Ethics Untangled

Content note: This episode discusses pornography in an academic context, focusing on ethical and philosophical arguments.Feminist critiques of pornography have a long history and take many different forms. One influential line of critique focuses on claims about authenticity and the suggestion that certain forms of representation may be ethically problematic, particularly for women. In response, some producers and commentators have argued for the value of ‘authentic' pornography, appealing to a mixture of ethical and aesthetic considerations and sometimes blurring the distinction between the two.In this episode, Rosa Vince, a philosopher based at IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds, examines these arguments and explains why they find the ethical case for authenticity in pornography unconvincing. The discussion explores questions about representation, discrimination and harm.Some further reading recommended by Rosa:Willis, Ellen. 2014. “Feminism Moralism and Pornography.” In The Essential Ellen Willis, edited by Nona Willis Aronowitz, 94–101. University Of Minnesota Press.Taormino, Tristan. 2013. “Calling the Shots: Feminist Porn in Theory and Practice” in The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure edited by Tristan Taormino, Celine Parreñas Shimizu, Constance Penley, Mireille Miller-Young. The Feminist PressRooster, Hello. 2021. “From Victim to Activist: The Road to Ethical Porn” in We Too: Essays on Sex Work and Survival, edited by Natalie West with Tina Horn. Feminist Press. 148–154.Mac, Juno, Hello Rooster, Misha Mayfair, and Lina Bembe. 2019. “Aesthetics vs Ethics: Expanding Definitions of Feminist Porn.” In A Decriminalised Future: Sex Workers' Festival of Resistance. Recording available at: https://decriminalisedfutures.org/aesthetics-vs-ethics-expanding-definitions-of-feminist-porn Macleod, P J. 2021.“How feminists pick porn: Troubling the link between ‘authenticity' and production ethics” in Sexualities Volume 24, Issue 4.Gallant, Chanelle. 2017. “Why I Started The Feminist Porn Awards 10 Years Ago” Huffpost. Available at: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-i-started-the-feminist-porn-awards-ten-years-ago_b_587559afe4b0f8a725448343Crutcher, Emily E. 2015. ““She's Totally Faking it!”: The Politics of Authentic Female Pleasure in Pornography” in New Views on Pornography: Sexuality, Politics, and the Law ed. Lynn Comella and Shira Tarrant. Praeger. Pp.319-334Berg, Heather. “Porn Work, Feminist Critique, and the Market for Authenticity.” Signs, Spring 2017, Vol. 42, No. 3 (Spring 2017), pp. 669-692Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.socialFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

Lisa Herzog is Professor of Philosophy at the Center for Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. The subject of this conversation is time, not in the abstract but how much of it we have, and what we might choose to do with it. We start by discussing whether people in general are lacking in free time. And then we move on to why it might be important to try to give people more time, not just for their own health and happiness, but also because of the costs to society and democracy of people being too time-poor. At the end, we get onto some specific policy measures that might help.The conversation is based on a chapter of Lisa's latest book, which you can get here. Some links to further reading as mentioned in the conversation:Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life by Theda Skocpol.Anderson, E. (2025). Local Knowledge in Institutional Epistemology1. Australasian Philosophical Review, 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/24740500.2024.2422551Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.socialFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

AI-generated content is a familiar and increasingly prevalent feature of social media. Users post text, video, audio and images which have been created by AI, sometimes being clear that this is what they're doing, sometimes not. This isn't always a problem, but some ways of using AI-generated content do raise significant dangers. So do social media platforms need to have policies in place specifically to deal with this form of content? Jeffrey Howard is professor of political philosophy and public policy at University College London. In a paper co-authored with Sarah Fisher and Beatriz Kira, he argues that policies that target AI-generated content specifically aren't necessary or helpful. It was great to get the chance to talk to him about why he thinks this, and how platforms should moderate this type of content without shutting down valuable free speech.Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.socialFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

Josh Hobbs is back in this episode for his second appearance. Again the subject is political. This time we're discussing whether we should all be activists. More specifically, does the existence of global structural injustice give us a responsibility to respond to those injustices, and should that response take the form of activism? Josh thinks there are reasons to think not everyone could or should be an activist, and introduces some other ways in which people can contribute, including something he calls 'scaffolding activism'.Here's Josh's article on the topic:Between activism and apathy: global structural injustice and ordinary citizensFurther reading:With Power Comes Responsibility: The Politics of Structural Injustice — Maeve McKeownWhat is My Role in Changing the System? A New Model of Responsibility for Structural InjusticeThe Politics of Politeness: Citizenship, Civility, and the Democracy of Everyday Life | Oxford AcademicEthics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.socialFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

