About a week before the United States presidential election last November, someone posted on Twitter that Hillary Clinton was at the center of a pedophilia...
Since 2002, Belgium has permitted terminally or incurably ill adults to request and receive euthanasia from a doctor. In February 2014, the parliament removed...
When Rio de Janeiro was awarded the 2016 Olympic Games, the Zika virus had yet to reach Brazil. Now, after billions of dollars have been invested in preparing...
Last month, a steer escaped from a slaughterhouse in the New York City borough of Queens. Video of the animal trotting down a busy street was soon featured on...
In the midst of my Practical Ethics class last month, several students stood up and walked out. They were joining hundreds of others in a protest led by the...
The lives of billions of people, for centuries to come, will be at stake when world leaders and government negotiators meet at the United Nations Climate...
If you used the term “business ethics” in the 1970s, when the field was just starting to develop, a common response was: “Isn’t that an oxymoron?” That quip...
In July, the number of migrants reaching the borders of the European Union passed 100,000 – the third consecutive month in which a new record was set. In one...
In 1809, Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism, set to work on “The Book of Fallacies.” His goal was to expose the fallacious arguments used to block...
In May, Pope Francis released his historic encyclical, Laudatio Si, or “Praise Be.” He chose his papal name, he explains in the text, because he considers St....
Fly out of London’s Heathrow Airport and you may pass over a grassy field called Runnymede. Eight hundred years ago this month, it offered a colorful...
The deadly outbreak of Ebola in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea that began last year highlighted a problem in the production of pharmaceuticals. Once it...
Can humans really be motivated by altruism? My new book, “The Most Good You Can Do,” discusses the emerging new movement called Effective Altruism, and, in...
Last month, U.S. President Barack Obama hosted a three-day summit on “Countering Violent Extremism.” That term has already spawned a new abbreviation, “CVE,”...
Anyone who does not share the ideology of ISIS is likely to agree that it is wrong for the group’s adherents to behead some of its hostages. Much more...
It may, in the end, turn out to be fortunate that a handful of people in developed countries – four in the United States and one in Spain – have contracted...
“I will take my life today around noon. It is time.” With these words, posted online, Gillian Bennett, an 85-year-old New Zealander living in Canada, began...
Is Israel’s military action in the Gaza Strip morally defensible? Different answers to that question are possible. Some depend on answers to prior questions...
In New York last month, Christie’s sold $745 million worth of postwar and contemporary art, the highest total that it has ever reached in a single auction....
Should your government be able to take away your citizenship? In the United Kingdom, the government has had the legal authority to revoke naturalized Britons’...
Last year, a report from Harvard University set off alarm bells, because it showed that the proportion of students in the United States completing bachelor’s...
Hitler and Stalin were ruthless dictators who committed murder on a vast scale. But, while it is impossible to imagine a Hitler statue in Berlin, or anywhere...
Last month, Faisal bin Ali Jaber traveled from his home in Yemen to Washington to ask why a United States drone had fired missiles at, and killed, his...
Sugar is sweet, but the ethics of its production is anything but appealing. “Sugar Rush,” a recent report released by Oxfam International as part of its...
Americans are fond of speaking in reverential tones about “the wisdom of the Founding Fathers” – that is, the men who wrote the United States Constitution....