Blog Archives - Page 3 of 11 - Centre for Enterprise Markets and Ethics

August 4, 2024 Blog

John Kroencke: Don’t Let Hazy Environmental Thinking Cloud Pragmatic Solutions

As part of the new government’s effort to raise the number of houses built and spur economic growth, Labour ministers plan to allow homebuilders to receive planning permission for projects currently impacted by nutrient neutrality rules that require new construction in areas with high levels of nutrients in waterways to not contribute additional nutrients. The...

July 29, 2024 Blog

Neil Jordan: Selling Bullets and Beers – A Matter of Responsibility

The company American Rounds is supplying vending machines from which gun owners can buy bullets, with machines currently available in food shops in the states of Alabama, Oklahoma and Texas. There are plans to expand this provision to states where hunting is popular, such as Louisiana and Colorado. Customers simply select the ammunition that they...

July 15, 2024 Blog

Brian Griffiths: Was Margaret Thatcher’s Monetarism Necessary?

This article on Thatcher’s Monetarism and Timothy Lankester’s ‘Inside Thatcher’s Monetarism Experiment’ originally appeared at TheArticle Sir Timothy Lankester has had a distinguished career of public service. He has served as Permanent Secretary at the Overseas Development Administration and the Department of Education; Director of the School of Oriental and African Studies; President of Corpus...

July 8, 2024 Blog

Patrick Riordan: Common Goods and AI

When someone like me from an older generation is confronted with a new piece of technology, inevitably we must turn to a younger person for help. What is described as ‘user friendly’ is usually so only to those who are already familiar with the ways of the machines. ‘Well, they have grown up with the...

June 27, 2024 Blog

Neil Jordan: The Obesity Market: A Question of Character?

Are drugs like semaglutide a quick fix, or might they be opportunities to practise virtue? Obesity is thought to affect over 800 million adults worldwide and according to the World Health Organisation, has tripled since 1975. Indeed, estimates are that half of the world’s population will be overweight or obese by 2035 and very few...

June 10, 2024 Blog

Martin Schlag: Adam Smith’s Virtue of Prudence in E-Commercial Society

The full article is available here Adam Smith’s virtue ethics is of enduring relevance within contemporary business and societal discourse, also in the realm of e-commerce. Despite the widespread recognition of Smith’s contributions to economic theory and business ethics, there has been a gap in the exploration of Smith’s virtue ethics in the context of...

May 17, 2024 Blog

Philip Booth: The Importance of Ownership – Protecting the Environment from Plunder

This blog has also been published by the Catholic Social Thought website at St Mary’s University, where there are also many other useful resources on Christian social thought. Despite the strong interest in property rights in Catholic social thought and teaching, their importance is rarely linked to the topic of the preservation of the...

May 10, 2024 Blog

Neil Jordan: Artificial General Intelligence and Reasoning

Reasoning Robots It was announced recently that developers of artificial intelligence models at Meta are working on the next stage of ‘artificial general intelligence’, with a view to eliminating mistakes and moving closer to human-level cognition. This will allow chatbots and virtual assistants to complete sequences of related tasks and was described as the beginning...

April 8, 2024 Blog

Neil Jordan: The Moral Argument(s) against Driverless Cars

On Saturday, February 10th, in Chinatown in San Francisco, a crowd of people attacked and burnt a driverless car operated by Waymo (Google’s self-driving car project). This represents an escalation of activism against autonomous vehicles led by a group calling itself the Safe Street Rebels, who generally seek to disable driverless cars by placing a...

March 8, 2024 Blog

Andrei Rogobete: AI Will Continue to Make Mistakes – It’s How we Respond that Matters

Most of us have probably witnessed the flurry of news coverage surrounding Google’s Gemini and its blunders in generative imaging – leading incumbent CEO Sundar Pitchai to admit that, ‘I know that some of its responses have offended our users and shown bias – to be clear, that’s completely unacceptable and we got it wrong’...