Imagine this: You're walking past a shallow pond and spot a toddler thrashing around in the water, in obvious danger of drowning. You look around for her parents, but nobody is there. You're the only person who can save her and you must act immediately. But as you approach the pond you remember that you're wearing your most expensive shoes. Wading into the water will ruin them - and might make you late for a meeting. Should you let the child drown? The philosopher Peter Singer published this thought experiment in 1972, arguing that allowing people in the developing world to die, when we could easily help them by giving money to charity, is as morally reprehensible as saving our shoes instead of the drowning child. Can this possibly be true? In Death in a Shallow Pond, David Edmonds tells the remarkable story of Singer and his controversial idea, tracing how it radically changed the way many think about poverty - but also how it has provoked scathing criticisms.David Edmonds is a brilliant philosophical and biographical writer, not to mention an OG philosophy podcaster - if you haven't checked out any of Philosophy Bites's nearly 400 episodes then you definitely should - and ex-BBC broadcaster. His latest book is about the fascinating history of a philosophical thought experiment, from its origins in the work of Peter Singer through its influence on the Effective Altruism movement. In this conversation we focus on some of the philosophical questions surrounding this thought experiment: is it, as Singer claims, analogous to our own position with regard to distant others, and does it have the practical implications that he and the Effective Altruists have taken it to have?Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.socialFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

A really interesting conversation with Simon Meisch this week. Simon is a Senior Lecturer for Applied Ethics at the Ethics Centre of the University of Tubingen, and until recently was also a visiting scholar here at IDEA. It's an unusual episode of the podcast in that we aren't talking about a specific ethical issue. Instead, we talk about a particular way of highlighting ethical issues and encouraging discussion of them. That's through engaging with serial narratives, including comic books and TV series. We focused on one particular comic book series, which has been adapted for TV, which is Heartstopper. Aside from enlightening me about that series, Simon makes a convincing case that this is a good way to get at a range of ethical issues, in a way that is complex, subtle and grounded in recognisable situations.Here's the Heartstopper webcomic.Here's Simon's webpage.And here are some other relevant links recommended by Simon:Ben Argon: Philosophy ComicsTim Smyth: Teaching with Comics and Graphic NovelsScott McCloud: Understanding ComicsAaron Meskin: The Philosophy of ComicsAaron Meskin: Teaching & Learning Guide for: The Philosophy of ComicsEthics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.socialFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

In this episode I talk to Professor Catriona McKinnon, a political philosopher based at the University of Exeter. The topic is the various environmental crises facing humanity today. Obviously lots to discuss there, but Catriona wants to highlight one issue in particular, which is the way one generation can, with or without knowing it, conceal information from future generations about the depth and nature of a crisis. This an issue of intergenerational justice, and its one that Catriona thinks deserves more attention.Some links:RENEW: Renewing biodiversity through a people-in-nature approach https://renewbiodiversity.org.uk/Catriona's University of Exeter site: https://experts.exeter.ac.uk/32795-Catriona-McKinnonCatriona's book Climate Change and Political Theory https://www.waterstones.com/book/climate-change-and-political-theory/catriona-mckinnon/9781509521661A lecture by Catriona on postericide Endangering Humanity: An International Crime: https://youtu.be/htQwrrURVOQ?si=DA17u9hBR6qn-iQm. Her book on postericide will be published in 2026 by MIT Press.Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.socialFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

For the last year and a half, Jim Baxter and the consulting team at IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds, have been working with the Law Society of England and Wales on a project looking at the ethics of in-house law. That project has involved talking to lots of lawyers who are both passionate and insightful about the job and the ethical challenges it presents. None more so than Sharon Bridglalsingh, Director of Law and Governance at Milton Keynes City Council. Sharon was kind enough to come on the podcast and share some of her insights in this wide-ranging conversation. The In-House Ethics Framework which IDEA produced for the Law Society is here: https://www.lawsociety.org.uk/topics/in-house/in-house-ethics-framework/.Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.socialFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

Cancelling and cancel culture are terms that we hear a lot these days, and it's one of the many areas where there seems to be more heat than light. The phenomenon of cancelling has become a front in the so-called culture wars, with one side claiming it's a healthy form of protest, or simply confronting people with the consequences of their actions, while the other side sees it as persecution by an unaccountable mob. Philosophers Alfred Archer (Tilburg University) and Georgie Mills (TU Delft) have tried to disentangle some of the different actions that sometimes get called cancelling, and to help us better understand the ethics of this complex phenomenon.Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.socialFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

