Imperfect Cognitions

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...

On 12th September 2016, Zoë Boden and Michael Larkin organised a workshop on Relatedness and Relationship in Mental Health at Park House, University of Birmingham. Experts came from psychology, psychiatry, sociology, philosophy, mental healthcare professions, and there were also several experts by experience, that is, people with lived experience of mental distress and carers. The workshop was the output of a project funded by the Independent Social Research Foundation . The workshop started with a brief introduction by Zoë and Michael who talked about the themes emerging from a previous series of workshop they had run on relatedness. They listed three: Relationships can be either good or bad for mental health Distributed recovery, where recovery is seen as a feature of a system and not of an individual The contract between independence and dependance, and how the latter gets a bad press. Further overlapping themes were pictured in the diagram below, delegates discussed ...