Chris McClean is the global lead for digital ethics at Avanade, a large tech innovation and consulting firm. He's also studying for his PhD at the University of Leeds, spending his time thinking about risk and trust relationships, especially in cases with a significant power imbalance, and where the people making the decisions are different from those exposed to the risk resulting from those decisions.

At the end of this conversation, we explored some practical questions related to Chris's day job, about what trust implies for business and the professions and in the digital realm, but in order to get there we first got stuck into the deeper question of what trust means…

Here's a list of papers and authors mentioned by Chris in the discussion:

Baier, A. “Trust and Antitrust.” Ethics 96, no. 2 (1986): 231–60. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2381376. 

Hawley, K. “Trust, Distrust and Commitment.” Noûs 48, no. 1 (2014): 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1111/nous.12000.

Holton, R. “Deciding to Trust, Coming to Believe.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 72, no. 1 (March 1994): 63–76. https://doi.org/10.1080/00048409412345881. 

Kirton, A. (2020). Matters of Trust as Matters of Attachment Security. International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 28(5), 583–602. https://doi.org/10.1080/09672559.2020.1802971.

The most recent Edelman Trust Barometer is here:

https://www.edelman.com/sites/g/files/aatuss191/files/2024-02/2024%20Edelman%20Trust%20Barometer%20Global%20Report_FINAL.pdf 

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
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For this episode, I spoke to Wendy Salkin, a philosophy professor at Stanford University, about informal political representatives: people who speak or act on behalf of groups in the political sphere without being elected to do so. Familiar examples include Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Malala Yousafzai, and Greta Thunberg.

Informal political representatives raise awareness of issues and bring about political change, often achieving things that people with more formal power cannot or do not. But their existence also raises some ethical questions. Do they need to be authorised? Can they be held accountable? What if the things they say diverge from the views of the people they represent?

Professor Salkin's book on this subject, Speaking for Others: The Ethics of Informal Political Representation, was released by Harvard University Press on July 9th.

Relevant reading:

1. Alcoff, L. (1991). The Problem of Speaking for Others. Cultural Critique, 20, 5–32.
2. Chapman, E.B. (2022). Election Day: How We Vote and What It Means for Democracy. Princeton University Press.
3. Du Bois, W.E.B. (1997). “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others” in The Souls of Black Folk, ed. David W. Blight and Robert Gooding-Williams, 62–72. Bedford Books.
4. Jagmohan, D. (forthcoming). Dark Virtues: Booker T. Washington’s Tragic Realism. Princeton University Press.
5. King, M.L., Jr. (2010) Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story. Beacon Press.
6. Mansbridge, J.J. (1983) Beyond Adversary Democracy. University of Chicago Press.
7. Montanaro, L. (2017). Who Elected Oxfam?: A Democratic Defense of Self-Appointed Representatives. Cambridge University Press.
8. Pitkin, H. (1967). The Concept of Representation. University of Los Angeles Press.
9. Rehfeld, A. (2006). Towards a General Theory of Political Representation. Journal of Politics 68, no. 1: 1–21.
10. Saward, M. (2010). The Representative Claim. Oxford University Press.
11. Washington, B.T. “The Standard Printed Version of the Atlanta Exposition Address,” in The Souls of Black Folk: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Terri Hume Oliver, 167–170. W. W. Norton.

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
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A special episode from the Leeds Love Month live talks series, featuring Pilar Lopez Cantero talking about experiences of breakup and how to move on well.

https://www.tilburguniversity.edu/staff/p-lopezcantero

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

A special episode from the Leeds Love Month live talks series, featuring Kate Lister talking about whether we evolved to be monogamous.

https://leedstrinity.academia.edu/KateLister

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
LinkedIn: 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 Brian Earp and Robbie Arrell.

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
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A special episode from the Leeds Love Month live talks series, featuring Dr Robbie Arrell on consent issues raised by teledildonic technology.

https://ahc.leeds.ac.uk/ethics/staff/2728/robbie-arrell

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
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A special episode from the Leeds Love Month live talks series, featuring Dr Brian Earp on the ethics of psychedelically-assisted relationship therapy.

https://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/people/brian-d.-earp

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
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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.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
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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-mccabe

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
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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.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
LinkedIn: 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.social
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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.social
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In May 2023, the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill received Royal Assent after two years of debate in Parliament. The new Act will strengthen the statutory duty already imposed on English higher education providers by previous legislation to secure freedom of speech within the law. Arif Ahmed, a former philosophy professor at Cambridge University, has been appointed as a Director overseeing free speech at the Office for Students, informally known as the 'Free Speech Tsar'. 

