Ethics Untangled

Send us Fan Mail Luke Ulas from the University of Sheffield and Josh Hobbs from the University of Leeds are both interested in cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism is a name used for a few different political ideas, but the core thought, according to the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, is "the idea that all human beings, regardless of their political affiliation, are (or can and should be)...

Send us Fan Mail This episode is part of what's becoming a bit of an informal series of Ethics Untangled episodes, on ethical issues relating to artificial intelligence applications. The particular application we're looking at this time comes from a healthcare setting, and is called a Patient Preference Predictor. It's a proposed way of using an algorithmic system to predict what a...

Send us Fan Mail Relationship anarchy is a radical approach to relationships that goes beyond just rejecting traditional monogamy. Relationship anarchists believe that relationships should never involve having power over each other, in the form of holding each other to obligations. So, for example, relationship anarchists reject the idea of restricting one's partner from entering into any for...

Send us Fan Mail Drag is a type of performance which uses clothing and makeup to imitate and often exaggerate female gender signifiers and gender roles. It's an activity with a long and varied history, and continues to be a very popular form of entertainment, as attested by TV shows such as Ru Paul's Drag Race. It's also distinctive in having faced criticism from several different p...

Send us Fan Mail Misinformation, fake news, hate speech, satire, the arts, political protest. These are all examples of what you might call disruptive speech. A free speech absolutist would say that all of these forms of speech should be tolerated, if not welcomed. On the other hand, it does look as though some of them are disruptive in a good way, and others are disruptive in a bad way. But can w...

Send us Fan Mail Recent developments in AI, including image generation and large language models, have created huge excitement and opened up some really interesting possibilities. But they've also attracted significant criticisms, not least of which is the accusation that they involve large scale theft. This is because they are trained on huge datasets that include the original work of many p...

Send us Fan Mail When I was doing my undergraduate degree back in the 90s, the Internet was a bit of a novelty. It was fun to play with, and you could see theoretically how it was probably going to be quite important. I'm not sure I would have predicted how completely it now pervades every area of human life, though: work, civil society, leisure and social interactions. There's still, ho...

Send us Fan Mail After time in the army and the fire service, Simon Cassin became a health and safety professional, and is now the managing director of a training and development consultancy called Ouch. Unusually for someone working in health and safety, he's dedicated some serious study to understanding the deep philosophical ideas underlying the profession, focusing particularly on the ide...

Send us Fan Mail *CONTENT WARNING: This podcast contains some frank discussion of sex and sex work.* While there are all kinds of sex work, by far the most common scenario involves a man paying a woman for sex. It is, in other words, a highly gendered activity. Why? It turns out the answer to this question isn't as obvious as it might at first seem. It turns out, in fact, that there are multi...

Send us Fan Mail Do you know what medical information is held about you? Do you know who is allowed to have access to it? Doctors collect lots of data - often quite personal - about their patients. This data needs to be collected, stored, and shared, sometimes quite widely, so that the patients can receive effective care, but also so that the medical profession can better understand diseases, how...

Send us Fan Mail Today's question is one which you might not immediately recognise as important or, so to speak, pressing. The question is, what is touching through ? It also might not be immediately apparent why this is an ethical question. As Robbie Morgan from the IDEA Centre and Will Hornett from the University of Cambridge explain, however, it's a metaphysical question which has eth...

Send us Fan Mail Conspiracy theories seem to be an increasingly prevalent feature of public discourse. No sooner has some significant event taken place, but the internet is full of alternative explanations for that event, involving hidden and nefarious decision-makers. These theories run the gamut from the wildly outlandish to the somewhat plausible, and your view may differ on where the line shou...

Send us Fan Mail Adam Byfield is Principal Technical Assurance Specialist at NHS England. His job involves providing ethical assurance for technical systems which are used in the NHS, including those which employ artificial intelligence. It's well known that AI, as well as providing some really exciting benefits, raises some distinctive ethical issues, but it was really interesting to talk to...

Send us Fan Mail Should we be worried about teledildonics?  *CONTENT WARNING. This episode contains frank descriptions of sexual practices of various kinds, and discussion of sexual assault and rape, including rape by deception.* Teledildonics is a word that refers to the use of networked electronic sex toys to facilitate sexual or quasi-sexual interactions between people at a distance. It's...

Send us Fan Mail Alex Batesmith has had a fascinating career. After beginning as a criminal barrister in Leeds, he went on to work as a United Nations prosecutor in Cambodia and Kosovo, working on cases involving genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. He's now a legal scholar working at Leeds University, and has been researching the values and motivations of international criminal...

Send us Fan Mail Gender is, of course, one of the most contentious ethical and political topics you can find at the moment. There are numerous practical and policy debates - for example those relating to medicine, prisons and sport - which can seem completely intractable, and which provoke the strongest possible opinions on all sides. Sitting behind these practical questions, however, is a cluster...

Send us Fan Mail Chris McClean is the global lead for digital ethics at Avanade, a large tech innovation and consulting firm. He's also studying for his PhD at the University of Leeds, spending his time thinking about risk and trust relationships, especially in cases with a significant power imbalance, and where the people making the decisions are different from those exposed to the risk resu...

Send us Fan Mail For this episode, I spoke to Wendy Salkin , a philosophy professor at Stanford University, about informal political representatives: people who speak or act on behalf of groups in the political sphere without being elected to do so. Familiar examples include Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Malala Yousafzai, and Greta Thunberg. Informal political representatives raise awareness o...

Send us Fan Mail In May 2023, the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill received Royal Assent after two years of debate in Parliament. The new Act will strengthen the statutory duty already imposed on English higher education providers by previous legislation to secure freedom of speech within the law. Arif Ahmed, a former philosophy professor at Cambridge University, has been appointed as a D...

Send us Fan Mail Never let it be said that we don't tackle the big questions on this podcast. This week we're discussing no less a subject than the meaning of life, with Predrag Cicovacki. Predrag is Professor of Philosophy at the College of the Holy Cross (USA), where he has been teaching since 1991. He has served as a visiting professor in Germany, Russia, Luxembourg, Serbia, France, a...

Send us Fan Mail Meredith Broussard is a data journalist and associate professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University, as well as research director at the NYU Alliance for Public Interest Technology. Her book More Than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech explores the way technology reinforces inequality and asks the question, what if racism,...

Send us Fan Mail Ethical questions about the dead are frequently interesting, puzzling, surprising, and weird. All of these things become clear in this conversation with Dr Joseph Bowen. Joe is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Leeds, specialising in moral, political, and legal philosophy. As well as whether the dead have rights, his research focuses on the nature of rights and directe...

Send us Fan Mail This episode is an exploration of the relationship between love and time with Troy Jollimore. As well as being a Professor in the Philosophy Department at California State University, Troy is a successful poet. His first collection of poetry, Tom Thomson in Purgatory, won the National Book Critics Circle award in poetry for 2006. His third, Syllabus of Errors, appeared on the New...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Munamato Chemhuru is Associate Professor in Philosophy at Great Zimbabwe University in Masvingo, Zimbabwe, and a Senior Research Associate in Philosophy at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Johannesburg in South Africa. He has been working on a project entitled Conceptualising Environmental Justice through Epistemic Justice in Africa , collaborating with former podcast...

Send us Fan Mail Politicians sometimes have to make decisions where there is no option that looks good, morally speaking. They may have to get their hands dirty, acting in a way that looks immoral - sometimes powerfully so - in order to avoid some greater evil. This is called the problem of dirty hands, and it's long been of interest to philosophers. However, most of the philosophical work ab...