Tony Coady

After briefly exploring the background to and nature of human rights, and endorsing their importance and significant universality, this chapter examines the problems that can afflict the humanitarian impulse to rescue people from human rights violations worldwide. These problems concern principally the implementation of programmes of rescue in complex circumstances involving nuanced political, cultural, and moral judgements. A besetting difficulty is that created by various forms of what the author calls “moralism” which is a distortion of morality, though political realists in genuine recognition of the difficulty often mistake moralism for morality itself. The chapter first discusses the problems of implementation for non-violent humanitarian aid and rescue operations, noting the criticisms and responses made by some aid practitioners themselves, and then examines, largely through the lens of moralism, the relevance of these difficulties to the more dramatic rescue efforts of violent military humanitarian intervention.

In the debate about the pros and cons of human enhancement, proponents of enhancement (so-called ‘liberals’) often accuse their opponents (so-called ‘conservatives’) of substituting emotion for reason. In this they are relying on an age-old dichotomy between reason and emotion that has a long popular and philosophical history. Plato’s picture of reason as the charioteer controlling the turbulent horses of the passions has had a significant influence (though its popular version ignores Plato’s reservations.) Cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists have recently joined the fray and sought to examine the role of reason on the one hand and emotion on the other in moral outlooks and decisions. This chapter examines the contrast between reason and emotion and, while noting many ambiguities in both concepts, will argue that much of the separation of reason and emotion that underpins the debate is misguided.

We humans can enhance some of our mental and physical abilities above the normal upper limits for our species with the use of particular drug therapies and medical procedures. We will be able to enhance many more of our abilities and be able to do so in more ways in the not-too-distant future. Some commentators have welcomed the prospect of human enhancement technologies becoming widely used, while others have viewed it with alarm and have made clear that they find human enhancement morally objectionable. Unfortunately the debate over the ethics of human enhancement appears to have reached an impasse, with proponents and opponents of human enhancement drawing on different intellectual traditions, relying on different methodologies and ‘talking past one another’. In order to move this debate forward, we need either to find new ways of understanding the current debate or to develop new ways of thinking about the ethics of human enhancement. In this volume leading philosophers and bioethicists invite us to adopt new ways to think about the ongoing debate, either by drawing on work in psychology that helps to explain common reactions to the prospect of human enhancement or by finding points of comparison between the current debate about the ethics of human enhancement and other academic debates, such as the debate about justice for people with disabilities. Other contributors offer original lines of argument about the ethics of human enhancement and seek to take that debate in new directions.

When Huck Finn embarks upon his hilarious education of the slave Jim in the moral vagaries of the monarchies of Europe, he takes himself to be propounding the merest common sense. He may have thought large‐scale villainy restricted to autocracies, but his creator was clearly not so naive. More to the present point, Huck ends his discourse on princely rule with remarks that show he was not merely cataloguing the fact of widespread royal vice, but willing to countenance it as necessary. As he puts it, ‘kings is kings, and you got to make allowances. Take them all around, they're a mighty ornery lot’.

ABSTRACT Violence is a central idea for political theory but there is very little agreement about how it should be understood. This paper examines some fashionable approaches to the concept and argues against ‘wide’ definitions, particularly those of the ‘structuralist’ variety of which that offered by the sociologist, Johan Galtung, is taken as typical. A critique is also given of ‘legitimist’ definitions which incorporate some strong notion of illegitimacy into the very meaning of violence. Structuralist definitions are much favoured by the political left whereas legitimist accounts are more common on the right but these connections, though psychologically understandable, are not logically tight. Both structuralist and legitimist analyses are criticised on conceptual and practical grounds and a defence of a more restricted definition is presented. The paper concludes with some remarks about the point of having a concept of violence of the type delineated.

Objectives: To discover the current state of opinion and practice among doctors in Victoria, Australia, regarding end-of-life decisions and the legalisation of voluntary euthanasia. Longitudinal comparison with similar 1987 and 1993 studies.Design and participants: Cross-sectional postal survey of doctors in Victoria.Results: 53% of doctors in Victoria support the legalisation of voluntary euthanasia. Of doctors who have experienced requests from patients to hasten death, 35% have administered drugs with the intention of hastening death. There is substantial disagreement among doctors concerning the definition of euthanasia.Conclusions: Disagreement among doctors concerning the meaning of the term euthanasia may contribute to misunderstanding in the debate over voluntary euthanasia. Among doctors in Victoria, support for the legalisation of voluntary euthanasia appears to have weakened slightly over the past 17 years. Opinion on this issue is sharply polarised.

This collective paper on radicalization and violent extremism part of the ‘Philosophy of education in a new key’ initiative by Educational Philosophy and Theory brings together some of the leading contemporary scholars writing on the most pressing epistemological, ethical, political and educational issues facing post-9/11 scholarship on radicalization and violent extremism. Its overall aim is to move beyond the ‘conventional wisdom’ associated with this area of scholarly research best represented by its many slogans, metaphors and other thought-terminating clichés. By providing conceptual lenses on issues previously compartmentalized primarily [or even exclusively] in security and intelligence studies or at the fringes of scholarly interest, radicalization and violent extremism turn out to be much more complex than ‘radicalization studies’ has been eager to acknowledge.

Given that testimony is a fundamental and fundamentally reliable source of information, having a status akin to perception and memory in our fabric of understanding, then questions arise about how to comprehend those categories of testimony that seem inherently misleading. Some of these are the ‘pathologies of testimony’ discussed in this chapter: gossip, rumour, and urban myth. It is argued that philosophers have paid insufficient attention to the phenomenology of these three and that what has been said suffers from certain defects. The chapter explores both the conceptual structure of gossip, rumour, and urban myth, and the social and moral significance that they have. It concludes with comment on the epistemic value (and dis-value) of such pathologies.