Ethics Untangled

Send us Fan Mail Duncan Sheehan is Professor of Business Law at the University of Leeds. He is interested in trusts and personal property law, especially secured transactions law. He has a particular recent interest in the application of the philosophy of action to the law, as well as a wider interest in private law theory more generally.  Unjust enrichment is a distinctive and, some might say, we...

Send us Fan Mail Dr Jamie Dow is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the IDEA Centre. He is particularly interested in Ancient Philosophy, and much of his research is concerned with what philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle can tell us about the ethical questions we face today. Recently, he's been thinking about the use of aesthetic features in persuasive speech. Sonorous, humorous or rh...

Send us Fan Mail Paula Satne is a Lecturer in Applied Ethics at the IDEA Centre. Her research focuses on theoretical and applied issues related to human evil and the ethics and politics of forgiveness and memory.  Her recent research is on Kantian forgiveness, political forgiveness and public commemoration of politically motivated wrongdoing, punishment, pacifism, and conflict resolution, and our...

Send us Fan Mail Joseph Lacey is Associate Professor of Political Theory at University College Dublin. He is about to embark on a five-year project looking at the moral agency of participants in elections. That's politicians, special advisers, journalists and so on. But it's also you and me: people who engage with political messaging, perhaps take some interest in what's going on be...

Send us Fan Mail Robbie Morgan is a lecturer and consultant here at the IDEA Centre. His research focuses on issues in the philosophy of sex, particularly as this intersects with feminist philosophy. As well as sexualisation, he's currently engaged in research about language change, the metaphysics of touch, conscientious objection in medicine, and the value of consensual sexual activity.   I...

Send us Fan Mail Ruby Hornsby is a PhD student at the IDEA Centre. Her research is about 'artificial friends' - robots and their interactions with humans - and whether these interactions can be part of a good human life. What do we get out of friendship and how much of that is possible when the supposed friend we're talking about is not a person with an inner life of their own, but...

Send us Fan Mail For this episode I spoke to Professor Fiona Woollard. Professor Woollard is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton. She has research interests in normative ethics, applied ethics, epistemically transformative experiences and the philosophy of sex and pregnancy. She has published on topics including the distinction between doing and allowing harm, climate change...

Send us Fan Mail Dr Joe Saunders is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Durham. He primarily works on ethics and agency in Kant and the post-Kantian tradition. He also has interests in the philosophy of love and media ethics. In this episode we talk about how we should behave online. How bad is social media as a forum for discussion, for example of political or social issues? Wh...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode we have special guest Panashe Chinya. Panashe is a medical student at the University of Leeds, who previously intercalated on the MA in Biomedical and Healthcare Ethics at the IDEA Centre. The presentation and subsequent discussion are based on the dissertation that Panashe completed during her MA at IDEA which asks if mandating moral enhancement for health care pr...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, Dr Andrew Kirton talks to Dr Jim Baxter about the issues explored in Jim’s new book, Moral Responsibility and the Psychopath: The Value of Others.   Are psychopaths morally responsible? Should we argue with them? Remonstrate with them, blame them, sometimes even praise them? Is it worth trying to change them, or should we just try to prevent them from causing harm...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, Dr Andrew Kirton talks to Dr Jim Baxter about the issues explored in Jim’s new book, Moral Responsibility and the Psychopath: The Value of Others.   Are psychopaths morally responsible? Should we argue with them? Remonstrate with them, blame them, sometimes even praise them? Is it worth trying to change them, or should we just try to prevent them from causing harm...

Send us Fan Mail This podcast discusses the ethics of the controversial medical condition of Borderline Personality Disorder, examining whether the high prevalence of diagnoses of Borderline Personality Disorder in female patients who have experienced trauma is the result of implicit biases around gender, and whether excessive blame towards patients with Borderline Personality Disorder constitutes...