Free speech is one of several fronts in the so-called culture wars. Ahmed has been at great pains to say that his office, and he, will be politically neutral. The idea is to protect the right of academics to express their views, wherever on the political spectrum those views fall. But is there a role for legitimate gatekeeping of academic speaking opportunities? And is there a principled way of making decisions about when, if ever, academics should be prevented from speaking on the grounds that what they say might be harmful? Gerald Lang, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Leeds, has been trying to dig under the headlines to get at the ethical concerns underlying this debate.

You can read Gerald Lang's blog on this topic, and a reply to it by the philosopher Robert Simpson, here:

https://peasoupblog.com/2023/11/soup-of-the-day-free-speech-and-academic-freedom-with-contributions-from-gerald-lang-and-robert-simpson/

You can find out more about the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act here:

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2023/16

You can read Arif Ahmed's first speech as Director for Freedom of Speech and Academic Freedom at the Office for Students, or 'Free Speech Tsar', here:

https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/news-blog-and-events/press-and-media/transcript-of-arif-ahmeds-speech-at-kings-college-london/

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

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A special episode from the Leeds Love Month live talks series, featuring Dr Finn MacKay on queer identities and attraction.

https://www.drfinnmackay.co.uk/about

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
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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 attraction

Tom O’Shea on whether we can be responsible for our attractions

Kate 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 technology

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
LinkedIn: 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/13967

She 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.pdf
Lippert-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.

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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/10.1080/21550085.2023.2166342

A short paper on a similar topic by Mark Roodhouse:

https://www.historyandpolicy.org/policy-papers/papers/rationing-returns-a-solution-to-global-warming

In 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-rationing

And finally, here's what Nigel Farage thought of it:

https://twitter.com/Nigel_Farage/status/1627606639711817728

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
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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: 81-86

Woollard 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.

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Heather Widdows is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Warwick, with expertise in applied ethics, global ethics, bioethics, moral philosophy and feminist philosophy. She's interested in the demands that the beauty ideal places on people, particularly women. Her book Perfect Me was described as 'ground-breaking' by Vogue, and listed by The Atlantic as one of the best books of 2018. In it, she argues that beauty is now an ethical ideal. Not only are women held to an impossible standard, but failure to live up to that standard is seen as a failure of moral character.

In this interview, we talked about several topics connected to beauty, including whether it's reasonable to expect women to refuse to conform to the beauty ideal, and what other effective responses there might be. We also talked about why Heather thinks 'lookism' should be recognised as a form of discrimination based on looks, comparable with sexism or racism.

Perfect Me is available to buy here:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Perfect-Me-Beauty-Ethical-Ideal/dp/0691160074

You can find other pieces of writing, talks, interviews etc. featuring Heather here: http://www.heatherwiddows.com/

If you want to join the #everydaylookism campaign, you can do so here: https://www.everydaylookism.com/

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
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Happy new year!
An unusual episode to kick off 2024 as I talk to Kevin Macnish, host of the Getting Technology Right podcast. If you aren't already a listener to that excellent podcast, I heartily recommend that you become one! 
In this joint episode, which is also appearing in the Getting Technology Right feed, Kevin and I quiz each other on what we're trying to do with our respective podcasts, and on our experience of working as consultants in ethics, me for the University of Leeds and Kevin for the technology company Sopra Steria. 
Also, some news! Ethics Untangled episodes will be coming out twice a month from now on. So the next episode, with Heather Widdows, will be out on 15 January, and from then on we'll be putting out episodes on the first and third Mondays of every month. Huzzah!
As always, please subscribe and spread the word!

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
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Traditionally, monogamy has been the form of romantic relationship which people have been assumed to want to pursue. But there has recently been a growing tendency among some to question this assumption, and instead to pursue polyamorous or other forms of romantic attachment. And this tendency has been reflected in philosophical debates too. Some have gone so far as to question whether monogamous relationships can be defended at all, prompting others to think more deeply about what the distinctive value of monogamous relationships, if any, might be. I spoke to Luke Brunning, a Lecturer in Applied Ethics at the IDEA Centre, and we explored some of this fascinating ethical territory.

Luke Brunning is a Lecturer in Applied Ethics at the IDEA Centre, and part of the Centre for Love, Sex and Relationships. His main research interests are romantic relationships, the emotions, applied ethics and moral life.

