Ethics Untangled
Jim Baxter
Ethics Untangled is a series of conversations about the ethical issues that affect all of us, with academics who have spent some time thinking about them. It is brought to you by the IDEA Centre, a specialist unit for teaching, research, training and consultancy in Applied Ethics at the University of Leeds.
Find out more about IDEA, including our Masters programmes in Healthcare Ethics and Applied and Professional Ethics, our PhDs and our consultancy services, here:
ahc.leeds.ac.uk/ethics
Ethics Untangled is edited by Mark Smith at Leeds Media Services.
Music is by Kate Wood.
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Top 10 Ethics Untangled Episodes
Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best Ethics Untangled episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to Ethics Untangled for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite Ethics Untangled episode by adding your comments to the episode page.
12/02/24 • 51 min
Today's question is one which you might not immediately recognise as important or, so to speak, pressing. The question is, what is touching through? It also might not be immediately apparent why this is an ethical question. As Robbie Morgan from the IDEA Centre and Will Hornett from the University of Cambridge explain, however, it's a metaphysical question which has ethical implications. For instance, since assault is defined as unwanted touching, we need to know whether touching has taken place before we can decide whether an assault has taken place. Then there may be cases where, if touching has taken place, it’s taken place through something, and these cases may be tricky to adjudicate. Anyway, in this conversation Robbie and Will introduce some possibilities for what touching through is, before arguing for their preferred explanation. You can decide if you think they’ve put their finger on it. So to speak.
Book your place at our public event with Gavin Esler, "Dead Cats, Strategic Lying and Truth Decay", here.
Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.
Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/
01/06/25 • 49 min
Do you know what medical information is held about you? Do you know who is allowed to have access to it? Doctors collect lots of data - often quite personal - about their patients. This data needs to be collected, stored, and shared, sometimes quite widely, so that the patients can receive effective care, but also so that the medical profession can better understand diseases, how they spread and how to treat them. In the UK, there is plenty of guidance for GPs about what information they can store, who should have access to it, and when. In fact, according to Jon Fistein, a doctor himself as well as an academic looking at the ethics of health data, there's too much guidance, it's too complex, and it's not always consistent. As a result, most GPs don't really understand what the requirements are, let alone patients. We talked about what can be done about this, and why the traditional idea of patient information being kept 'in the strictest confidence' isn't really going to cut it in today's data-driven healthcare context.
Book your place at our public event with Gavin Esler, "Dead Cats, Strategic Lying and Truth Decay", here.
Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.
Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/
04/21/25 • 53 min
Relationship anarchy is a radical approach to relationships that goes beyond just rejecting traditional monogamy. Relationship anarchists believe that relationships should never involve having power over each other, in the form of holding each other to obligations. So, for example, relationship anarchists reject the idea of restricting one's partner from entering into any form of intimacy with anyone, even with mutual friends. They also reject any hierarchy of relationships - for example having a central relationship with one person whose agreement is needed for you to have relationships with other people. For relationship anarchists, all relationships should be approached individually and no relationship should involve placing restrictions on any partner. Natasha McKeever, and Luke Brunning, all based at the IDEA Centre, have been looking critically at the ethics of relationship anarchy, and I spoke to all three of them in a wide-ranging conversation about this fascinating topic.
Some links to further reading:
A 'Short Instructional Manifesto for Relationship Anarchy'
An article by Aleksander Sørlie, Ole Martin Moen on The Ethics of Relationship Anarchy.
A book about relationship anarchy by by Juan-Carlos Pérez-Cortés.
Book your place at our public event with Gavin Esler, "Dead Cats, Strategic Lying and Truth Decay", here.
Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.
Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/
33. Is Internet Access a Human Right? With Merten Reglitz
Ethics Untangled
02/17/25 • 45 min
When I was doing my undergraduate degree back in the 90s, the Internet was a bit of a novelty. It was fun to play with, and you could see theoretically how it was probably going to be quite important. I'm not sure I would have predicted how completely it now pervades every area of human life, though: work, civil society, leisure and social interactions. There's still, however, a significant digital divide. Not everyone has easy access, or any access to the internet, and its systemic importance in all of these areas means this is more of a disadvantage than it's ever been.
Merten Reglitz, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham, thinks it's time we recognised internet access not just as a significant good, but as a human right.
Here is Merten's recently published book on the topic, an overview of it and an article that sets out the book’s main defence of the idea of a new right.
An article and another article opposing the idea that internet is a human right.
The latest figures on global connectivity from the ITU.
Freedom House’s ‘Freedom of the Net’ reports on internet freedom.
Book your place at our public event with Gavin Esler, "Dead Cats, Strategic Lying and Truth Decay", here.
Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.
Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/
35. What Should We Do About Disruptive Speech? With Carl Fox
Ethics Untangled
03/17/25 • 47 min
Misinformation, fake news, hate speech, satire, the arts, political protest. These are all examples of what you might call disruptive speech. A free speech absolutist would say that all of these forms of speech should be tolerated, if not welcomed. On the other hand, it does look as though some of them are disruptive in a good way, and others are disruptive in a bad way. But can we tell the good from the bad in a way that isn't just politically partisan? Carl Fox, Lecturer in Applied Ethics at the IDEA Centre, thinks we can, and that we should treat different forms of disruptive speech differently.
Here is Carl's paper on the subject in the Journal of Social Philosophy.
Carl co-edited The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Media Ethics with fellow Ethics Untangled alumnus Joe Saunders, which contains a chapter by Carl on satire and stability.
For further reading, there's Amy Olberding's book on manners and civility.
In the interview, Carl mentions a paper on lying by Don Fallis. That's here:
Fallis, D. 2009. “What Is Lying?” Journal of Philosophy 106(1): 29–56.
And then there's the classic text on freedom and its limits, John Stuart Mill's On Liberty:
Mill, J. S. 1974. On Liberty. London: Penguin.
Book your place at our public event with Gavin Esler, "Dead Cats, Strategic Lying and Truth Decay", here.
Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.
Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/
18. Do the Dead Have Rights? With Joseph Bowen
Ethics Untangled
05/20/24 • 42 min
Ethical questions about the dead are frequently interesting, puzzling, surprising, and weird. All of these things become clear in this conversation with Dr Joseph Bowen. Joe is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Leeds, specialising in moral, political, and legal philosophy. As well as whether the dead have rights, his research focuses on the nature of rights and directed duties, the justifications for and constraints on harming, the nature and scope of duties to rescue, and just war theory.
Here's Joe:
https://ahc.leeds.ac.uk/philosophy/staff/4794/dr-joseph-bowen
https://joseph-bowen.weebly.com/
He's written about whether the dead have rights in this paper:
Bowen, J. 2022. ‘The Interest Theory of Rights at the Margins: Posthumous Rights’, Without Trimmings: The Legal, Moral, and Political Philosophy of Matthew Kramer, Visa Kurki & Mark McBride (eds), (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
And here are some other readings which might be of interest:
- Jeff McMahan, ‘Death and the Value of Life’ Ethics 99, 1 (1998), pp. 32-61.
- Cécile Fabre, ‘Posthumous Rights’, in Matthew H. Kramer, and others (eds), The Legacy of H.L.A. Hart: Legal, Political, and Moral Philosophy (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2008).
- David Boonin, Dead Wrong: The Ethics of Posthumous Harm (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2019).
- Ben Bradley, Well-Being and Death (New York; Oxford University Press, 2009).
Book your place at our public event with Gavin Esler, "Dead Cats, Strategic Lying and Truth Decay", here.
Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.
Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/
03/04/24 • 42 min
Jules Holroyd is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Sheffield. Her teaching and research focuses on understanding the nature of, and addressing, injustices. In this conversation, she turns her attention to praise.
Philosophers have given a lot of attention to blame in the past, but not so much to praise. This might be because praise looks fairly unproblematic on the whole. Praising people is nice! It boosts people's self-confidence, strengthens social bonds, and if we occasionally praise people who don't deserve our praise, who cares? According to Jules Holroyd, a philosopher working at the University of Sheffield, while this attitude is probably right overall, there can be instances in which we praise people in ways that are morally problematic, harmful even, and we should be on the lookout for these cases. In this conversation, we talked about some of the moral norms that govern praise - when it is and isn't appropriate to praise someone - and in particular we looked at the ways in which our acts of praising can signal a commitment to wider social norms, some of which we might not want to endorse.
Jules's paper which forms the basis of this conversation is here:
Holroyd, J. (2021) Oppressive Praise. Feminist Philosophy Quarterly. https://ojs.lib.uwo.ca/index.php/fpq/article/view/13967
She also has this more recent paper on praise:
Holroyd, J. (2023) Proleptic praise: a social function analysis. Noûs. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nous.12482
Here are some of the papers Jules refers to in the episode:
Coates, Justin. (2019). Gratitude and Resentment: Some Asymmetries. In R. Roberts & D. Telech (Eds.) The Moral Psychology of Gratitude(pp. 160–175). London: Rowman & Littlefield.
