What is a good person? + Nature/nurture debate

After a couple of interesting talks at the AAP conference this week, I stumbled across this BBC article on goodness of character and the nature/nurture debate, both subjects of which I attended talks about throughout the week.

Luke Russell first off talked about what made an evil person, deciding that our intuitions were a good basis for this, but that current models of evil weren't quite up to the task, and Paul Griffiths today talked about the nature/nurture debate, and how you can't really separate nurture from nature (his example from the animal kingdom was the development of rats and their gene expression based on how much grooming they received from their mother (among other examples)), and that the idea of "human nature" is not just explicable by our DNA (or by our environment).

Anyway I'm a little tipsy right now after the AAP conference dinner so I'll leave it at that for now, IMO the BBC is a little behind in the most recent thinking on these debates! ;)

When you're presenting at a philosophy conference

... you tend to check out who your "competition" is. Today the timetable went up, and I find out that instead of the 30min timeslot that I wanted, I ended up with a 90 min timeslot. Against Big Names.



Whatever am I going to talk about for 90 mins to my audience of maybe 1? :)

Just a heads-up...

Just to let everyone know, this week some rather Important People will be hanging around the hallowed halls of CAPPE. Firstly, Professor Simon Rogerson from the Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility at De Montfort University in England, Professor Don Gotterbarn, from the Computer and Information Science Department at East Tennessee State University, and finally, Justice Michael Kirby, all of whom are here for a conference on Ethical Governance of ICT and the Role of Professional Bodies which is on Thursday and Friday. Unfortunately it's too late to register for the event, but I'll be sure to keep you all updated (perhaps in real-time, depending on internet access!) on what goes on!