Words such as 'woke', 'emotional labour' and 'gaslighting' get bandied around a lot, especially in online discourse. And as they get bandied around, their meaning can change over time. Of course, changes in the meaning of words are natural, inevitable and, usually harmless. However, Robbie Morgan, back for his record-setting third appearance on Ethics Untangled, thinks we should be worried about these changes in meaning, at least sometimes. This isn't just pedantry - it's a concern about the way changes in meaning can rob us of the means to express important concepts, and also about the way these moves can serve political motivations in an illegitimate way.Here's Robbie's paper on the topic:Morgan, Robert (2025), "Hermeneutical Disarmament", ​The Philosophical Quarterly 75(3): 1071-1093.Here's Robbie's website.And here are the other sources we discuss in the episode:Beck, Julie (2018), “The Concept Creep of ‘Emotional Labor'”, The Atlantic.Bloomfield, Leonard (1983), Introduction to the Study of Language. Amsterdam/Philidelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, p.240.Brownmiller, Susan (1990), In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution. 1st ed. New York: Dial Press, pp.182, 280-285.Déjacque, Joseph, Hartman, Janine C., and Lause, Mark A. (2012), In the Sphere of Humanity: Joseph Déjacque, Slavery, and the Struggle for Freedom. Cincinnati, Ohio: University of Cincinnati Libraries.Fricker, Miranda (2007), Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Hamilton, Patrick (1939, Gas Light. 1st ed. London: Constable.Hochschild, Arlie Russell (2012), The Managed Heart. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. London: University of California Press.Lead Belly (2015) “Scottsboro Boys.” In Lead Belly: The Smithsonian Folkways Collection, 4:26. MacGuill, Dan (2021), “Did People Refer to Gaslighting During the Era of 'I Love Lucy'?”, Snopes. Norri, Juhani (1998), “Gender-Referential Shifts in English.” English Studies 79 (3): 270–87, p.281.Rothbard, Murray N. (2007), The Betrayal of the American Right. Edited by Thomas E. Woods Jr. Auburn, Alabama: Ludwig von Mises Institute, p.83.Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.socialFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

Epistemic injustice is a broad category of injustice relating to knowledge. It can involve people from marginalised or oppressed groups being excluded, silenced, misrepresented, or not taken seriously — in conversations, education, or professional settings — because of their membership to that group.In academic contexts, this kind of injustice can distort entire fields of study. Orla Carlin, a scholar at the University of Leeds, explores how this plays out in relation to class.She argues that the literature on epistemic injustice doesn't adequately account for epistemic injustice that occurs in virtue of class. One reason, she suggests, is the underrepresentation of working-class voices in academia. Her research asks why this underrepresentation exists and points to deeper, systemic forms of epistemic injustice that affect working class people more broadly, perpetuating a vicious circle in which working class people find it more difficult to enter fields which are dominated by middle class voices, and thereby to shape those fields.Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.socialFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

Gossip is an ethically interesting phenomenon when humans do it. It creates a bond between the people doing the gossiping, but it does so by implicitly excluding the person being gossiped about, and can cause harm, especially when the gossip is malicious, or simply isn't true. What I hadn't realised until I spoke to Lucy Osler, a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Exeter, is that large language models like ChatGPT and Claude can gossip, or at least they can do something which looks an awful lot like gossip. In this conversation with Lucy, we got into what might be happening, how it might harm people, and what we might be able to do about it.Following my conversation with Lucy, I had an interesting conversation with ChatGPT about the same topic.In the episode we discuss Kevin Roose's interaction with the chatbot Sydney. Here's Roose's own article about that experience:Why a Conversation With Bing's Chatbot Left Me Deeply Unsettled - The New York TimesAnd here are some academic articles that might be of interest:Fisher, S. A. (2024). Large language models and their big bullshit potential. Ethics and Information Technology, 26(4), 67.Hicks, M. T., Humphries, J., & Slater, J. (2024). ChatGPT is bullshit. Ethics and Information Technology, 26(2), 1-10.Alfano, M., & Robinson, B. (2017). Gossip as a burdened virtue. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 20, 473-487.Adkins, K. (2017). Gossip, epistemology and power. Springer International Publishing AG, Gewerbestrasse, 11, 6330.Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.socialFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

Adam Byfield is a Principal Technical Assurance Specialist at NHS England. After his previous appearance on the podcast, discussing providing ethical assurance for AI applications in healthcare, we were keen to get him back to dive into some more specific issues. We chose bias and accessibility, two related issues that are clearly central for anyone concerned with AI, including in healthcare applications. We talked about different forms of bias, how bias can affect accessibility and what forms of bias, if any, might be acceptable.Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.socialFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

Professor Lisa Bortolotti is a philosopher at the University of Birmingham, who has been working on a fascinating interdisciplinary project looking at what happens when young people experiencing mental health difficulties talk to clinicians about those difficulties. The project has involved closely examining hours of audio and video material of these encounters, as well as talking to the young people themselves, in the hope of gaining insights which can help clinicians improve their practice. Emerging from the work has been a focus on agency and the agential stance. We discuss what that means and why it's important, drawing on some examples from the project.Links to further reading:Agency project page on the McPin Foundation website: https://mcpin.org/project/agency/ (has a lot of open access resources)Three relevant open access papers:L Bortolotti (2025). Agential Epistemic Injustice in Clinical Interactions Is Bad for Medicine. Philosophy of Medicine 6 (1), 1-19.C Bergen, L Bortolotti, R Temple, et al. (2023). Implying implausibility and undermining versus accepting peoples' experiences of suicidal ideation and self-harm in Emergency Department psychosocial assessments. Frontiers in Psychiatry 14.C Bergen, L Bortolotti, K Tallent, et al. (2022). Communication in youth  health clinical encounters: Introducing the agential stance. Theory & Psychology 32 (5), 667-690.Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.socialFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