Luke has a book on Romantic Agency coming out in May 2024, and available to order here:
https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=romantic-agency-loving-well-in-modern-life--9781509551521

... and his previous book on monogamy is here: https://thamesandhudson.com/does-monogamy-work-9780500295694

He was interviewed about that book here: https://mashable.com/article/does-monogamy-work-luke-brunning-book-interview

He's also written this article (freely available) on jealousy: https://aeon.co/essays/love-without-jealousy-consider-the-benefits-of-compersion 

Finally, he also recommends this book on monogamy by Carrie Jenkins:

https://www.routledge.com/Why-Its-OK-to-Not-Be-Monogamous/Clardy/p/book/9781032449784 

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
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Duncan Sheehan is Professor of Business Law at the University of Leeds. He is interested in trusts and personal property law, especially secured transactions law. He has a particular recent interest in the application of the philosophy of action to the law, as well as a wider interest in private law theory more generally. 

Unjust enrichment is a distinctive and, some might say, weird area of law. It is supposed to cover cases in which someone acquires a benefit of some kind at the expense of another person in a way that is unjust, and which leads to a requirement for restitution. It's not the same as fraud or theft, partly because the person who has been unjustly enriched might never have intended to be enriched. But it has proven surprisingly difficult for legal scholars to say exactly what it is, or what precisely links all the cases that are usually brought together under the heading of unjust enrichment, which has led some to call for it to be abolished. Nonetheless, Professor Sheehan does think it's a thing, and thinks it should continue to be a thing, and in this conversation he explains why.

As someone who was once massively overpaid by my employer (and was honest enough to give the money back, otherwise I probably wouldn't be admitting to it here) I was interested to find out what the law thinks about this issue...

Duncan's book, The Scope and Structure of Unjust Enrichment will be published in February 2024. Chapters 1 and 3 cover the issues discussed in the podcast.

Duncan also recommends the following two articles:

Hedley, S. 'What is Unjust Enrichment for?' (2016) 16 Oxford University Commonwealth Law Journal 333 (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2805475)

Jaffey, P. 'The Unjust Enrichment Fallacy and Private Law' (2013) 28 Canadian Journal of Law & Jurisprudence 115 (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3799149) 

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

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Dr Jamie Dow is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the IDEA Centre. He is particularly interested in Ancient Philosophy, and much of his research is concerned with what philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle can tell us about the ethical questions we face today. Recently, he's been thinking about the use of aesthetic features in persuasive speech.

Sonorous, humorous or rhetorically elegant language can help us to get our message across more effectively and change people's minds. There are lots of ways of doing this. We might want to describe our opponent's position in a humorous way to invite our listeners to join us in ridiculing it. We might want to vary the rhythm and pitch of our speech to lend it musicality. We might want to begin successive sentences with a repeated phrase, in a sequence of three (a 'tricolon') where the final sentence cleverly subverts the expectation set up by the preceding two. Or pepper our prose with pellets of punchy alliteration.

But is this stuff okay, or is there always something morally suspect about this kind of approach? If we want people to come round to our point of view for the right reasons, shouldn't we be focusing purely on the content of what we're saying? To try to answer this question, Jamie uses two examples of persuasive speech which use aesthetic approaches very effectively - speeches by Barack Obama and Martin Luther King. He also talks about the implications of his research for people who are using persuasive speech in everyday life.

You can hear the Obama speech here (the section discussed in the podcast starts at around 21:25):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQnlnk6Y7Kk&t=207s

The King speech is here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgVrlx68v-0

Jamie's paper, published in the British Journal of Aesthetics, is here:

https://academic.oup.com/bjaesthetics/advance-article/doi/10.1093/aesthj/ayac061/7187071

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

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Never let it be said that we don't tackle the big questions on this podcast. This week we're discussing no less a subject than the meaning of life, with Predrag Cicovacki.

Predrag is Professor of Philosophy at the College of the Holy Cross (USA), where he has been teaching since 1991. He has served as a visiting professor in Germany, Russia, Luxembourg, Serbia, France, and India. He's interested in problems of good and evil, violence and nonviolence, philosophy of war and peace, and ethics.

In 2021, in the midst of very difficult personal circumstances and a global pandemic, Predrag set to work on a book called The Meaning of Life: a Quick Immersion. It's a great book: very clear, heartfelt, personal and full of insights. I hugely enjoyed reading it, and enjoyed even more the opportunity to talk to Predrag about it.

You can find out more about Predrag here:

https://www.holycross.edu/academics/programs/philosophy/faculty/predrag-cicovacki

A few places you can buy The Meaning of Life: A Quick Immersion:

https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-meaning-of-life-a-quick-immersion-predrag-cicovacki/17413009?ean=9781949845280
https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/THE-MEANING-OF-LIFE-A-Quick-Immersion-by-Cicovacki-Predrag/9781949845280
https://www.amazon.co.uk/MEANING-LIFE-Quick-Immersion-Immersions/dp/1949845281

I asked Predrag to recommend some further reading and, in line with the general vibe of this episode, he suggested that you might like to reconnect with a book that meant a lot to you in childhood or adolescence. For Predrag, it's The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse. The first one that came to mind for me was The Old Man and The Sea by Ernest Hemingway. What about you?

