Self-driving cars are already cruising the streets today. And while these cars will ultimately be safer and cleaner than their manual counterparts, they can’t completely avoid accidents altogether. How should the car be programmed if it encounters an unavoidable accident? Patrick Lin navigates the murky ethics of self-driving cars. Patrick Lin navigates the murky ethics … The Ethics of Self-driving Cars
Medical Ethics and the State The role of the state (government) in medical ethics can be quite complex. In these two articles (see links below), two perspectives are explored. The famous Baby Theresa case involves a situation where the state prevents parents from acting to share their dying daughter’s organs. The second case concerns a … How Do We Decide Who Should Decide?
The new technology of driverless cards has opened up a real-world corollary to the 65- year-old philosophical tradition of trolley problems. The basic question here involves how these cars should be programmed: is the goal to protect passengers or others out on the road? Read these the two articles and watch the video, which focuses … Should Driverless Cars Kill Their Passengers?
In this high school philosophy lesson plan, students will engage with Gottfried Leibniz’s The Monadology.
On November 6, 2015, NPR aired a story about the controversial topic of stem cell research. This story can be used as the basis for a philosophical discussion of a variety of topics, including what it is to be human and the ethics of medical research. Here is a link to the story: http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/11/06/454693391/should-human-stem-cells-be-used-to-make-partly-human-chimeras This … The Ethics of the Creation of Dual-Species Chimeras
One of the practical consequences of the Scientific Revolution was a suggestion that one should only believe things that are both true and justified. Eventually, there was even the proposal by mathematician William Clifford that it is morally wrong to believe things without good justification. While early thinkers suggested we need to justify all of … The Demarcation Problem and Falsifiability
Overview One of the most fundamental questions philosophy of science raises involves the problem of scientific realism, which asks us to think about the status of scientific claims. For instance, when your chemistry teacher talks about atoms, are these real entities (and what does that mean?) or are they just a linguistic model that’s a … Scientific Realism and the Weird World
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