Tim Watkin is a journalist and media manager. He works as executive editor for audio at Radio New Zealand, but is currently on sabbatical at the University of Glasgow, studying how to rebuild trust in journalism as part of a project on Epistemic Autonomy. In this interview we discuss the nature of trust, why it's important, why journalists seem to be losing the public's trust, whose fault this is, and what might be done about it.Book your place at our public event with Gavin Esler, "Dead Cats, Strategic Lying and Truth Decay", here. Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.socialFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

Joe Fogarty has spent over 30 years working in national security and law enforcement, in the UK and elsewhere. He's currently working on cyber-security risks and organised crime for the UK's central government, as the Head of the Government's Cyber Resilience Centre. Recently, he's been looking at security and law enforcement through a philosophical lens, through studying for a Masters in Applied and Professional Ethics at IDEA, the Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds. One of the big questions for these areas of work is how to balance privacy concerns against the public good, and we discuss that question, among others, in this interview.Some extra reading suggested by Joe:Omand, D. 2023. Examining the Ethics of Spying: A Practitioner's View. Criminal Law and Philosophy. https://doi.org/ 10.1007/s11572-023-09704-5). [Online].  Available from https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11572-023-09704-5.Omand, D. and Phythian, M. 2023. Principled Spying - The Ethics of Secret Intelligence. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Available at https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/principled-spying-the-ethics-of-secret-intelligence-david-omand/3583190.Fabre, C. 2022. Spying Through A Glass Darkly. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Available at https://www.amazon.co.uk/Spying-Through-Glass-Darkly-Counter-Intelligence/dp/019891217X.And if listeners are interested in a view from the top of the domestic national security establishment, there is an excellent Reith Lecture by former Head of MI5 Eliza Manningham-Buller here, which echoes some of the themes in the podcast: BBC Radio 4. 2011. Eliza Manningham-Buller - Securing Freedom: Security. [Online]. Available from http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rmhttp/radio4/transcripts/2011_reith4.pdf. Book your place at our public event with Gavin Esler, "Dead Cats, Strategic Lying and Truth Decay", here. Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.socialFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

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) citizens in a single community." One might think it's an idea that's in retreat, at least in some countries, today. That's one of the issues we discuss, as well as whether there's a crisis of motivation of cosmopolitanism, what that means and what one might do about it.Book your place at our public event with Gavin Esler, "Dead Cats, Strategic Lying and Truth Decay", here. Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.socialFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

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 patient's preferences would be concerning their healthcare, in situations where they're incapacitated and unable to tell us what their preferences are. Ethicists have raised concerns about these systems, and these concerns are worth taking seriously, but Dr Nick Makins, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Leeds, thinks they can be answered, and that the use of these systems can be justified, at least in some circumstances.Book your place at our public event with Gavin Esler, "Dead Cats, Strategic Lying and Truth Decay", here. Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.socialFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

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 form of intimacy with anyone, even with mutual friends. They also reject any hierarchy of relationships - for example having a central relationship with one person whose agreement is needed for you to have relationships with other people. For relationship anarchists, all relationships should be approached individually and no relationship should involve placing restrictions on any partner. Natasha McKeever, and Luke Brunning, all based at the IDEA Centre, have been looking critically at the ethics of relationship anarchy, and I spoke to all three of them in a wide-ranging conversation about this fascinating topic. Some links to further reading:A 'Short Instructional Manifesto for Relationship Anarchy'An article by Aleksander Sørlie, Ole Martin Moen on The Ethics of Relationship Anarchy.A book about relationship anarchy by by Juan-Carlos Pérez-Cortés.Book your place at our public event with Gavin Esler, "Dead Cats, Strategic Lying and Truth Decay", here. Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.socialFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

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 political directions, including conservative, transgender and feminist perspectives. In this conversation with Simon Kirchin, who is Professor of Applied Ethics, Director of IDEA, The Ethics Centre and someone who has experience as a drag performer himself, we mainly focused on the feminist critique. The problem is that drag typically involves men (a relatively advantaged group) imitating women (a relatively disadvantaged group), in a way that plays on often offensive stereotypes about women, for entertainment. Described in that way, it seems uncomfortably similar to blackface, a form of entertainment which follows a very similar dynamic, at least superficially, on racial lines. Professor Kirchin thinks a moral difference between these two activities can be identified, though, and in the conversation he explains why.You can read Simon's article on the topic here.Book your place at our public event with Gavin Esler, "Dead Cats, Strategic Lying and Truth Decay", here. Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Twitter/X: @EthicsUntangledBluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.socialFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

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 we tell the good from the bad in a way that isn't just politically partisan? Carl Fox, Lecturer in Applied Ethics at the IDEA Centre, thinks we can, and that we should treat different forms of disruptive speech differently. Here is Carl's paper on the subject in the Journal of Social Philosophy.Carl co-edited The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Media Ethics with fellow Ethics Untangled alumnus Joe Saunders, which contains a chapter by Carl on satire and stability. For further reading, there's Amy Olberding's book on manners and civility.In the interview, Carl mentions a paper on lying by Don Fallis. That's here:Fallis, D. 2009. “What Is Lying?” Journal of Philosophy 106(1): 29–56. And then there's the classic text on freedom and its limits, John Stuart Mill's On Liberty: Mill, J. S. 1974. On Liberty. London: Penguin.Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Twitter/X: @EthicsUntangledBluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.socialFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