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

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Paula Satne is a Lecturer in Applied Ethics at the IDEA Centre. Her research focuses on theoretical and applied issues related to human evil and the ethics and politics of forgiveness and memory.  Her recent research is on Kantian forgiveness, political forgiveness and public commemoration of politically motivated wrongdoing, punishment, pacifism, and conflict resolution, and our shared complicity and responsibility for structural injustice (i.e., climate change, poverty, and war).

Krisanna Scheiter is Associate Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Union College. She specializes in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy. Her research focuses on Plato and Aristotle's accounts of emotion, desire, imagination, and thinking. Most recently her work explores Plato and Aristotle's account of the mind, knowledge, and truth. In addition, she continues to examine Aristotle's account of revenge and why he thinks sometimes we are justified in seeking revenge against wrongdoers.

In this episode I met with both of them to discuss the edited volume they have recently published on punishment, forgiveness and revenge. These are ideas that are interesting on a personal level: is it good to forgive? Are there any circumstances in which we might be required to forgive? Can there ever be any value in taking revenge on people who have wronged us? But they also arise on a societal or international level: should groups of people forgive or forget historic wrongs that have been perpetrated against them? What is the point of punishment, and does the state have the right to punish its citizens?

Apologies for the slight sound issues with this episode, which was recorded remotely.

This episode includes discussion of the death penalty in the context of a discussion of Seneca’s views. Both Krisanna and Paula want to make it clear that, unlike Seneca, they do not personally endorse the death penalty.

Paula and Krisanna's book, Conflict and Resolution: The Ethics of Forgiveness, Revenge and Punishment is available here: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-77807-1.

A chapter from the book, written by Paula, is available open access here: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-77807-1_16.

Krisanna's chapter (not open access) is here: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-77807-1_2

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

Joseph Lacey is Associate Professor of Political Theory at University College Dublin. He is about to embark on a five-year project looking at the moral agency of participants in elections. That's politicians, special advisers, journalists and so on. But it's also you and me: people who engage with political messaging, perhaps take some interest in what's going on behind the scenes and, ultimately, vote in elections. In this episode Joseph talks about the questions he's interested in, his plans for the research, what's distinctive about the method he's going to use, and what he hopes to get out of it. 

Here are some readings suggested by Joseph as good and relevant to the topic:

Beckman, Arthur. 2018. ‘Political Marketing and Intellectual Autonomy: Political Marketing & Intellectual Autonomy’. Journal of Political Philosophy 26(1): 24–46.

Beerbohm, Eric. 2016. ‘The Ethics of Electioneering’. Journal of Political Philosophy 24(4): 381–405.

Green, Jeffrey. 2010. The Eyes of the People: Democracy in an Age of Spectatorship. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Lipsitz, Keena. 2004. ‘Democratic Theory and Political Campaigns’. Journal of Political Philosophy 12(2): 163–89.

Scammell, Margaret. 2014. Consumer Democracy: The Marketing of Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

Robbie Morgan is a lecturer and consultant here at the IDEA Centre. His research focuses on issues in the philosophy of sex, particularly as this intersects with feminist philosophy. As well as sexualisation, he's currently engaged in research about language change, the metaphysics of touch, conscientious objection in medicine, and the value of consensual sexual activity.
 
In this conversation, we discuss sexualisation. Unwanted sexualisation is at the very least an inappropriate behaviour. At worst it can be an illegitimate exercise of power which involves harassing, bullying, or terrorising another person. But how exactly should we define sexualisation, and what if anything is distinctively harmful about it?

Here are the readings Robbie mentions in the episode:

Anonymous. 2011. “What It’s like to Be Pregnant in Philosophy.” What Is It Like to Be a Woman in Philosophy? 2011. https://beingawomaninphilosophy.wordpress.com/2011/04/14/what-its-like-to-be-pregnant-in-philosophy/.

Nussbaum, Martha Craven. 1995. “Objectification.” Philosophy & Public Affairs 24 (4): 249–91.

Olberding, Amy. 2014. “Subclinical Bias, Manners, and Moral Harm.” Hypatia 29 (2): 287–302.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1781/1953), The Confessions. Translated by J.M. Cohen. Penguin Books: 108-109.

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
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Ruby Hornsby is a PhD student at the IDEA Centre. Her research is about 'artificial friends' - robots and their interactions with humans - and whether these interactions can be part of a good human life. What do we get out of friendship and how much of that is possible when the supposed friend we're talking about is not a person with an inner life of their own, but an artificial being that has been programmed to act in a friendly way towards us? And what if our interactions with robots are a bit like our interactions with fictional characters? Does this mean we can't have friendships with them, or is there some form of quasi-friendship that might still be possible, and might have something to offer us? And what about the ethics of these relationships? Do we leave ourselves open to exploitation or deception by entering into them?

