Today's post is by David Edmonds, presenter and producer at the BBC, host of The Big Idea , author of many books, including Would You Kill the Fat Man? and (with John Eidinow) Wittgenstein’s Poker . David is also a senior research associate at Oxford University’s Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and a columnist for the Jewish Chronicle. In this post he introduces his new book, Ethics and the Contemporary World. I was rummaging through my attic last week when I came across some notes and essays I’d written as an undergraduate and graduate studying ethics in the 1980s. What surprised me – apart from the clunky prose and the no-nonsense typeface produced by my clunky dot-matrix printer – was the narrowness of subject range. There was a lot, for example, on abortion. It’s easy to forget that abortion was only legalized in Britain in 1967 and the key Supreme Court ruling in the US, Roe v Wade, was in 1973. Then there was capital punishment – the death penalty...
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