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 people, who go uncredited and are unlikely to have given consent to their work being used in this way. Focusing on AI art and the work of artists on which it is built, Trystan Goetze, Senior Lecturer in the Ethics of Engineering at Cornell University, argues that these criticisms are well founded. In Dr Goetze's view, these systems are guilty of stealing artists' labour.Here's a link to Dr Goetze's paper on the topic.Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Twitter/X: @EthicsUntangledBluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.socialFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

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, however, a significant digital divide. Not everyone has easy access, or any access to the internet, and its systemic importance in all of these areas means this is more of a disadvantage than it's ever been. Merten Reglitz, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham, thinks it's time we recognised internet access not just as a significant good, but as a human right. Here is Merten's recently published book on the topic, an overview of it and an article that sets out the book's main defence of the idea of a new right.An article and another article opposing the idea that internet is a human right.The latest figures on global connectivity from the ITU.Freedom House's ‘Freedom of the Net' reports on internet freedom.Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Twitter/X: @EthicsUntangledBluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.socialFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

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 idea of harm. When do consequences caused or made worse by work become harm? What are an organisation's responsibilities regarding harm? And what are the responsibilities of health and safety professionals related to harm and doing good? Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Twitter/X: @EthicsUntangledBluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.socialFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

*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 multiple possible explanations, some of which fit better with the evidence than others. Natasha McKeever has been examining this evidence and trying to come up with a definitive answer, to an explanatory question which also intersects with some ethical questions. For example, would the world be a better place if sex work was less gendered, or if it didn't exist at all?Natasha's paper on this topic has been published (open access) here:https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/hypatia/article/is-sex-work-inherently-gendered/3EE28F1EAC9594C89B21F8E47C42D106 Here's some further reading suggested by Natasha:Kingston, Sarah, Natalie Hammond, and Scarlett Redman. 2020. Women Who Buy Sex: Converging Sexualities? London: Routledge.Mac, Juno, and Molly Smith. 2018. Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers' Rights. London: Verso. Moen OM ‘Is prostitution harmful?' Journal of Medical Ethics 2014;40:73-81. Sanders, Teela, Jane Scoular, Rosie Campbell, Jane Pitcher, and Stewart Cunningham. 2018. ‘Beyond the Gaze: Summary Briefing on Internet Sex Work'. Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Twitter/X: @EthicsUntangledBluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.socialFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

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 they spread and how to treat them. In the UK, there is plenty of guidance for GPs about what information they can store, who should have access to it, and when. In fact, according to Jon Fistein, a doctor himself as well as an academic looking at the ethics of health data, there's too much guidance, it's too complex, and it's not always consistent. As a result, most GPs don't really understand what the requirements are, let alone patients. We talked about what can be done about this, and why the traditional idea of patient information being kept 'in the strictest confidence' isn't really going to cut it in today's data-driven healthcare context.Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Twitter/X: @EthicsUntangledBluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.socialFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

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 ethical implications. For instance, since assault is defined as unwanted touching, we need to know whether touching has taken place before we can decide whether an assault has taken place.  Then there may be cases where, if touching has taken place, it's taken place through something, and these cases may be tricky to adjudicate. Anyway, in this conversation Robbie and Will introduce some possibilities for what touching through is, before arguing for their preferred explanation. You can decide if you think they've put their finger on it. So to speak.Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Twitter/X: @EthicsUntangledBluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.socialFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

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 should be drawn. There are a number of questions about the rationality of conspiracy theories - whether we should reject them wholesale as irrational, for example, or consider each one on its merits. But there are also some interesting ethical questions, and philosophers, including Patrick Stokes, associate professor of philosophy at Deakin University in Melbourne, have been increasingly turning their attention to these questions. What are the moral costs of accusing someone of being a conspiracy theorist? But also, what are the moral costs of accusing someone of being a conspirator? In what ways might conspiracy theorising be corrosive of trust? And how should we respond to people we know who believe conspiracy theories? I really enjoyed this conversation with Professor Stokes, on the line from Melbourne, on what I think is a really important topic which needs some philosophical attention.Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Twitter/X: @EthicsUntangledBluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.socialFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

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 someone who is at the sharp end of trying to address these issues. How do you test AI systems in a healthcare setting? What are you looking for? What kind of assurance can you provide to patients and the public? I'm very grateful to Adam for taking the time to talk to me about this really important topic.Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Twitter/X: @EthicsUntangledBluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.socialFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

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 a relatively new type of technology, but one that is becoming more advanced. Clearly, it's a technology that opens up interesting new possibilities! But Robbie Arrell, Lecturer in Applied Ethics at the IDEA Centre, thinks it also raises some serious concerns, not all of which have yet been fully understood. In this conversation, Robbie outlines some of these worries, and begins to consider how we might address them.Some further reading:Robbie's chapter entitled "Sex and Emergent Technologies" in the Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Sex and Sexuality in which he discusses teledildonics: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003286523-49/sex-emergent-technologies-robbie-arrell.Robert Sparrow and Lauren Karas's paper "Teledildonics and Rape by Deception" that Robbie makes reference to in the podcast: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17579961.2020.1727097Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Twitter/X: @EthicsUntangledBluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.socialFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

