to help others. There has been considerable research on abnormal people, like psychopaths, but we need to know more about relatively stable differences (perhaps rooted in our genes) in the great majority of people as well.

Undoubtedly, situational factors can make a huge difference, and perhaps moral beliefs do as well, but if humans are just different in their predispositions to act morally, we also need to know more about these differences. Only then will we gain a proper understanding of our moral behavior

If continuing brain research does in fact show biochemical differences between the brains of those who help others and the brains of those who do not, could this lead to a “morality pill” — a drug that makes us more likely to help?