Jeppsson, S., & Brandenburg, D. (2022). Patronizing Praise. The Journal of Ethics, 26, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-022-09409-2
Khader, S., & Lindauer, M. (2020). The “Daddy Dividend”: The Gender Division of Labour and Regression Towards Patriarchy.APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy,19(2), 6–8. https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.apaonline.org/ resource/collection/D03EBDAB-82D7-4B28-B897-C050FDC1ACB4/FeminismV19n2.pdf
Lippert-Rasmussen, K. (2022). Praising without standing. The Journal of Ethics, 26,229–246. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10892-021-09374-2
Shoemaker, D., & Vargas, M. (2019). Moral torch fishing: A signaling theory of blame. Noûs, 55, 581–602. https:// doi.org/10.1111/nous.12316
Book your place at our public event with Gavin Esler, "Dead Cats, Strategic Lying and Truth Decay", here.
Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.
Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/
9. What's Wrong (or Right) With Monogamy? With Luke Brunning
Ethics Untangled
12/04/23 • 44 min
Traditionally, monogamy has been the form of romantic relationship which people have been assumed to want to pursue. But there has recently been a growing tendency among some to question this assumption, and instead to pursue polyamorous or other forms of romantic attachment. And this tendency has been reflected in philosophical debates too. Some have gone so far as to question whether monogamous relationships can be defended at all, prompting others to think more deeply about what the distinctive value of monogamous relationships, if any, might be. I spoke to Luke Brunning, a Lecturer in Applied Ethics at the IDEA Centre, and we explored some of this fascinating ethical territory.
Luke Brunning is a Lecturer in Applied Ethics at the IDEA Centre, and part of the Centre for Love, Sex and Relationships. His main research interests are romantic relationships, the emotions, applied ethics and moral life.
Luke has a book on Romantic Agency coming out in May 2024, and available to order here:
https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=romantic-agency-loving-well-in-modern-life--9781509551521
... and his previous book on monogamy is here: https://thamesandhudson.com/does-monogamy-work-9780500295694
He was interviewed about that book here: https://mashable.com/article/does-monogamy-work-luke-brunning-book-interview
He's also written this article (freely available) on jealousy: https://aeon.co/essays/love-without-jealousy-consider-the-benefits-of-compersion
Finally, he also recommends this book on monogamy by Carrie Jenkins:
https://www.routledge.com/Why-Its-OK-to-Not-Be-Monogamous/Clardy/p/book/9781032449784
Book your place at our public event with Gavin Esler, "Dead Cats, Strategic Lying and Truth Decay", here.
Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.
Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/
LLM8. MM McCabe on Love and Desire in Plato’s Symposium [Leeds Love Month special episode]
Ethics Untangled
03/18/24 • 28 min
A special episode from the Leeds Love Month live talks series, featuring Professor MM McCabe on love and desire in Plato’s symposium.
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/mm-mccabe
Book your place at our public event with Gavin Esler, "Dead Cats, Strategic Lying and Truth Decay", here.
Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.
Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/
26. Should We Be Worried About Teledildonics? With Robbie Arrell
Ethics Untangled
10/21/24 • 39 min
Should we be worried about teledildonics?
*CONTENT WARNING. This episode contains frank descriptions of sexual practices of various kinds, and discussion of sexual assault and rape, including rape by deception.*
Teledildonics is a word that refers to the use of networked electronic sex toys to facilitate sexual or quasi-sexual interactions between people at a distance. It's a relatively new type of technology, but one that is becoming more advanced. Clearly, it's a technology that opens up interesting new possibilities! But Robbie Arrell, Lecturer in Applied Ethics at the IDEA Centre, thinks it also raises some serious concerns, not all of which have yet been fully understood. In this conversation, Robbie outlines some of these worries, and begins to consider how we might address them.
Some further reading:
- Robbie's chapter entitled "Sex and Emergent Technologies" in the Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Sex and Sexuality in which he discusses teledildonics: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003286523-49/sex-emergent-technologies-robbie-arrell.
- Robert Sparrow and Lauren Karas's paper "Teledildonics and Rape by Deception" that Robbie makes reference to in the podcast: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17579961.2020.1727097
Book your place at our public event with Gavin Esler, "Dead Cats, Strategic Lying and Truth Decay", here.
Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.
Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/
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FAQ
How many episodes does Ethics Untangled have?
Ethics Untangled currently has 75 episodes available.
What topics does Ethics Untangled cover?
The podcast is about Society & Culture, Podcasts and Philosophy.
What is the most popular episode on Ethics Untangled?
The episode title '11. What Should We Do About the Beauty Ideal? With Heather Widdows' is the most popular.
What is the average episode length on Ethics Untangled?
The average episode length on Ethics Untangled is 39 minutes.
How often are episodes of Ethics Untangled released?
Episodes of Ethics Untangled are typically released every 13 days, 23 hours.
When was the first episode of Ethics Untangled?
The first episode of Ethics Untangled was released on Mar 16, 2023.
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