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 lawyers. In this conversation we discussed the idea of 'cause lawyering'. Cause lawyers are lawyers who practice law primarily because of their moral, political or ideological commitments. An example of someone who has arguably been a cause lawyer is the UK's new Prime Minister Kier Starmer, whose previous career as a human rights lawyer appears to have been motivated at least partly by some broader moral commitments, including opposition to the death penalty for example. It's interesting to consider how this outlook complicates the ethical framework under which lawyers operate, which traditionally balances duties to the client with duties to the court, and to the rule of law.Alex has published an article on the same topic in the Journal of International  Criminal Justice, which can be accessed here:He also recommended this article by Anna-Maria Marshall and Daniel Crocker Hale.Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Twitter/X: @EthicsUntangledBluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.socialFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

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 of theoretical questions, which can be summarised as questions about what gender actually is. Graham Bex-Priestley, a Lecturer at the IDEA Centre, has a novel approach to these questions. He suggests that we should think of someone's gender as being something like their name. In this interview, he explains why.Graham's article on this topic is here:Bex-Priestley, Graham. “Gender as Name.” Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 23, no. 2 (November 2022): 189–213.And here are some articles defending the other views mentioned in the conversation:Biological view: Byrne, Alex. “Are Women Adult Human Females?” Philosophical Studies 177, no. 12 (December 2020): 3783–803.Family resemblance view: Heyes, Cressida. Line Drawings: Defining Women through Feminist Practice. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000.Social position via perceived reproductive role view: Haslanger, Sally. Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.Social constraints and enablements view: Ásta. Categories We Live By: The Construction of Sex, Gender, Race, and Other Social Categories. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.Critical gender view: Dembroff, Robin. “Beyond Binary: Genderqueer as Critical Gender Kind.” Philosophers' Imprint 20, no. 9 (April 2020): 1–31. Note the “critical gender” view is about rejecting and destabilising dominant gender ideology and is not to be confused with the “gender critical” movement, which accepts the biological view.Existential self-identity view: Bettcher, Talia Mae. “Trans Identities and First-Person Authority.” In You've Changed: Sex Reassignment and Personal Identity, edited by Laurie Shrage, 98–120. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.Pluralist view: Jenkins, Katharine. Ontology and Oppression: Race, Gender, and Social Reality. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023. See also Cull, Matthew J. What Gender Should Be. London: Bloomsbury, 2024.Performative view: Judith Butler's early books (Gender Trouble, Bodies That Matter) are the classics, but they can be difficult. In contrast, Butler's latest book is written for a public audience: Butler, Judith. Who's Afraid of Gender? Allen Lane, 2024 (many of the topics in this book are discussed in their Cambridge public lecture of the same title).Ethics Untangled is produced by the IDEA Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Twitter: @EthicsUntangledFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

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 resulting from those decisions.At the end of this conversation, we explored some practical questions related to Chris's day job, about what trust implies for business and the professions and in the digital realm, but in order to get there we first got stuck into the deeper question of what trust means…Here's a list of papers and authors mentioned by Chris in the discussion:Baier, A. “Trust and Antitrust.” Ethics 96, no. 2 (1986): 231–60. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2381376. Hawley, K. “Trust, Distrust and Commitment.” Noûs 48, no. 1 (2014): 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1111/nous.12000.Holton, R. “Deciding to Trust, Coming to Believe.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 72, no. 1 (March 1994): 63–76. https://doi.org/10.1080/00048409412345881. Kirton, A. (2020). Matters of Trust as Matters of Attachment Security. International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 28(5), 583–602. https://doi.org/10.1080/09672559.2020.1802971.The most recent Edelman Trust Barometer is here:https://www.edelman.com/sites/g/files/aatuss191/files/2024-02/2024%20Edelman%20Trust%20Barometer%20Global%20Report_FINAL.pdf Ethics Untangled is produced by the IDEA Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Twitter: @EthicsUntangledFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

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 of issues and bring about political change, often achieving things that people with more formal power cannot or do not. But their existence also raises some ethical questions. Do they need to be authorised? Can they be held accountable? What if the things they say diverge from the views of the people they represent?Professor Salkin's book on this subject, Speaking for Others: The Ethics of Informal Political Representation, was released by Harvard University Press on July 9th.Relevant reading:Alcoff, L. (1991). The Problem of Speaking for Others. Cultural Critique, 20, 5–32.Chapman, E.B. (2022). Election Day: How We Vote and What It Means for Democracy. Princeton University Press.Du Bois, W.E.B. (1997). “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others” in The Souls of Black Folk, ed. David W. Blight and Robert Gooding-Williams, 62–72. Bedford Books.Jagmohan, D. (forthcoming). Dark Virtues: Booker T. Washington's Tragic Realism. Princeton University Press.King, M.L., Jr. (2010) Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story. Beacon Press.Mansbridge, J.J. (1983) Beyond Adversary Democracy. University of Chicago Press.Montanaro, L. (2017). Who Elected Oxfam?: A Democratic Defense of Self-Appointed Representatives. Cambridge University Press.Pitkin, H. (1967). The Concept of Representation. University of Los Angeles Press.Rehfeld, A. (2006). Towards a General Theory of Political Representation. Journal of Politics 68, no. 1: 1–21.Saward, M. (2010). The Representative Claim. Oxford University Press.Washington, B.T. “The Standard Printed Version of the Atlanta Exposition Address,” in The Souls of Black Folk: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Terri Hume Oliver, 167–170. W. W. Norton.Ethics Untangled is produced by the IDEA Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Twitter: @EthicsUntangledFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

