Carbon Nanotubes and Cancer: A Hazard Forestalled?
Writing about engineering ethics can be a grim business: plane crashes, fires, explosions, or insidious deaths from apparently innocuous things that people did decades earlier show up with depressing...
View ArticleDid Morality Evolve? Part 2
Last week I commented on an article by Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker about what he called the “moral instinct.” Pinker reviewed scientific efforts to study moral thinking in the brain and across...
View ArticleMarriage and Engineering Revisited
Back on May 31, I argued here that allowing same-sex marriage in the U. S. could conceivably damage our prospects for raising the next generation of engineers. It elicited several responses, including...
View ArticleHuman Biological Enhancement and the Ethics of Personhood
Some philosophers of the mind like to try a little thought experiment on their students. It goes something like this. Suppose some years from now, a person—an ordinary human being—gets some dreaded...
View ArticleI Got the Botts About Bots
My father, God rest his soul, had enough South Texas German in him to be subject to occasional fits of Teutonic depression. He had enough self-awareness to know what was going on when these moods hit...
View ArticleSkype’s Wipe-Out
Just because a surfer wipes out every now and then, you don’t jump to the inevitable conclusion that he’s a bad surfer. And if a relatively new technology suffers a massive failure that puts it out of...
View ArticleCopyright or Copywrong? The Ethics of Technological Multiplication
On Oct. 5, a jury in Minneapolis fined Jammie Thomas, a 30-year-old single mother, a total of $220,000 for downloading twenty-four copyrighted songs. Thomas was the target of a lawsuit filed by the...
View ArticleYahoo Pays—A Little—for Internet Censorship in China
Shi Tao is still languishing in a Chinese prison. But now Yahoo, the company that helped put him there, has to pay something for what they did. Until November of 2004, Shi was a journalist working for...
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