peter singer | Pandaemonium

DEATH AND MORAL CONFUSION

August 6, 2017 by Kenan Malik

This is the full version of the article I wrote last month for the New York Times on the contrasting court cases of Charlie Gard and Noel Conway and the moral confusions they reveal about our attitudes to death. (I cannot publish my NYT articles on Pandaemonium until the month after they are published in the newspaper.) Charlie Gard died last week. It was a tragic case in which, as I suggest, there was no single right answer; there were valid […]

Categories: Britain, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: assisted dying, charlie gard, death, julian savulescu, morality, noel conway, peter singer

A WORLD WITH TOO LITTLE EMPATHY – OR TOO MUCH?

May 18, 2017 by Kenan Malik

This review of Paul Bloom’s Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion was published in the Summer 2017 issue of New Humanist. The biggest problem we have in our society and in the world right now,’ Barack Obama suggested before he became US President, ‘is an empathy deficit.’ It is a view that has become almost unquestioned, indeed almost unquestionable. ‘Behind every progressive policy,’ the American academic George Lakoff suggests, ‘is a single moral value: empathy.’ For the psychologist Simon Baron […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: alan kurdi, charity, effective altruism, emapthy, morality, paul bloom, peter singer, reason

EMBRYO RESEARCH AND HUMAN BEING

July 6, 2016 by Kenan Malik

This is the full version of the article I wrote last month for the International New York Times on the debate about time limits for embryo research. (I cannot publish my INYT articles on Pandaemonium until a month after it is published in the newspaper.) It was originally published under the headline ‘Rethinking Embryo Research Rules’. Few areas of scientific investigation are more controversial than embryo research. Yet, few are more brimming with potential. The field promises valuable insights into early […]

Categories: Philosophy & Ethics, Science & Technology • Tags: abortion, embryo research, infanticide, peter singer, women's rights

THE MORAL CAMERA

April 11, 2015 by Kenan Malik

The Quest for a Moral Compass is now out in paperback. And, to accompany the new edition, I will be, over the next few weeks, running extracts from the book. This first extract is from Chapter 18, ‘The search for ethical concrete’, and looks at neuroscientist Joshua Greene‘s idea of morality as existing in two modes – automatic and manual. You can buy The Quest for a Moral Compass in most bookshops, through Amazon or from my Pandaemonium bookstore. From The […]

Categories: History of moral thought, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: history of moral thought, joshua greene, kantianism, morality, peter singer, trolley problem, utilitarianism

HUMAN RIGHTS AND ANIMAL RIGHTS

December 5, 2013 by Kenan Malik

The Nonhuman Rights Project, an organization founded by Massachusetts lawyer and animal rights activist Steven Wise, has this week filed a series of lawsuits in New York demanding that chimpanzees be granted ‘legal personhood’. The lawsuit seeks to extend the concept of habeas corpus to chimpanzees, drawing an analogy with one of the most famous anti-slavery cases, that of James Somerset in 1772, an American slave who had been taken to London by his owner, escaped, was recaptured and was being held in chains on a […]

Categories: Human, Justice & Liberties • Tags: animal rights, apes, human nature, morality, peter singer, rights

FROM THE VAULTS: STONE AGE POLITICS

July 11, 2013 by Kenan Malik

I am away for the next few weeks, but rather than abandon Pandaemonium, I thought I would again raid the vaults, as it were, for old material that I have not published here. So, for the next few weeks, I have dug out essays, reviews, talks and broadcasts, broadly on the theme of human nature. Back in 2001, I gave a series of three talks on BBC Radio 4’s Westminster Hour entitled ‘Man, Beast and Politics’ that explored the political impact […]

Categories: Human, Politics, Science & Technology • Tags: darwinism, evolutionary psychology, francis fukuyama, human nature, matt ridley, peter singer, sociobiology

ABORTION AND CONSCIENCE

August 30, 2012 by Kenan Malik

Religious freedom, I argued in my Notes on Religious Freedom, is not a special kind of liberty but one of a broader set of freedoms of conscience, belief, assembly and action. Whatever one’s beliefs, secular or religious, there should be complete freedom to express them, short of inciting violence or other forms of physical harm to others. Whatever one’s beliefs, secular or religious, there should be freedom to assemble to promote them. And whatever one’s beliefs, secular or religious, there should […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion • Tags: abortion, atheism, creationism, ethics, peter singer, religious freedom, utilitarianism

ABORTION, INFANTICIDE, HUMANITY, FREE SPEECH

March 7, 2012 by Kenan Malik

Is there no moral distinction between killing a newborn baby and aborting a fetus? And should an academic paper that seemingly advocated the killing of newborns have ever been published? Those are the questions at the heart of a controversy that has erupted after the publication of a paper entitled ‘After-birth abortion: Why should the baby live?’ in the Journal of Medical Ethics. Two Australian academics, Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva, argued that the moral status of a newborn baby was […]

Categories: Free Speech, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: abortion, atheism, ethics, free speech, humanism, infanticide, peter singer, religion, utilitarianism, women's rights