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 Director overseeing free speech at the Office for Students, informally known as the 'Free Speech Tsar'. Free speech is one of several fronts in the so-called culture wars. Ahmed has been at great pains to say that his office, and he, will be politically neutral. The idea is to protect the right of academics to express their views, wherever on the political spectrum those views fall. But is there a role for legitimate gatekeeping of academic speaking opportunities? And is there a principled way of making decisions about when, if ever, academics should be prevented from speaking on the grounds that what they say might be harmful? Gerald Lang, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Leeds, has been trying to dig under the headlines to get at the ethical concerns underlying this debate.You can read Gerald Lang's blog on this topic, and a reply to it by the philosopher Robert Simpson, here:https://peasoupblog.com/2023/11/soup-of-the-day-free-speech-and-academic-freedom-with-contributions-from-gerald-lang-and-robert-simpson/You can find out more about the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act here:https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2023/16You can read Arif Ahmed's first speech as Director for Freedom of Speech and Academic Freedom at the Office for Students, or 'Free Speech Tsar', here: https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/news-blog-and-events/press-and-media/transcript-of-arif-ahmeds-speech-at-kings-college-london/Ethics Untangled is produced by the IDEA Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Twitter: @EthicsUntangledFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

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, and India. He's interested in problems of good and evil, violence and nonviolence, philosophy of war and peace, and ethics.In 2021, in the midst of very difficult personal circumstances and a global pandemic, Predrag set to work on a book called The Meaning of Life: a Quick Immersion. It's a great book: very clear, heartfelt, personal and full of insights. I hugely enjoyed reading it, and enjoyed even more the opportunity to talk to Predrag about it.You can find out more about Predrag here:https://www.holycross.edu/academics/programs/philosophy/faculty/predrag-cicovackiA few places you can buy The Meaning of Life: A Quick Immersion:https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-meaning-of-life-a-quick-immersion-predrag-cicovacki/17413009?ean=9781949845280https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/THE-MEANING-OF-LIFE-A-Quick-Immersion-by-Cicovacki-Predrag/9781949845280https://www.amazon.co.uk/MEANING-LIFE-Quick-Immersion-Immersions/dp/1949845281I asked Predrag to recommend some further reading and, in line with the general vibe of this episode, he suggested that you might like to reconnect with a book that meant a lot to you in childhood or adolescence. For Predrag, it's The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse. The first one that came to mind for me was The Old Man and The Sea by Ernest Hemingway. What about you?Ethics Untangled is produced by the IDEA Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Twitter: @EthicsUntangledFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

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, sexism, and ableism aren't just bugs in mostly functional machinery—what if they're coded into the system itself? It's a great read, full of eye-opening examples and insights, from a writer with the technical and ethical expertise to get to the heart of what is clearly a very significant challenge for society. We were only able to scratch the surface in this short conversation, but it's changed my thinking about technology ethics, and I was very grateful to Professor Broussard for taking the time to talk to us.You can find out more about Professor Broussard here:https://meredithbroussard.com/Places you can buy More Than  a Glitch include the following:https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/More-Than-a-Glitch-by-Meredith-Broussard/9780262548328https://www.amazon.co.uk/More-Than-Glitch-Confronting-Ability/dp/0262047659Ethics Untangled is produced by the IDEA Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Twitter: @EthicsUntangledFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

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 directed duties, the justifications for and constraints on harming, the nature and scope of duties to rescue, and just war theory. Here's Joe:https://ahc.leeds.ac.uk/philosophy/staff/4794/dr-joseph-bowenhttps://joseph-bowen.weebly.com/He's written about whether the dead have rights in this paper:Bowen, J. 2022.  ‘The Interest Theory of Rights at the Margins: Posthumous Rights', Without Trimmings: The Legal, Moral, and Political Philosophy of Matthew Kramer​, Visa Kurki & Mark McBride (eds), (Oxford: Oxford University Press).And here are some other readings which might be of interest:Jeff McMahan, ‘Death and the Value of Life' Ethics 99, 1 (1998), pp. 32-61.Cécile Fabre, ‘Posthumous Rights', in Matthew H. Kramer, and others (eds), The Legacy of H.L.A. Hart: Legal, Political, and Moral Philosophy (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2008).David Boonin, Dead Wrong: The Ethics of Posthumous Harm (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2019).Ben Bradley, Well-Being and Death (New York; Oxford University Press, 2009).Ethics Untangled is produced by the IDEA Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Twitter: @EthicsUntangledFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

