TrueSciPhi

Podcast Profile: Practical Ethics Bites

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9 episodes
2014 to 2015
Median: 18 minutes
Collection: Philosophy

Description (podcaster-provided):

Themes and summary (AI-generated based on podcaster-provided show and episode descriptions):

This podcast offers short, classroom-oriented interviews on practical ethics aimed at UK school pupils studying philosophy. Each instalment features an academic associated with Oxford’s Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, discussing a focused moral question in an accessible format.

Across the episodes, the podcast concentrates on applied ethical controversies where individual rights, social norms, and public policy intersect. A significant strand deals with sexuality and sexual orientation, including questions about whether orientation is chosen and how ethical arguments relate to claims about what is “natural.” Another set of discussions centres on bioethics and reproductive ethics, such as the moral status of embryos, the permissibility of genetic engineering in early human development, abortion as a conflict of rights and interests, and the ethics of selecting a child’s sex.

The series also addresses end-of-life decision-making, considering the ethical and legal dimensions of euthanasia. Beyond medical and sexual ethics, it engages with broader moral and political questions, including whether war can ever be just and how violence might be ethically justified or condemned.

Alongside these applied topics, the podcast introduces core philosophical frameworks and concepts used to analyse moral problems, including virtue ethics as a major ethical theory and the relationship between free will and moral responsibility—what it means to be blameworthy for one’s actions. Overall, the content combines real-world ethical dilemmas with the tools philosophers use to evaluate them.