Ethics
Inside the metaverse, your emotions and physical responses will be monitored, and AI will use that data to influence you in real time. Is that essentially mind control?
Satanic cultists don’t even believe the Devil exists. Satanism is largely a religion focused on secular humanism and hedonism.
What if your best friend was an informant?
After 10,000 years of civilization, have we figured out what virtue is?
Every Christmas could be the last Christmas.
The “attention economy” corrupts science.
Successful forgers are remembered as great conmen, not artists. This is strange, considering their forgeries fooled even the most seasoned critics.
Synthetic biology has the power to cure and kill. Have we learned from our past mistakes?
Instead of liberation, the sexual revolution has led some people, particularly men, to be addicted to porn.
Literature’s first utopia shows how far we’ve come.
Turning away is a natural response.
Why, exactly, don’t you trust that person’s opinion?
Some animals were even assigned their own lawyers.
The Arabic word fatwa can mean “explanation” or “clarification.”
Be famous within five miles.
We’re still using 800,000 gallons of embalming fluid a year, but burials are becoming far less common.
Why, exactly, should you die for your child?
Uploading your mind is not a pathway to immortality. Instead, it will create a possibly hostile digital doppelgänger.
People tend to underestimate how much a friend they’ve lost contact with would enjoy a simple note saying “hi.”
Patients with amygdala damage rejected the widely accepted answer to the infamous “trolley problem,” saying that it “hurts too much.”
Ideas often taken for granted in the United States and Europe about what it means to be a person are, quite simply, not shared with other cultures.
Is there such a thing as a heroic personality type?
It’s not a huge leap to imagine we could target the biological processes that mediate our behaviours.
More than 20% Americans live in a state with access to a medically assisted death.
In the philosophy of Star Wars, the Sith are evil because they surrender to passion. But is a life of total rationality a “good” life?
Gradualism rejects the idea of a “bright line” in the abortion debate.