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 York Times' list of the best books of poetry published in 2015. He's also a literary critic, and in this interview he illustrates his ideas with examples from films and literature, as well as real life.You can find out more about Troy's work - the philosophy, the poetry and the literary criticism - here:https://www.troyjollimore.com/There's a list of his philosophical papers here, including things he's written about films including Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Vertigo and The Big Lebowski, all of which are referred to in the episode:https://www.troyjollimore.com/philosophy-papersYou can read the Song of Solomon (King James version) here: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Song%20of%20Solomon%201&version=KJV...and you can listen to 'Endless Love' by Lionel Richie and Diana Ross here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Bwwo7ctG10Ethics Untangled is produced by the IDEA Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Twitter: @EthicsUntangledFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

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 guest Jamie Dow.Munamato's research highlights the way Africans have been subjected to epistemic injustice in the debate around environmental ethics and the distribution of environmental benefits and burdens. That's to say, African voices are often ignored, misinterpreted or not taken seriously. This injustice extends to the theoretical frameworks which are used to conceptualise environmental ethics, and towards the end of the interview, Munamato introduces unhu/ubuntu as an alternative ethical framework which promises to enrich our understanding of the ethical terrain in which environmental responsibilities are grounded.Ethics Untangled is produced by the IDEA Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Twitter: @EthicsUntangledFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

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 about dirty hands has focused on the person whose hands are dirty: have they acted wrongly, are they blameworthy, how should we respond to them? Christina Nick, a philosopher based at the IDEA Centre, is more interested in the victims of dirty-handed politicians. These victims may have been subjected to quite profound harms as a result of the actions of politicians who were trying to avoid some even worse harm. What does it look like to treat these victims justly? Specifically, are they owed reparations? And if so, what form should these reparations take, and should these reparations be made by, or on behalf of, the politicians who made the decision?Christina Nick is a Lecturer in Applied Ethics atthe IDEA Centre at the University of Leeds. Her PhD thesis “The Problem of Democratic Dirty Hands” examined how we should understand the occurence of moral conflict for public office holders and how we ought to ascribe moral responsibility for the outcomes of such actions in modern democracies.  Here's an article about the Claudy bombing on the BBC website:https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-62332152...and the Police Ombudsman's report into the bombing:https://www.policeombudsman.org/Investigation-Reports/Historical-Reports/Police-Ombudsman-s-Claudy-reportHere's an introduction to the philosophical problem of dirty hands in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dirty-hands/Ethics Untangled is produced by the IDEA Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Twitter: @EthicsUntangledFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

A special episode from the Leeds Love Month live talks series, featuring a Q&A session with Kate Lister and Pilar Lopez Cantero.Ethics Untangled is produced by the IDEA Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Twitter: @EthicsUntangledFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

A special episode from the Leeds Love Month live talks series, featuring Pilar Lopez Cantero talking about experiences of breakup and how to move on well.https://www.tilburguniversity.edu/staff/p-lopezcanteroEthics Untangled is produced by the IDEA Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Twitter: @EthicsUntangledFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

A special episode from the Leeds Love Month live talks series, featuring Kate Lister talking about whether we evolved to be monogamous.https://leedstrinity.academia.edu/KateListerEthics Untangled is produced by the IDEA Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Twitter: @EthicsUntangledFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

A special episode from the Leeds Love Month live talks series, featuring a Q&A session with Brian Earp and Robbie Arrell.Ethics Untangled is produced by the IDEA Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Twitter: @EthicsUntangledFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

A special episode from the Leeds Love Month live talks series, featuring Dr Robbie Arrell on consent issues raised by teledildonic technology.https://ahc.leeds.ac.uk/ethics/staff/2728/robbie-arrellEthics Untangled is produced by the IDEA Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Twitter: @EthicsUntangledFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

A special episode from the Leeds Love Month live talks series, featuring Dr Brian Earp on the ethics of psychedelically-assisted relationship therapy.https://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/people/brian-d.-earpEthics Untangled is produced by the IDEA Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Twitter: @EthicsUntangledFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

A special episode from the Leeds Love Month live talks series, featuring a Q&A with MM McCabe and Troy Jollimore.Ethics Untangled is produced by the IDEA Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Twitter: @EthicsUntangledFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

A special episode from the Leeds Love Month live talks series, featuring Professor MM McCabe on love and desire in Plato's symposium.https://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/mm-mccabeEthics Untangled is produced by the IDEA Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Twitter: @EthicsUntangledFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

A special episode from the Leeds Love Month live talks series, featuring Troy Jollimore on whether we love for reasons.https://www.troyjollimore.com/Ethics Untangled is produced by the IDEA Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Twitter: @EthicsUntangledFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

A special episode from the Leeds Love Month live talks series, featuring a Q&A session with Finn MacKay and Tom O'Shea.Ethics Untangled is produced by the IDEA Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Twitter: @EthicsUntangledFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/