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Ethics Untangled

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/ethicsEthics

society & culture philosophy

All Episodes

46:08

39. How Should We Motivate Cosmopolitanism? With Luke...

Ethics Untangled ·

2025/05/19

Luke Ulas from the University of Sheffield and Josh Hobbs from the University of Leeds are both interested in cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism is a name used for a few different political ideas, but the core thought, according to the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, is "the idea that all human beings, regardless of their political affiliation, are (or can and should be) citizens in a single community." One might think it's an idea that's in retreat, at least in some countries, today. Tha...

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43:53

38. Should We Be Using AI to Predict Patient...

Ethics Untangled ·

2025/05/05

This episode is part of what's becoming a bit of an informal series of Ethics Untangled episodes, on ethical issues relating to artificial intelligence applications. The particular application we're looking at this time comes from a healthcare setting, and is called a Patient Preference Predictor. It's a proposed way of using an algorithmic system to predict what a patient's preferences would be concerning their healthcare, in situations where they're incapacitated and unable to tell us what ...

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53:04

37. What Is Relationship Anarchy? With Natasha...

Ethics Untangled ·

2025/04/21

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 havi...

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52:53

36. Is Drag Problematic? With Simon Kirchin

Ethics Untangled ·

2025/04/07

Drag is a type of performance which uses clothing and makeup to imitate and often exaggerate female gender signifiers and gender roles. It's an activity with a long and varied history, and continues to be a very popular form of entertainment, as attested by TV shows such as Ru Paul's Drag Race. It's also distinctive in having faced criticism from several different political directions, including conservative, transgender and feminist perspectives. In this conversation with Simon Kirchin, who ...

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47:36

35. What Should We Do About Disruptive Speech? With...

Ethics Untangled ·

2025/03/17

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 a...

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47:52

34. Is AI Stealing Artists' Labour? With Trystan Goetze

Ethics Untangled ·

2025/03/03

Recent developments in AI, including image generation and large language models, have created huge excitement and opened up some really interesting possibilities. But they've also attracted significant criticisms, not least of which is the accusation that they involve large scale theft. This is because they are trained on huge datasets that include the original work of many people, who go uncredited and are unlikely to have given consent to their work being used in this way. Focusing on AI ar...

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45:46

33. Is Internet Access a Human Right? With Merten...

Ethics Untangled ·

2025/02/17

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 importanc...

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46:07

32. Where's the Harm in Health and Safety? With Simon...

Ethics Untangled ·

2025/02/03

After time in the army and the fire service, Simon Cassin became a health and safety professional, and is now the managing director of a training and development consultancy called Ouch. Unusually for someone working in health and safety, he's dedicated some serious study to understanding the deep philosophical ideas underlying the profession, focusing particularly on the idea of harm. When do consequences caused or made worse by work become harm? What are an organisation's responsibil...

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40:16

31. Why is Sex Work So Gendered? With Natasha McKeever

Ethics Untangled ·

2025/01/20

*CONTENT WARNING: This podcast contains some frank discussion of sex and sex work.*While there are all kinds of sex work, by far the most common scenario involves a man paying a woman for sex. It is, in other words, a highly gendered activity. Why? It turns out the answer to this question isn't as obvious as it might at first seem. It turns out, in fact, that there are multiple possible explanations, some of which fit better with the evidence than others. Natasha McKeever has been examining t...

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49:07

30. What Should Doctors Be Doing With Your Data? With...

Ethics Untangled ·

2025/01/06

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 ...

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51:50

29. What Is Touching Through? With Robbie Morgan and...

Ethics Untangled ·

2024/12/02

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 pl...

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47:25

28. What's Wrong With Conspiracy Theories? With...

Ethics Untangled ·

2024/11/18

Conspiracy theories seem to be an increasingly prevalent feature of public discourse. No sooner has some significant event taken place, but the internet is full of alternative explanations for that event, involving hidden and nefarious decision-makers. These theories run the gamut from the wildly outlandish to the somewhat plausible, and your view may differ on where the line should be drawn. There are a number of questions about the rationality of conspiracy theories - whether we should reje...

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47:55

27. How Do You Assure AI in the NHS? With Adam Byfield

Ethics Untangled ·

2024/11/04

Adam Byfield is Principal Technical Assurance Specialist at NHS England. His job involves providing ethical assurance for technical systems which are used in the NHS, including those which employ artificial intelligence. It's well known that AI, as well as providing some really exciting benefits, raises some distinctive ethical issues, but it was really interesting to talk to someone who is at the sharp end of trying to address these issues. How do you test AI systems in a healthcare setting?...

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39:52

26. Should We Be Worried About Teledildonics? With...

Ethics Untangled ·

2024/10/21

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 u...

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47:39

25. Should Lawyers be Fighting for a Cause? With Alex...

Ethics Untangled ·

2024/10/07

Alex Batesmith has had a fascinating career. After beginning as a criminal barrister in Leeds, he went on to work as a United Nations prosecutor in Cambodia and Kosovo, working on cases involving genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. He's now a legal scholar working at Leeds University, and has been researching the values and motivations of international criminal lawyers. In this conversation we discussed the idea of 'cause lawyering'. Cause lawyers are lawyers who practice law pr...

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51:10

24. Is Your Gender Like Your Name? With Graham...

Ethics Untangled ·

2024/09/16

Gender is, of course, one of the most contentious ethical and political topics you can find at the moment. There are numerous practical and policy debates - for example those relating to medicine, prisons and sport - which can seem completely intractable, and which provoke the strongest possible opinions on all sides.Sitting behind these practical questions, however, is a cluster of theoretical questions, which can be summarised as questions about what gender actually is. Graham Bex-Priestley...

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34:19

23. What Is Trust? With Christopher McClean

Ethics Untangled ·

2024/09/02

Chris McClean is the global lead for digital ethics at Avanade, a large tech innovation and consulting firm. He's also studying for his PhD at the University of Leeds, spending his time thinking about risk and trust relationships, especially in cases with a significant power imbalance, and where the people making the decisions are different from those exposed to the risk resulting from those decisions.At the end of this conversation, we explored some practical questions related to Chris's day...

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49:27

22. How Should We Think About Informal Political...

Ethics Untangled ·

2024/07/15

For this episode, I spoke to Wendy Salkin, a philosophy professor at Stanford University, about informal political representatives: people who speak or act on behalf of groups in the political sphere without being elected to do so. Familiar examples include Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Malala Yousafzai, and Greta Thunberg.Informal political representatives raise awareness of issues and bring about political change, often achieving things that people with more formal power cannot or do no...

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39:16

21. Should We Be Worried About Academic Freedom and...

Ethics Untangled ·

2024/07/01

In May 2023, the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill received Royal Assent after two years of debate in Parliament. The new Act will strengthen the statutory duty already imposed on English higher education providers by previous legislation to secure freedom of speech within the law. Arif Ahmed, a former philosophy professor at Cambridge University, has been appointed as a Director overseeing free speech at the Office for Students, informally known as the 'Free Speech Tsar'. Free s...

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49:25

20. What's the Meaning of Life? With Predrag Cicovacki

Ethics Untangled ·

2024/06/17

Never let it be said that we don't tackle the big questions on this podcast. This week we're discussing no less a subject than the meaning of life, with Predrag Cicovacki.Predrag is Professor of Philosophy at the College of the Holy Cross (USA), where he has been teaching since 1991. He has served as a visiting professor in Germany, Russia, Luxembourg, Serbia, France, and India. He's interested in problems of good and evil, violence and nonviolence, philosophy of war and peace, and ethics.In ...

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97 results

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