Some links:

Ai-Da House of Lords (2022)

Care homes and social robots (2020)

Sex robots and companionship (2023) 

Sony's AIBO dog (2023)

Research Ruby did alongside IDEA's Natasha McKeever on sex robots (2022)

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

For this episode I spoke to Professor Fiona Woollard.

Professor Woollard is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton. She has research interests in normative ethics, applied ethics, epistemically transformative experiences and the philosophy of sex and pregnancy. She has published on topics including the distinction between doing and allowing harm, climate change and the non-identity problem, the moral significance of numbers, pornography and the norm of monogamy.

Her recent research has led her to ask a question which turns out to be surprisingly difficult to answer: what is a mother? Not necessarily, in her view, a woman with a child. In this interview she explains why she doesn't think this is the right way of defining a mother, and what she thinks is a better way. To get there, we tried to get to grips with some vexed questions about gender.

Professor Woollard's page at Southampton is here.

Here's the advert we refer to at the start of the interview.

Some of the books and papers Professor Woollard talks about in the interview:

Ashley, Florence. (forthcoming) ”What Is It like to Have a Gender Identity? Gender Subjectivity and the Phenomenological Constitution of Gender Identity”  Mind.
Bettcher, Talia Mae. (2009) “Trans Identities and First-Person Authority” In Laurie Shrage (ed.), You've Changed: Sex Reassignment and Personal Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hays, Sharon. (1998) The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood. London: Yale University Press.
Jenkins, Katharine. (forthcoming) Ontology and Oppression: Race, Gender and Social Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kukla, Quill and Lance, Mark. (forthcoming) “Telling Gender: The Pragmatics and Ethics of Gender Ascriptions” in ERGO.
Ruddick, S. (1980). "Maternal Thinking". Feminist Studies, 6(2), 342–367. 

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
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Dr Joe Saunders is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Durham. He primarily works on ethics and agency in Kant and the post-Kantian tradition. He also has interests in the philosophy of love and media ethics.

In this episode we talk about how we should behave online. How bad is social media as a forum for discussion, for example of political or social issues? What specific pitfalls can we fall into and how should we avoid them? What are our responsibilities to each other? And is civility the answer?

Here's Joe: https://www.durham.ac.uk/staff/joe-saunders/
And here he is on Twitter (be nice!): https://twitter.com/Saunders_Joe

Some of the books and papers which Joe mentions in the episode:

Levy, Neil (2021). Virtue signalling is virtuous. Synthese 198 (10):9545-9562.
Nguyen, C. Thi (2020). Echo chambers and epistemic bubbles. Episteme 17 (2):141-161.
Olberding, Amy. The Wrong of Rudeness: Learning Modern Civility from Ancient Chinese Philosophy. 2019. Oxford University Press. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-wrong-of-rudeness-9780190880965
Olberding, Amy. Righteous Incivility. Online at: https://aeon.co/essays/whats-the-difference-between-being-righteous-and-being-rude
Ronson, Jon. So You've Been Publicly Shamed. 2015. Riverhead Books. https://www.amazon.co.uk/So-Youve-Been-Publicly-Shamed/dp/1594487138
Tosi, J. and Warmke, B. Grandstanding: The use and abuse of moral talk. 2020. Oxford University Press. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/grandstanding-9780190900151

By the way, at one point in the episode I talk about the practice on social media of finding the worst possible version of your opponent's argument in order to dunk on it. I've since become aware of the very useful term 'nutpicking' to refer to this phenomenon: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Nutpicking.

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
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A short trailer to let you know what Ethics Untangled is all about, including an extract from episode 1.

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
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This podcast discusses the ethics of the controversial medical condition of Borderline Personality Disorder, examining whether the high prevalence of diagnoses of Borderline Personality Disorder in female patients who have experienced trauma is the result of implicit biases around gender, and whether excessive blame towards patients with Borderline Personality Disorder constitutes a form of hermeneutic injustice. Along the way, we discuss the specifics of BPD, and explain the cutting-edge philosophical concepts of epistemic injustice and hermeneutic injustice – assuming no prior knowledge."

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

In this episode, Dr Andrew Kirton talks to Dr Jim Baxter about the issues explored in Jim’s new book, Moral Responsibility and the Psychopath: The Value of Others.  

