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 (...)

Was Margaret Thatcher’s Monetarism Necessary?

By Brian Griffiths

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 (...)

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 (...)

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 (...)

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 (...)

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 (...)

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 (...)

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 (...)

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 (...)

Virtues of Growth and Restraint

By Lyndon Drake

In this final article, I will draw from two stories in the Bible that will be well-known to many readers, to give an example of how those who read the Bible as scripture can draw from those stories in developing modern economic ethics. The first story is of the Garden (...)

The Task of Modern Economic Ethics

By Lyndon Drake

As I suggested in my previous article, my preferred way to read the biblical texts is to identify in them a particular kind of method, rather than precise prescriptions. In this article, I will suggest some specific aspects of method in modern, theologically-informed economic ethics. Above all, I suggest that (...)