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"Rights"
Are Exoskeletons “Ableist?”
By Kyle Munkittrick On January 22, 2012 · Leave a Comment · In Bioethics, Body, Medicine, Prosthetics, Rights
In a word, no.
Over at Cyborgology (a blog I am amazed I didn’t discover sooner, given its sister site is Sociological Images) Jenny Davis attempts to figure out if the assistive devices built by Ekso Bionics are “ableist” or if they represent genuine progress. She makes a pretty good [...]
Esquire has selected Andrew Sullivan as one of their Americans of the Year. I’ll take it a step further and say he is the Greatest Living American.
Why? Here’s why:
I arrived here, and you had people brawling over everything that mattered, and just presuming to do so, honoring no protocol or pecking order, and [...]
Many of us intuitively think so. Jonah Lehrer focuses on one example, prison rape, in his examination of the question, “Is the World Just?” That is one hell of a question for a single blog post.
In his response, he describes what is among one of the most interesting practical ethics tests on the [...]
Imagine the following:
Tomorrow, a bureaucrat in Berlin discovers a massive cache of documents, videos, and photos from a secret Nazi science lab. The lab was charged with the most heinous and unethical of Nazi research programs wherein human test subjects were abused and violated in the most inhuman ways possible. [...]
Why Not Uplift Animals?
By Kyle Munkittrick On July 26, 2011 · Leave a Comment · In Animal, Mind, Personhood, Rights, Uplift
Paul Raven makes a bold case against boosting animal intelligence:
Because they are not us. We are related, certainly, this much is inescapable, but a chimpanzee is not a human being, and to insist that uplift is a moral duty is to enshrine the inferiority-to-us of the great apes, not to sanctify their uniqueness. This [...]
Alyssa Rosenberg highlights an issue I’ve discussed here before: non-humans allow a barrier of safety for our minds to explore controversial or previously unacceptable ideas:
But I wonder if we might have more day-to-day depictions of genuinely working-class and poor characters if those characters weren’t always human. Obviously, the aliens inDistrict 9 are a metaphor [...]
An Australian man who had sex with a sixteen year old and was convicted as a sex offender is being denied the opportunity to use IVF treatment to reproduce. Here is the thing: sex offender laws are wildly disproportionate to the crime committed. Let me be clear: rape and harassment are traumatic and horrific behaviors. [...]
I don’t think there is a direction the future is supposed to go, but I sure enjoy it when it goes the way I hope. A snippet from my post last summer “The Sci-fi Explanation of Why Gay People Must Be Allowed to Marry” in reaction to the ruling on Prop 8:
[...]
Ross Douthat expresses the “right to die” side of the paradox of natural death nicely in his rejoinder to Kevin Drum.
Well, yes: The slippery slope that I discussed in the column doesn’t amount to much if you don’t disapprove at all of people deciding to take their own lives. Absent that disapproval (and an [...]
About
Pop Bioethics, written by Kyle Munkittrick, is an effort to study the ethics of the continuing evolution of the human species via the lens of pop culture and be somewhat entertaining in the process.
Kyle's writing can also be found at Discover's The Crux, Slate's Future Tense, and at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. For questions or comments: comments [at] popbioethics [dot] com
All opinions, ideas, and words either explicit or implicit found within this website are my own and represent no other person, organization, or group.Categories
