Moral Dreams and Practical Realities

History of Industrial Biotransformations – Dreams and Realities

Throughout the history of mankind, microorganisms have been of enormous social and economic importance. Without even being aware of their existence, very early on in history man was using them in the production of food and beverages. The Sumerians and Babylonians were practising the brewing of beer before 6000BC, references to wine making can be found in the Book of Genesis and the Egyptians us...

Precision Farming: Dreams and Realities for Indian Agriculture

Human kind invented agriculture 10,000 years ago. After a long mile, nowhere in the world has agriculture made an impact as it has in India. The economy of the second most populous country in the world is inextricably linked to the pulse of its agricultural success or failure. The green revolution in the late 60’s saw the country through a period of what could otherwise have been the worst fami...

Moral Intuition, Moral Theory, and Practical Ethics

Practical Reasons and Moral ‘Ought’

Morality is a source of reasons for action, what philosophers call practical reasons. Kantians say that it ‘gives’ reasons to everyone. We can even think of moral requirements as amounting to particularly strong or stringent reasons, in an effort to demystify deontological views like Kant’s, with its insistence on inescapable or ‘binding’ moral requirements or ‘oughts.’1 When we say that someon...

Moral pedagogy and practical ethics.

Online science and engineering ethics (SEE) education can support appropriate goals for SEE and the highly interactive pedagogy that attains those goals. Recent work in moral psychology suggests pedagogical goals for SEE education that are surprisingly similar to goals enunciated by several panels in SEE. Classroom-based interactive study of SEE cases is a suitable method to achieve these goals...