Secretary of State for Justice Shabana Mahmood is reportedly looking into a potential ‘national rollout of voluntary chemical castration for sex offenders’. The proposal is one of the recommendations outlined in the recently published Independent Sentencing Review led by former Lord Chancellor David Gauke, commissioned to investigate ‘the prison overcrowding crisis and to consider alternative| Practical Ethics
By Dr Jeremy Gauntlett-Gilbert – student on the MSt Practical Ethics programme The advent of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence has opened up new possibilities for health research. Specifically, these techniques could be let loose on ‘big data’, such as the collective data of healthcare organisations (including the NHS), and would likely reveal new insights| Practical Ethics
You might have seen the headlines: Colossal Biosciences claims to have brought back the dire wolf. Except, it's not quite a direct resurrection. What Colossal actually created are genetically engineered proxies: grey wolves modified to have some dire wolf traits. I wondered if the news might renew interest in the ethics of “de-extinction” and perhaps| Practical Ethics
Author: Dr César Palacios-Gonzalez Discussions about maternal health and rights in Mexico tend to focus on health outcomes and access to healthcare. Academics and activists have long campaigned for the government to invest more resources in maternal health. Unfortunately, healthcare provision for women who want to have a child and are struggling to conceive hasn’t received enough| Practical Ethics
This year, we hosted the sixth edition of our annual Practical Ethics and Responsibility Competition (PERC). We received 42 entries to the video competition, and though we had many great entries, four finalists emerged as our winning teams, and travelled to Oxford for a day of ethics and debate, supported by their teachers. Our four teams were| Practical Ethics
What makes health ‘global’? This is the question I have addressed in a recent article in the journal Developing World Bioethics. I am afraid, however, that I don’t have an answer. Nor was answering the aim of the article. After all, many definitions of ‘global health’ exist in the literature and most of them are| Practical Ethics
Graduate Highly Commended paper in the 2025 National Uehiro Oxford Essay Prize in Practical Ethics. By Edward Lamb. During the 2024 Paris Olympics, the inclusion of Dutch beach volleyball player Steven van de Velde generated serious controversy. Van de Velde had previously been sentenced to four years in British jail, convicted of child rape.[1] After| Practical Ethics
What this post explores: The disconnect between philosophy, empirical research, and policy in practical ethics Initial experiments using language models to bridge these gaps Case study: Using Claude to extract empirical claims and policy implications from my own co-authored paper Limitations of this approach and questions for further exploration At its best, practical ethics addresses| Practical Ethics