Philosophy & Ethics

Transparency is the slogan of a new, heterogeneous movement. The demand for transparency unites very different orientations. Many conservatives feel that transparency is similar to anarchy. However,…

I have been an active member of the self-described Community of Reason since about 1997. By that term I mean the broad set encompassing skeptics, atheists and secular humanists (and all the assorted…

Living Forever - Boring? A recent article ["Would it be boring to live forever"] raised the question that if science could resolve the problem of dying and prolong human life indefinitely, in a…

The latest issue of Philosophy Now features an interesting collection of articles on human enhancement, with articles arguing that the approach is “essential” to humans in order to avoid catastrophes…

I recently came across an article entitled "Synthetic biology: 'playing God' is vital if we are to create a better future for all".   As you can imagine, the article itself is primarily focused…

In 2010, when Dr. Paul Muizelaar of U.C. Davis began performing illegal experimental treatments on terminally ill brain cancer patients, he earned over $800,000. (1) That's pretty good money for…

Since the unicellular creature, going through the evolution of the living organisms, until the recently ones, with complex and different kind of neurons, the nervous system has had only one purpose;…

Eugenics, the darling of elite, educated progressives 100 years ago in their quest to create Utopia, has been out of favor since those crazy Germans took it too far in the late 1930s, but there is…

Plato famously maintained that knowledge is “justified true belief,” meaning that to claim the status of knowledge our beliefs (say, that the earth goes around the sun, rather than the other way…

A trial of HPV vaccines in India, which has now been halted and is the subject of an investigation by the Indian government, was examining the safety and feasibility of offering a vaccine against the…