Send us Fan Mail A short trailer to let you know what Ethics Untangled is all about, including an extract from episode 1. Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds. As well as the podcast, Ethics Untangled is also the name for the long-form online presence of IDEA . Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bluesky.social Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/idea_leeds/ Fa...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, we welcome Dr Andrew Stanners - hospital doctor and healthcare ethics teacher at the IDEA Centre. He is also a trustee for the UK Clinical Ethics Network. This episode is a continuation of our previous discussion about real trolley problems, and we explore two possible solutions to the complexity of decision-making when we have to choose who gets treatment. Andrew...

Send us Fan Mail The IDEA Pod returns as Dr Natasha McKeever, programme director for the online MA Biomedical and Healthcare Ethics , interviews Amaal Maqsood-Shah, an alumnus from our campus MA programme, about her MA dissertation topic – the confidentiality of information about patients’ genetic conditions. Despite guidance permitting clinicians the discretion to breach confidentiality, clinicia...

Send us Fan Mail Our special guest for this episode is Ken Lewchuk, a chartered accountant who worked for Enron before its collapse. Ken's first degree was in theology, he has an MBA from Heriot-Watt University, and he recently completed an MA in applied and professional ethics with the IDEA Centre.  Graham Bex-Priestley interviews Ken about the issue of responsibility for corporate failure....

Send us Fan Mail In this episode we have special guest Matt Murray. Matt is a medical student at the University of Leeds, who previously intercalated on the MA in Biomedical and Healthcare Ethics at the IDEA Centre. The presentation and subsequent discussion are based on the dissertation that Matt completed during his MA at IDEA on the duties and ethics surrounding end of life care for the medical...

Send us Fan Mail What does an ethical police officer look like? How ought we to judge the “Dirty Harry” style cop who gets results by any means? Should police to see themselves as “good guys” out to catch villains? And, must police officers “dirty their hands” in order to be truly ethical? Detective Garda and MA in Applied and Professional Ethics , Thomas O’Connor, offers a unique and compelling p...

Send us Fan Mail ‘Project Prevention’ is a growing organisation in the US that aims to achieve the sterilisation of addicts, and offers monetary incentivisation to do so. In her dissertation, Georgina James engages with the question of whether it is morally permissible to incentivise the sterilisation of addicts, and whether something similar may be introduced to the UK. The talk discusses the con...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, we comment on one of the latest events held at the IDEA Centre, the AI and Philosophy Workshop. Postgraduate Researcher Gabriela Arriagada Bruneau speaks with Zach Gudmunsen, fellow co-organiser of the event and Michael Cannon, co-author of one of the presented papers. This episode covers different talks in the workshop, dividing them into two themes: Theory:  Dr...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, we explore the concept of identity. It’s a buzzword that many businesses and institutions use and present as part of their ethos, but do we really have clarity as to what integrity actually is or what it implies? Dr Jim Baxter (IDEA Centre) and Tracey Groves (Intelligent Ethics) walk us through understanding what integrity is, how it impacts businesses and how the...

Send us Fan Mail Meet special guest Christian Herzog, a researcher at the Institute for Electrical Engineering in Medicine at the University of Lübeck and Head of the Ethical Innovation Hub. Christian recently completed an MA in Applied and Professional Ethics at the IDEA Centre and published two papers based on his research for this course, linked below. Graham Bex-Priestley interviews Christian...

Send us Fan Mail The IDEA Pod returns with special episodes on the ethics of sex work, with particular focus on the impact of Covid-19 on sex workers’ wellbeing and health. These episodes are produced, edited, and presented by IDEA alumna Georgina James.   In this first episode, Georgina speaks with Bea Piper of the English Collective of Prostitutes about the issues faced by sex workers in the UK,...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, medical student and IDEA alumna Georgina returns with guests Jude and Carys who work closely with sex workers in Nottingham.  Jude is the Sexual Health Outreach and Health Promotion team lead at Nottingham University Hospital Trust. Carys is the operations manager for POW Nottingham, a voluntary organisation supporting those in the sex work industry.   In this epi...

Send us Fan Mail IDEA alumna Georgina speaks to Scott A Anderson, Associate Professor of Social and Political Philosophy at the University of British Columbia.  In this episode, Georgina and Scott discuss the philosophical argument that the gender power imbalance between men and women can impact the sexual autonomy of sex workers in cis-hetero sexual transactions, and could have further-reaching i...