The Immorality of Eating Meat

Unlike other ethical arguments for veganism, the argument advanced is not predicated on the wrongness of speciesism, nor does it depend on your believing that all animals are equal or that all animals have a right to life, nor is it predicated on some highly contentious metaethical theory which you reject. Rather, it is predicated on your beliefs. Simply put, the argument shows that even those of you who are steadfastly committed to valuing humans over nonhumans are nevertheless committed to the immorality of eating meat and other animal products, given your other beliefs

Epistemic Luck

Epistemic luck is a generic notion used to describe any of a number of ways in which it can be accidental, coincidental, or fortuitous that a person has a true belief. For example, one can form a true belief as a result of a lucky guess, as when one believes through guesswork that “C” is the right answer to a multiple-choice question and one’s belief just happens to be correct. One can form a true belief via wishful thinking; for example, an optimist’s belief that it will not rain may luckily turn out to be correct, despite forecasts for heavy rain all day. One can reason from false premises to a belief that coincidentally happens to be true. One can accidentally arrive at a true belief through invalid or fallacious reasoning. And one can fortuitously arrive at a true belief from testimony that was intended to mislead but unwittingly reported the truth. In all of these cases, it is just a matter of luck that the person has a true belief. Until the twenty-first century, there was nearly universal agreement among epistemologists that epistemic luck is incompatible with knowledge. Call this view “the incompatibility thesis.” In light of the incompatibility thesis, epistemic luck presents epistemologists with three distinct but related challenges. The first is that of providing an accurate analysis of knowledge (in terms of individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for “S knows that p,” where ‘S’ represents the knower and ‘p’ represents the proposition known). An adequate analysis of knowledge must succeed in specifying conditions that rule out all instances of knowledge-destroying epistemic luck. The second challenge is to resolve the skeptical paradox that the ubiquity of epistemic luck generates: As will become clear in section 2c, epistemic luck is an all-pervasive phenomenon. Coupling this fact with the incompatibility thesis entails that we have no propositional knowledge. The non-skeptical epistemologist must somehow reconcile the strong intuition that epistemic luck is not compatible with knowledge with the equally evident observation that it must be. The third challenge concerns the special skeptical threat that epistemic luck seems to pose for more reflective forms of knowledge, such as knowing that one knows. Each of these challenges will be explored in the present article

Taking Hunger Seriously

An argument is advanced to show that affluent and moderately affluent people, like you and me, are morally obligated: To provide modest financial support for famine relief organizations and/or other humanitanan organizations working to reduce the amount of unnecessary suffering and death in the world, and To refrain from squandering food that could be fed to humans in situations of food scarcity. Unlike other ethical arguments for the obligation to assist the world’s absolutely poor, my argument is not predicated on any highly contentious ethical theory that you likely reject. Rather, it is predicated on your beliefs. The argument shows that the things you currently believe already commit you to the obligatoriness of helping to reduce malnutrition and famine-related diseases by sending a nominal percentage of your income to famine relief organizations and by not squandering food that could be fed to them. Consistency with your own beliefs implies that to do any less is to be profoundly immoral

Deferred Conditional Discharges – The New Regime

R (on the application of IH) v Secretary of State for the Home Department (1)Secretary of State for Health (2)-and-Mental Health Review Tribunal (1) Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust (2) Appellant C(3) (Interested Parties)[2002] EWCA Civ 646Court of Appeal (15th May 2002) Lord Phillips MR, Dyson LJ, and Jonathan Parker L

A Consideration of the Approach the Mental Health Review Tribunal Should Adopt When Considering the Discharge of the Asymptomatic Patient

Regina v London South and South West Region Mental Health Review Tribunal ex parteStephen MoyleHigh Court (Queen’s Bench Division)Latham JJudgment Given 21st December 1999TLR 10th February 200

The Home Secretary’s Tribunal Referral Powers Following IH

R (on the application of C) v Secretary of State for the Home Department[2002] EWCA Civ 647Court of Appeal (15th May 2002) Lord Phillips MR, Dyson LJ, and Jonathan Parker L

Necessary, but not Sufficient: What Flight Training Organisations Teach is No Longer Adequate for a Demanding Market that Needs ‘Captains Out-of-the-Box\u27

Early 2017 one of the fastest growing low-cost Asian airlines posed a problem to the Aerudite™ consultancy. “We are expanding faster than we can mature our first officers to command. We have no choice but to distil the command knowledge and maturity, traditionally attained through ten years of right-seat osmosis, into three years flat! We don’t plan to recruit MPL first officers. We plan to recruit CIWs - Captains-In-Waiting. And we want you to devise a training course - right now.” To enjoy (or to suffer) such a rate of expansion, this airline ‘sticks to its knitting’ and outsources whatever it can, including self-sponsored pilot training. Aerudite™ provisionally accepted this challenge and convened a team of six consultants ranging from a D.Psych to a test pilot tutor. The conclusion was that ‘captaincy’ is a mindset - not a skillset and that if philosophy can be taught, so can ‘captaincy.\u27 Definitions and KPI’s were established, and Aerudite™ worked with a Flight Training Organisation (FTO) and a Type Rating Training Organisation (TRTO) to develop an extramural curriculum linked with national legislative requirements to create a ‘zero-to-hero’ solution which added a month to total training time. The training sequence is PPL/CPL/IR/Type Rating. ‘Command thinking’ commences pre-PPL with threat and error management training. Single crew CRM is employed throughout the PPL where stalls become ‘undesired states’ - with minimal rudder recoveries. All Aerudite™ ‘training plug ins’ are now being beta tested on students to be ready for submission to NTAS in July 2017