Public service announcement: I’ve turned off Feedburner redirection for the weblog. If you’re subscribed to the Atom feed via a feedburner.com or feedburner.google.com Atom/RSS URL, it will redirect you for a short while and then switch off, so please do ensure you're using the http://rfjseddon.net/log/atom/1 feed URL.

Here are some recent book titles: Philosophy After Hiroshima (2009); Moral Philosophy After 9/11 (2005); Ethics for a Broken World: Imagining Philosophy After Catastrophe (2011); The Contract of Mutual Indifference: Political Philosophy After the Holocaust (1999); Ethics After the Holocaust: Perspectives, Critiques, and Responses (1999); The Double Binds of Ethics After the Holocaust: Salvaging the Fragments …

I’ve been correcting the typesetters’ proofs for Getting ‘Virtual’ Wrongs Right, which is basically an extended gripe at the way in which loose talk of ‘virtual murder’ and the like managed to migrate from tabloid headlines to ethics papers. (The final, typeset version will be paywalled somewhere; I’m more sanguine than usual about this aspect of …

Illegible handwriting may be commonplace, but one normally thinks of asemic writing, and of pseudobiblia, as exotic and maturely experimental and vaguely avant garde. Then again...

I thought I’d use some of this server’s spare resources to help further the good of humanity, by volunteering them for number-crunching on Berkeley’s BOINC programme, which is supposed to aid distributed research efforts by unobtrusively making use of idle system resources. Unfortunately, things didn’t quite work out.

ddate × Positivity = pdate

Remember the digital peacocks? I made more images like those shortly afterwards, but I never did get around to doing anything with them. Until now.

...of the heads which purportedly should roll at the Crown Prosecution Service: if our sovereign parliament passes a confused, misconceived law reflecting a prurient interest in people’s sexuality, then it might be thought an act of dutiful consistency for the C.P.S. to wield it in a confused, misconceived fashion reflecting a prurient interest in people’s sexuality. …

Some towns promote themselves to the world at large with selective, optimistic, even exaggeratedly positive portrayals of local amenities. Then we have this refreshingly honest webcam footage from Leek in Staffordshire:

In the news:

Google reports about 8,190 results for the search term "ethics, broadly construed". Even allowing for the fact that some of those are for more specific variants like ‘business ethics broadly construed’ (and for the schism which has evidently opened between those who embrace the comma and those who decline), it’s a fair number. I wonder how …

Research Councils will not permit an institution to claim more than 100% of any one individual’s time...

Delegates passed a motion calling for the abolition of ‘zero-hours contracts’ in which academics are employed on an ad hoc basis with no guarantee of teaching within a year. The use of unpaid postgraduates to carry out seminars was also condemned.
Times Higher Education Supplement

From 2003 (the year I entered the University of Durham as an undergrad. fresher):

“[Anxiety about body image is] something which has existed for a long time... but in terms of the scale of it, that is what is new, and it is being driven by the proliferation of media imagery portraying a so-called ‘perfected ideal’ that is entirely unattainable for the vast majority of people,” she told [the] Today …