According to a team of British scientists and ethicists, experiments to “humanize” apes should be carefully regulated and certain experiments banned. In its report, Animals Containing Human Material, the working group begins with the obvious claim that “animals are not humans.” They then worry about three types of animal-human research. The first would be the …
The deliberate extermination of the female of our species is not the stuff of some dystopian novel or epic film, it’s a fact. Imagine if 160 million women were wiped out in the United States. You can’t imagine it, because that’s more than the entire female population of the country. Yet in Asia alone, the …
Louis Menand is a distinguished professor of English, whose book, The Metaphysical Club won him a Pulitzer Prize in 2001. As a seasoned, thoughtful, and increasingly vocal public intellectual, he is worth listening to. In today’s The New Yorker, Louis Menand offers an extended review essay on what amounts to the devolution of liberal arts …
Arguably, one of the best extended contemporary discussions of human dignity and its implications for biomedicine was commissioned under President George W. Bush and convened by his President’s Council on Bioethics. The council’s two reports, Being Human (2003), and Human Dignity and Bioethics (2008), are the results of more than a few public meetings, thousands …
The institution where I now teach had the fortunate opportunity to have Gilbert Meilaender on our campus recently. Meilaender is the Duesenberg Chair of Christian Ethics at Valparaiso University and served on the President’s Council on Bioethics from 2002-2009. He was also a doctoral student under the inimitable Paul Ramsey, whose legacy in medical ethics …
Believing as I do in the priority of the human species among all other animal species probably makes me, ironically, a dinosaur. Happily, I’m not alone. Attorney, author, and activist Wesley J. Smith is also a proud speciesist. His latest book, A Rat is a Pig is a Dog is a Boy: The Human Cost of …
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