02/05/2021
Ethics of the GameStop Short Squeeze
By Doug McConnell Recently a large, loosely coordinated group of individual ‘retail investors’ have been buying up stocks that certain hedge funds had bet against (i.e. ‘shorted’). In doing so, the retail investors have driven up the price of those stocks. This has caused hedge funds that shorted the stock to lose billions of dollars […]
By Doug McConnell A recent BBC news story has drawn attention to the fact that there isn’t a word for “dementia” in many South Asian languages and some South Asian people living in the UK still use the stigmatising Punjabi word “pagal”, meaning “crazy” or “mad”. The news story implicitly assumes that the word […]
By Doug McConnell and Dominic Wilkinson Post originally appeared on the Journal of Medical Ethics Blog While the general public enjoy the relative safety of social distancing, key workers are at a higher risk of both contracting COVID-19 and transmitting it to their families. This is especially the case for ‘frontline’ workers who are […]
By Doug McConnell Recently many of the staff at an aged-care home in Sydney, Australia called in sick the day after the report of a CoVid-19 outbreak at that facility.1 Upon investigation of these absences, one of the reasons the workers gave was that they were concerned about protecting their own families. They didn’t want […]
Written by Doug McConnell Everywhere we look environmentalists are being exposed as hypocrites. But is this relevant to the arguments these environmentalists are making and, if not, how can we improve the quality of public debate on environmental issues? In August, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle used 4 private jet flights over 11 days while […]
By Doug McConnell Some argue that good medicine depends on physicians having a wide discretionary space in which they can act on their consciences (Sulmasy, 2017). Interestingly, those who are against conscientious objection in medicine make the exact opposite claim – giving physicians the freedom to act on their consciences will undermine good medicine. […]
By Doug McConnell It looks as if Isreal Folau will lose his job as a professional rugby player for expressing his apparently genuine religious belief that drunks, homosexuals, adulterers, liars, fornicators, thieves, atheists, and idolators are all going to hell. Morgan Begg, a research fellow at the Australian conservative think-tank, the Institute of Public Affairs, […]
By Doug McConnell Chandra Sripada (2016) has recently proposed a conative self-expression account of moral responsibility which claims that we are responsible for actions motivated by what we care for and not responsible for actions motivated solely by other desires. He claims that this account gives us the intuitively correct answers when used to assess […]
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