What Are the Essential Features of Ethical Advertising?

Advertising is one of those industries that is strongly associated with unethical or dodgy practices, preying on people’s emotions and insecurities to get them to spend money on things they don’t need, on things that are irrelevant to genuine happiness. Researchers from the University of Warwick have also drawn a link between advertising spending in…

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The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin: An Analogy for Antinatalism

The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas is a philosophical short story by the sci-fi writer Ursula K. Le Guin, originally published in 1973 and then re-republished in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (1975), a collection of Le Guin’s short stories. This particular short story (which you can read here) describes the utopian city of Omelas,…

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On Antinatalism and Depression

Antinatalism is the view that procreation is morally wrong. Its most well-known current defender is David Benatar, a professor of philosophy at the University of Capetown, who explicated this moral position on procreation in his 2006 book Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence. However, antinatalism long predates Benatar’s work. Antinatalism has…

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The Ethical Justification for ‘Overreacting’ to the COVID-19 Outbreak

The COVID-19 pandemic is an interesting ethical problem, given the outbreak’s susceptibility to worsen or improve based on individual decision-making. Clearly, government advice and country-wide lockdowns are intended to minimise harm and make it easier for health systems to save the lives of the vulnerable, but in many countries – like the UK, where I…

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Freelancing and the Ethical Issue of Late Payments

Getting paid late is the bane of a freelancer’s life. From personal experience, I know how frustrating, stressful, and tiring it can be to submit an invoice, not know when it will be paid and then – if payment doesn’t come in after a month – to have to chase the invoice, not even just once,…

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