Are psychopaths morally responsible? Should we argue with them? Remonstrate with them, blame them, sometimes even praise them? Is it worth trying to change them, or should we just try to prevent them from causing harm? And how should society treat them, particularly if they have committed crimes? To answer these questions, we first need to understand what a psychopath is, which means engaging with insights from psychiatry, psychology and neuroscience. We also need to know what moral responsibility is, which is a deep and difficult philosophical question. And then we need to join the dots, applying the criteria of moral responsibility to a category of person whose emotional engagement with the world may be shallow, but who are not obviously irrational. 

In a conversation that ranges across all of these areas, Jim ultimately argues that at least some psychopaths lack the ability to value others, which is fundamental to moral life, and are therefore not morally responsible for their actions. Finally, the discussion turns to the implications of this position for how psychopaths should be treated in the criminal law. 

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

In this episode, Dr Andrew Kirton talks to Dr Jim Baxter about the issues explored in Jim’s new book, Moral Responsibility and the Psychopath: The Value of Others.  

Are psychopaths morally responsible? Should we argue with them? Remonstrate with them, blame them, sometimes even praise them? Is it worth trying to change them, or should we just try to prevent them from causing harm? And how should society treat them, particularly if they have committed crimes? To answer these questions, we first need to understand what a psychopath is, which means engaging with insights from psychiatry, psychology and neuroscience. We also need to know what moral responsibility is, which is a deep and difficult philosophical question. And then we need to join the dots, applying the criteria of moral responsibility to a category of person whose emotional engagement with the world may be shallow, but who are not obviously irrational. 

In a conversation that ranges across all of these areas, Jim ultimately argues that at least some psychopaths lack the ability to value others, which is fundamental to moral life, and are therefore not morally responsible for their actions. Finally, the discussion turns to the implications of this position for how psychopaths should be treated in the criminal law. 

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

Meredith Broussard is a data journalist and associate professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University, as well as research director at the NYU Alliance for Public Interest Technology. Her book More Than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech explores the way technology reinforces inequality and asks the question, what if racism, sexism, and ableism aren't just bugs in mostly functional machinery—what if they're coded into the system itself? 

It's a great read, full of eye-opening examples and insights, from a writer with the technical and ethical expertise to get to the heart of what is clearly a very significant challenge for society. We were only able to scratch the surface in this short conversation, but it's changed my thinking about technology ethics, and I was very grateful to Professor Broussard for taking the time to talk to us.

You can find out more about Professor Broussard here:

https://meredithbroussard.com/

Places you can buy More Than  a Glitch include the following:

https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/More-Than-a-Glitch-by-Meredith-Broussard/9780262548328
https://www.amazon.co.uk/More-Than-Glitch-Confronting-Ability/dp/0262047659

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

In this episode we have special guest Panashe Chinya. Panashe is a medical student at the University of Leeds, who previously intercalated on the MA in Biomedical and Healthcare Ethics at the IDEA Centre.

The presentation and subsequent discussion are based on the dissertation that Panashe completed during her MA at IDEA which asks if mandating moral enhancement for health care professionals as a means to deal with racism and implicit biases in the field could be ethically justified. Could moral enhancement really help to combat racial injustice in healthcare? Can responsibilities to patients be balanced against the autonomy and moral freedom of the health care professional? And how do we square concerns around impacts to personal identity that moral enhancement might raise with the duty of care that health care workers have to their patients? 

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

In the fifth and final episode of the third series of the IDEA Pod podcast, IDEA alumna Georgina reflects on the conversations and interviews that have made up the series and considers what she has learned from her exploration into the ethics of sex work in the Covid-19 pandemic. 

Released November 2021. Presented by Georgina James. Georgina is a final-year medical student at the University of Leeds and is also a graduate of our Campus MA Biomedical and Health Care Ethics. Georgina returned to IDEA in the summer of 2021 for her academic elective, and produced this podcast series during this time.

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

IDEA alumna Georgina speaks to Anna Westin. Anna is a philosopher, artist, and musician. She is a Visiting Lecturer at St Mary’s University Twickenham, and also at LST, Canterbury Christ Church University and Azusa Pacific University. 

In this episode, Georgina and Anna discuss Anna’s research into the potential harms of sex work, including physical and psychological harms, and the risk of objectification. They also consider the notion of transactional relationships and Anna’s work with victims of human trafficking. 

Released December 2021. Presented by Georgina James. Georgina is a final-year medical student at the University of Leeds and is also a graduate of our Campus MA Biomedical and Health Care Ethics. Georgina returned to IDEA in the summer of 2021 for her academic elective, and produced this podcast series during this time.  

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

IDEA alumna Georgina speaks to Scott A Anderson, Associate Professor of Social and Political Philosophy at the University of British Columbia. 

