Biopolitics Archives – MJRyder.net

Tag Archives: Biopolitics

What the ‘right to die’ debate tells us about sovereignty

17th May 2024 Mike Ryder Comment

Many readers will be familiar with the ongoing debate in the UK around the ‘right to die’. The campaign group Dignity in Dying is calling for a change in the law with a new assisted dying bill to give terminally ill people choice in how and when they die.

However, things aren’t as simple as they may first seem. While many people may well argue that developed nations should not treat their citizens worse than animals, there have been many dissenting voices who suggest that an assisted dying bill may put pressure on people to take their own lives; it may even be a ‘slippery slope’ of legislation that discriminates against the most vulnerable people.

‘No refuge’: The sign of our times

9th June 2023 Mike Ryder Comment

Signs are everywhere – there can be no escaping them. From the speed limit signs on our roads, to fire exits, and the signs that tell us not to smoke, signs can take many forms that help us navigate the world and instruct us how to behave. They also say something about the world in which we live.

The biopolitics of the bird-flu pandemic

8th December 2022 Mike Ryder Comment

There’s a pandemic on don’t you know.

Or maybe you don’t: that’s the problem. Across the globe now, millions of birds have died, and many more have been put to slaughter in order to try and curb the spread of the deadly strain of bird-flu that has ravaged its way through swathes of the global bird population.

It could be time to start thinking about a cybernetic Bill of Rights

11th December 2019 Mike Ryder Comment

Like it or loathe it, the robot revolution is now well underway and the futures described by writers such as Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl and Philip K. Dick are fast turning from science fiction into science fact. But should robots have rights? And will humanity ever reach a point where human and machine are treated the same?

Ethics, killing, and the Moral Machine

10th December 2018 Mike Ryder Comment

Just over a year ago now, I published the results of a small survey I shared with my followers on Facebook. The idea was to test a few theories I had been working on around ethics and the relative value we assign different forms of life. In this case, I was specifically interested in how we think about animal life, and how we respond to different species when it comes to decisions around life and death.

Even though my survey was relatively small, the results were quite remarkable, and show a clear trend in responses that favour saving larger and more ‘noble’ animals, over smaller, ‘less intelligent’ animals that may be perceived to be in some way less worthy. While a utilitarian perspective should in theory show that the save/kill decisions made by respondents should be weighted equally across five different species of farmyard animal (each life is, after all, of equal ‘value’), respondents very clearly favoured saving a single horse over a single chicken. This trend continued when participants were asked to choose between saving a single horse or five chickens, with many respondents still opting to save the horse, while many respondents would much prefer to kill five chickens, instead of a single horse.