Imperfect Cognitions

Today I have the pleasure to post an interview with my colleague  Heather Widdows , John Ferguson Professor of Global Ethics at the University of Birmingham, who talks to us about her research interest in beauty and her very successful monograph, Perfect Me : Beauty as an Ethical Ideal . LB: Your project examines beauty from a new angle. How did you first become interested in beauty as an ethical ideal? HW: That’s a difficult question to answer as my passion for researching beauty crept up on me. Before working on beauty I was a fairly typical moral philosopher working in global ethics and justice. My main topic was defining global ethics as an multidisciplinary approach to philosophy, taking the real world and empirical evidence seriously. More broadly, I have worked on areas such as women’s rights, reproductive rights, genetic ethics and bioethics. I guess my interest in beauty emerged from this long standing interest in gender justice. I recognised that something w...

On 9th January at the Royal Society of Medicine an event took place, Global Mental Health: Children in Crisis . The first speaker, Vikram Patel  (Harvard Medical School), presented a lecture on how to prevent mental health problems in children. He highlighted the importance of linking epidemiological and neuroscientific data. From en epidemiological perspective, deprivation is a very significant risk factor for mental health problems, comparable to what smoking is for lung cancer. And most mental health probelms begin before the age of 24. From a neuroscientific perspective, the brain is very plastic in young adulthood. The prefrontal region of the brain (linked to executive decision making) matures 5-8 years later than the limbic region (linked to basic emotional reactions). Adversities associated with poor developmental outcomes include: Malnutrition Stressors Infections War and displacement Parental ill-health Abuse The need for responsive parents ...