Ethics Untangled

A special episode from the Leeds Love Month live talks series, featuring a Q&A session with Brian Earp and Robbie Arrell.Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.socialFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

A special episode from the Leeds Love Month live talks series, featuring a Q&A with MM McCabe and Troy Jollimore.Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.socialFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

A special episode from the Leeds Love Month live talks series, featuring Professor MM McCabe on love and desire in Plato’s symposium.https://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/mm-mccabeEthics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.socialFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

A special episode from the Leeds Love Month live talks series, featuring Troy Jollimore on whether we love for reasons.https://www.troyjollimore.com/Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.socialFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

A special episode from the Leeds Love Month live talks series, featuring a Q&A session with Finn MacKay and Tom O'Shea.Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.socialFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

A special episode from the Leeds Love Month live talks series, featuring Dr Tom O’Shea on whether we can be responsible for our attractions.https://www.tomoshea.org/Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.socialFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

A quick introduction to our special series of episodes featuring recordings from the Leeds Love Month live events organised by the Centre for Love, Sex and Relationships at the University of Leeds.In October 2023, Centre for Love, Sex and Relationships at the University of Leeds ran a series of events under the Love Month banner. There were some really interesting talks, and we thought we'd release them as a special series of Ethics Untangled episodes. So we're giving you them all in one go, and they won't affect the standard episodes, which will carry on going out according to the usual schedule.Here's a list of episodes:Finn MacKay on queer identities and attractionTom O’Shea on whether we can be responsible for our attractionsKate Lister on whether we evolved to be monogamous Pilar Lopez-Cantero on experiences of breakup, and how to move on well Troy Jollimore on whether we love for reasons MM McCabe on love and desire in Plato’s symposium Brian Earp on the ethics of psychedelically-assisted relationship therapy Robbie Arrell on consent issues raised by teledildonic technologyEthics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.socialFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

Jules Holroyd is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Sheffield. Her teaching and research focuses on understanding the nature of, and addressing, injustices. In this conversation, she turns her attention to praise.Philosophers have given a lot of attention to blame in the past, but not so much to praise. This might be because praise looks fairly unproblematic on the whole. Praising people is nice! It boosts people's self-confidence, strengthens social bonds, and if we occasionally praise people who don't deserve our praise, who cares? According to Jules Holroyd, a philosopher working at the University of Sheffield, while this attitude is probably right overall, there can be instances in which we praise people in ways that are morally problematic, harmful even, and we should be on the lookout for these cases. In this conversation, we talked about some of the moral norms that govern praise - when it is and isn't appropriate to praise someone - and in particular we looked at the ways in which our acts of praising can signal a commitment to wider social norms, some of which we might not want to endorse.Jules's paper which forms the basis of this conversation is here:Holroyd, J. (2021) Oppressive Praise. Feminist Philosophy Quarterly. https://ojs.lib.uwo.ca/index.php/fpq/article/view/13967She also has this more recent paper on praise: Holroyd, J. (2023) Proleptic praise: a social function analysis. Noûs. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nous.12482 Here are some of the papers Jules refers to in the episode:Coates, Justin. (2019). Gratitude and Resentment: Some Asymmetries. In R. Roberts & D. Telech (Eds.) The Moral Psychology of Gratitude(pp. 160–175). London: Rowman & Littlefield.Jeppsson, S., & Brandenburg, D. (2022). Patronizing Praise. The Journal of Ethics, 26, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-022-09409-2 Khader, S., & Lindauer, M. (2020). The “Daddy Dividend”: The Gender Division of Labour and Regression Towards Patriarchy.APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy,19(2), 6–8. https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.apaonline.org/ resource/collection/D03EBDAB-82D7-4B28-B897-C050FDC1ACB4/FeminismV19n2.pdfLippert-Rasmussen, K. (2022). Praising without standing. The Journal of Ethics, 26,229–246. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10892-021-09374-2 Shoemaker, D., & Vargas, M. (2019). Moral torch fishing: A signaling theory of blame. Noûs, 55, 581–602. https:// doi.org/10.1111/nous.12316 Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.socialFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

Rob Lawlor, a philosopher at the IDEA Centre, has been involved in an inter-disciplinary collaboration looking at one possible response to climate change, which is the introduction of rationing. With Nathan Wood and Josie Freear, he's been looking at the history of rationing as well as the ethics. So - not just whether rationing would be morally permissible, but also how it might be received by the public. And what we can learn about this from public attitudes to rationing of food during and after the second world war. When it was first published, the paper got an unusual amount of attention in the media for an academic paper, including lots of positive coverage, but also some disparagement from the likes of Nigel Farage and Richard Littlejohn. As well as discussing the content of the paper, we talked about what that reaction has been like and I gave Rob a chance to respond to some of the ways the paper has been discussed in the media.Here's Rob, Josie and Nathan's paper:https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21550085.2023.2166342A short paper on a similar topic by Mark Roodhouse:https://www.historyandpolicy.org/policy-papers/papers/rationing-returns-a-solution-to-global-warmingIn the interview, Rob mentions he thought the best of the news articles about the paper was in the New Republic. Here it is:https://newrepublic.com/article/170914/climate-case-rationingAnd finally, here's what Nigel Farage thought of it:https://twitter.com/Nigel_Farage/status/1627606639711817728Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.socialFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

Doctors are bound by the ethical requirement to first do no harm. Unfortunately, harm is not something that they can always avoid. Sometimes harm comes about through the actions of doctors, but at other times it comes about because of things they haven't done. David Molyneux is a doctor of medicine who is also working on a doctorate in philosophy, and his PhD thesis is about the difficult ethical questions that arise because of this distinction. Is there a moral difference between doing and allowing harm? But to answer this question, he first needed to get to grips with a prior question: when we allow harm do we thereby cause that harm? And more generally, do allowings, or omissions, cause?Here are some introductory readings on the topic recommended by David:Foot P (1984), Killing and Letting Die, in Steinbock and Norcross, Killing and Letting Die, Second Edition. pp 280-290.  New York: Fordham University Press.McGrath S (2003) Causation and the Making/Allowing Distinction.   Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition 114: 81-86Woollard F (2012).    The Doctrine of Doing and Allowing I: Analysis of the Doing ⁄Allowing Distinction.   Philosophy Compass 7: 448–458 Woollard, F and Howard-Snyder, F.  2021.  Doing and Allowing Harm.  The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (Fall 2021 edition), Edward N Zalta (ed) URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/fall2021/entries/doing-allowing/   Accessed 15th January 2024.  Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.socialFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/