In this episode, Georgina and Scott discuss the philosophical argument that the gender power imbalance between men and women can impact the sexual autonomy of sex workers in cis-hetero sexual transactions, and could have further-reaching impacts on sexual harassment in the workplace in other carers.  

Released November 2021. Presented by Georgina James. Georgina is a final-year medical student at the University of Leeds and is also a graduate of our Campus MA Biomedical and Health Care Ethics. Georgina returned to IDEA in the summer of 2021 for her academic elective, and produced this podcast series during this time.  

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

In this episode, medical student and IDEA alumna Georgina returns with guests Jude and Carys who work closely with sex workers in Nottingham.  Jude is the Sexual Health Outreach and Health Promotion team lead at Nottingham University Hospital Trust. Carys is the operations manager for POW Nottingham, a voluntary organisation supporting those in the sex work industry.  

In this episode, Jude and Carys explain the outreach services that POW provides, and how this is supported by the Sexual Health Outreach and Health Promotion team. They also discuss the impact that the Covid-19 pandemic has had on outreach services like theirs, and in particular how vulnerable sex workers have been affected by this.  

Released November 2021. Presented by Georgina James. Georgina is a final-year medical student at the University of Leeds and is also a graduate of our Campus MA Biomedical and Health Care Ethics. Georgina returned to IDEA in the summer of 2021 for her academic elective, and produced this podcast series during this time.  

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

The IDEA Pod returns with special episodes on the ethics of sex work, with particular focus on the impact of Covid-19 on sex workers’ wellbeing and health. These episodes are produced, edited, and presented by IDEA alumna Georgina James.  

In this first episode, Georgina speaks with Bea Piper of the English Collective of Prostitutes about the issues faced by sex workers in the UK, both generally and those that have been brought into particularly sharp focus in light of the pandemic.  

Released November 2021. Presented by Georgina James. Georgina is a final-year medical student at the University of Leeds and is also a graduate of our Campus MA Biomedical and Health Care Ethics. Georgina returned to IDEA in the summer of 2021 for her academic elective, and produced this podcast series during this time.

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

Meet special guest Christian Herzog, a researcher at the Institute for Electrical Engineering in Medicine at the University of Lübeck and Head of the Ethical Innovation Hub. Christian recently completed an MA in Applied and Professional Ethics at the IDEA Centre and published two papers based on his research for this course, linked below.

Graham Bex-Priestley interviews Christian about his work on the problems with formalising ethics for implementation in artificial intelligence. What seems at first to be a merely technical issue ends up touching on the contentious topics of inclusive deliberation, moral understanding, relationships of power, and the ideals of democracy. Is there anything wrong with an AI using "deep learning" to essentially trawl the internet and aggregate the moral opinions they find? Christian bounces off Foucault and Habermas to explain what he thinks is missing from such approaches to machine ethics.

Herzog, C. On formal ethics versus inclusive moral deliberation. AI Ethics (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43681-021-00045-4 

Herzog, C. Three Risks That Caution Against a Premature Implementation of Artificial Moral Agents for Practical and Economical Use. Sci Eng Ethics 27, 3 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-021-00283-z

Released 11 May 2020. Presented by Graham Bex-Priestley.

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
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In this episode, we explore the concept of identity. It’s a buzzword that many businesses and institutions use and present as part of their ethos, but do we really have clarity as to what integrity actually is or what it implies?

Dr Jim Baxter (IDEA Centre) and Tracey Groves (Intelligent Ethics) walk us through understanding what integrity is, how it impacts businesses and how the role and impact of integrity has changed over time.

Released 27 April 2021. Presented by Gabriela Arriagada Bruneau

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

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In this episode, we comment on one of the latest events held at the IDEA Centre, the AI and Philosophy Workshop. Postgraduate Researcher Gabriela Arriagada Bruneau speaks with Zach Gudmunsen, fellow co-organiser of the event and Michael Cannon, co-author of one of the presented papers. This episode covers different talks in the workshop, dividing them into two themes:

Theory: 

Dr David Strohmaier - "Ontology, neural networks, and the social sciences"
Professor Vincent C. Müller - "Orthogonality and Existential Risk from AI
Dr Ioannis Votsis - "Machine‐Made Jabberwocky?"

Practice:

Professor David Hogg - "AI and Common sense"
Dr Paula Boddington - "Philosophy of AI through the theory and practice of dementia"
Professor John McDermid - "Embodied AI: Autonomous Systems and Ethics"

We finish by commenting on the Future challenges for the development of AI.

Released 30 March 2021. Presented by Gabriela Arriagada Bruneau

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

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‘Project Prevention’ is a growing organisation in the US that aims to achieve the sterilisation of addicts, and offers monetary incentivisation to do so.

