Right to academic freedom is far below right to life

IN support of their case for destructive research on human embryos, Dr Tom Moore and Prof Tom Cotter make use of what they call ethical pragmatism.

This reminded me of a joke going the rounds when I was a young philosophy student at UCC. If we lost money, the joke went, we should pray that it wouldn’t be found by an ethicist as the ethicist would easily come up with a good reason for keeping it.

No doubt a slur on our learned and upright teachers but with the advent of ethical pragmatism perhaps no longer a joke. Of course, being human, we often tried to come up with a satisfactory justification for a morally problematic course of action, but we called this rationalisation. Ethical pragmatism certainly has a more impressive ring to it.