Substantially updated blogroll

Just a quick note that I have finally gotten around to updating the Philosophical Comment blogroll, that is the list of linked blogs promoted on this page further down in the left hand side margin. I have basically taken off all old blogs that either has closed down since I listed them some years back, or that when I checked had not posted anything for a year or more. In addition the URLs for some of the still active blogs had been changed, so this has been updated as well. Among the new entries are:

Three general purpose collectively run philosophy blogs that have appeared since I compiled my original list, which mix news, commentary and academic debate with substantial philosophical discussion in various areas: The Daily Nous, Feminist Philosophers,  A Philosopher's Take. Other additions are individual philosophy blogs dedicated to substantial philosophical debate in selected topical areas. Two of these have become well established and highly regarded since the last update, Philosophical Disquisitions and The Splintered Mind.

But I would like to push a little bit extra for a very recently started blog by my dynamic colleague and good friend Richard Ashcroft, professor of bioethics at the School of law of the Queen Mary University of London: Utopian Biofutures. One of the most broadly conceiving and farsighted of philosophical bioethicists I know (being a scholar law and social science besides philosophy, applied ethics and political theory), this blog is dedicated to his latest project, where he sets out to combine his diverse scholarship with his astute knowledge and affinity for futuristic and SF fiction in an analysis that is to address what technological utopias for humanity and human societies we, where we stand now, have reason to consider and what we should think and do about them.

***

The Pinker Stinker And The One Bioethicist That Really Should Get Out of the Way

Back from summer holidays, I was greeted by what has seemingly been the big news in bioethics this and the last month: Steven Pinker's article in the Boston Globe, where he tells the field of bioethics and bioethicists to "get out of the way" and stop debating new technologies, such as the CRISP/Cas9 "genome editing", which I commented on earlier this year – seemingly because Steven Pinker himself has already done all of the bioethics needed doing on this and related subjects (apparently by saying that these technologies will become very good, albeit we don't know much about them yet). That is, he seems at first glance to be performing the very act he urges so strongly against: doing some (rogue elephant) bioethics in this sacred area and, in effect, revealing himself as a ghastly closet bioethicist – who, according to his own logic, should then get out of the way, I presume.

But this is not the end of the folly of Pinker's article, as he seems to be confusing a great number of things, such as bioethics (the academic field where various aspects of bioscience and biotechnology is debated and probed in ethical terms using intellectual tools of moral philosophy and social science), legal and semi-legal regulation of science and technology (adopted by governments, international bodies and professions to control how new ideas and gadgets are introduced and used), and the idea of a temporary moratorium on particular applications of new technologies while exploring them further in more controlled settings (like the  1974 Asilomar consensus on recombinant DNA technology) decided not by bioethicists, but by the concerned scientists themselves – albeit based (one presumes) on views on bioethical issues. Read my distinguished colleagues Richard Ashcroft, Alice Dreger and Julian Savulescu, who I admire for their extreme charity and patience, in turn pointing to several others, to unveil many more subtle incoherent twists apparently resting inside Pinker's stinker, and how these, at the end of the day, leaves him even worse off in terms of  consistency than what the initial impression holds out.

On my own part, I can't free myself from the reflection that if there is one bioethicist who really should get out of the way, it is the one who thinks that the fact the he/she has formed an (no matter how badly argued) opinion on something is a reason for others not to voice and argue their own.