The idea of structural injustice - broadly, injustice that results from social structures rather than from the wrongdoing of individuals - is something that has a lot of currency nowadays, but it pres...

One of the many technological advances that have been made in recent years is the ability of computers to synthesise people's voices to a very high standard. Voice synthesis can produce new, entirely ...

There are many children in the world who either do not have parents, or do not have parents who can look after them, and who would benefit greatly from being placed with adoptive families. Some ethici...

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 ...

Content warning: This episode contains frank discussion of death and of various forms of body disposal, which some might find distressing.Sarah Carter-Walshaw, Lecturer in Applied and Inter-Disciplina...

Simon Kirchin on free speech, comedy, and publicly engaged philosophy

Is it ever morally acceptable to keep pets? While most of us take pet-keeping for granted and think of it as a source of affection, companionship, and care, it is possible to see it very differently. ...

Can organisations themselves be trustworthy, or is trustworthiness only a quality of individuals? This question matters for how we think about public institutions, businesses, and charities – and abou...

In our final post for Dementia Action Week 2026, Dr Andrew Stanners reflects on Matilda Carter’s work to consider how we could best care for people with dementia. Andrew is a consultant physician for ...

In this episode, we’re asking whether people can really have genuine emotional reactions to artificial intelligence. Many of us already feel things towards AIs – whether that’s frustration with a chat...

In this episode, we’re looking at the ethics of long COVID and the ways it is reshaping how we think about disability, care, and community. Long COVID has left millions of people living with chronic s...

In this episode, I'm talking to Matilda Carter, a lecturer in Applied Ethics at IDEA The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds, about the ethics of dementia care, and asking what justice requires f...

In medical ethics, competence (sometimes called decision-making capacity) refers to a person’s ability to make informed choices about their own healthcare. It is a central concept because respect for ...

AI-generated content is a familiar and increasingly prevalent feature of social media. Users post text, video, audio and images which have been created by AI, sometimes being clear that this is what t...

Josh Hobbs is back in this episode for his second appearance. Again the subject is political. This time we're discussing whether we should all be activists. More specifically, does the existence of gl...

It’s still better to do something rather than nothing.

Josh Hobbs is back in this episode for his second appearance. Again the subject is political. This time we're discussing whether we should all be activists. More specifically, does the existence of gl...

The New Yorker’s editors and critics choose this year’s essential reads in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction.

Imagine this: You’re walking past a shallow pond and spot a toddler thrashing around in the water, in obvious danger of drowning. You look around for her parents, but nobody is there. You’re the only ...

A really interesting conversation with Simon Meisch this week. Simon is a Senior Lecturer for Applied Ethics at the Ethics Centre of the University of Tubingen, and until recently was also a visiting ...

One afternoon, having just clocked-in, I sat myself down next to a resident of the care home I worked at in the mid-2010s, and asked her what she thought about the programme she was watching on TV.

In the problem of dirty hands, agents must choose between two incompatible moral demands, thereby inevitably violating an important moral value. While dirty-hands cases can arise in all areas of life,...

Words such as 'woke', 'emotional labour' and 'gaslighting' get bandied around a lot, especially in online discourse. And as they get bandied around, their meaning can change over time. Of course, chan...

Epistemic injustice is a broad category of injustice relating to knowledge. It can involve people from marginalised or oppressed groups being excluded, silenced, misrepresented, or not taken seriously...

Gossip is an ethically interesting phenomenon when humans do it. It creates a bond between the people doing the gossiping, but it does so by implicitly excluding the person being gossiped about, and c...

Adam Byfield is a Principal Technical Assurance Specialist at NHS England. After his previous appearance on the podcast, discussing providing ethical assurance for AI applications in healthcare, we we...