In her dissertation, Georgina James engages with the question of whether it is morally permissible to incentivise the sterilisation of addicts, and whether something similar may be introduced to the UK. The talk discusses the concepts of autonomy, best interests, public interest and issues of exploitation and commodification. Georgina’s dissertation provided a strong argument against the permissibility of any such sterilisation of addicts.

Released 16 March 2021. Presented by Tom Hancocks

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

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Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
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Ethical questions about the dead are frequently interesting, puzzling, surprising, and weird. All of these things become clear in this conversation with Dr Joseph Bowen. Joe is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Leeds, specialising in moral, political, and legal philosophy. As well as whether the dead have rights, his research focuses on the nature of rights and directed duties, the justifications for and constraints on harming, the nature and scope of duties to rescue, and just war theory.

Here's Joe:

https://ahc.leeds.ac.uk/philosophy/staff/4794/dr-joseph-bowen
https://joseph-bowen.weebly.com/

He's written about whether the dead have rights in this paper:

Bowen, J. 2022.  ‘The Interest Theory of Rights at the Margins: Posthumous Rights’, Without Trimmings: The Legal, Moral, and Political Philosophy of Matthew Kramer​, Visa Kurki & Mark McBride (eds), (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

And here are some other readings which might be of interest:

• Jeff McMahan, ‘Death and the Value of Life’ Ethics 99, 1 (1998), pp. 32-61.
• Cécile Fabre, ‘Posthumous Rights’, in Matthew H. Kramer, and others (eds), The Legacy of H.L.A. Hart: Legal, Political, and Moral Philosophy (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2008).
• David Boonin, Dead Wrong: The Ethics of Posthumous Harm (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2019).
• Ben Bradley, Well-Being and Death (New York; Oxford University Press, 2009).

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
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What does an ethical police officer look like? How ought we to judge the “Dirty Harry” style cop who gets results by any means? Should police to see themselves as “good guys” out to catch villains? And, must police officers “dirty their hands” in order to be truly ethical?

Detective Garda and MA in Applied and Professional Ethics, Thomas O’Connor, offers a unique and compelling perspective on these questions in conversation with his former MA supervisor, Dr Josh Hobbs.

Released 2 March 2021. Presented by Josh Hobbs

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

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In this episode we have special guest Matt Murray. Matt is a medical student at the University of Leeds, who previously intercalated on the MA in Biomedical and Healthcare Ethics at the IDEA Centre. The presentation and subsequent discussion are based on the dissertation that Matt completed during his MA at IDEA on the duties and ethics surrounding end of life care for the medical professional. 

Matt’s dissertation was supervised by IDEA lecturer Sarah Carter-Walshaw, who joins him in this episode to discuss his research. Matt and Sarah discuss how we in society understand health and death (especially the latter), and why there is an ethical imperative to change the way that the medical profession perceives and approaches death and dying.  

Released 16 February 2021. Presented by Sarah Carter-Walshaw.

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

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Our special guest for this episode is Ken Lewchuk, a chartered accountant who worked for Enron before its collapse. Ken's first degree was in theology, he has an MBA from Heriot-Watt University, and he recently completed an MA in applied and professional ethics with the IDEA Centre. 

Graham Bex-Priestley interviews Ken about the issue of responsibility for corporate failure. In the context of Enron, Ken argues against the common view that it was "a few bad apples" that brought the house down.

To understand the problem we must consider the culture that was fostered in the corporation collectively (which extends all the way back to what was taught at business school) instead of focusing on individual behaviour in isolation. Ken brings together themes from several disciplines - including psychology, economics, the philosophy of agency, and the ethics of blame and punishment - to provide an explanation for what went wrong and a suggestion for what we should do to prevent similar catastrophes from happening in the future.

Released 2 February 2021. Presented by Graham Bex-Priestley.

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
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The IDEA Pod returns as Dr Natasha McKeever, programme director for the online MA Biomedical and Healthcare Ethics, interviews Amaal Maqsood-Shah, an alumnus from our campus MA programme, about her MA dissertation topic – the confidentiality of information about patients’ genetic conditions.

Despite guidance permitting clinicians the discretion to breach confidentiality, clinicians maintain confidences against a backdrop of litigation fears. As genomic medicine advances to return more information on the heritable basis of conditions, there is an increasing need for clinicians to understand when, and how, to communicate genetic information to at-risk relatives (The British Society for Genetic Medicine, 2017).

Amaal’s dissertation seeks to challenge current guidance and provide an ethical case for the non-consensual disclosure of all genetic information generated by the proband to biological relatives.

Released 19 January 2021. Presented by Natasha McKeever.

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
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