10, 03, 09 Hello again. Just a reminder that the final essay is due after the Easter break, on 21 st April. You just need to make sure that you select an essay title from the SE4101 list if the essay you have recently handed in was from the SE4102 list, and vice-versa. I’ve marked your essays and will hand them back this Friday 13 th March, between 10 o’clock and midday . This week’s opinion piece  It’s on speciesism in the moral sphere: Most of us wish to live morally, conducive to which is that we should either be good or avoid getting caught. What is totally unfair, I think, is that only we humans are expected to show the self-restraint that being good requires, the essence of which is consideration for other people unless they hit you first. When it comes to other species, they can behave as badly as they like without incurring our disapproval, as is graphically illustrated by a very distressing personal experience of mine. I was on a train with a beatitude of nun...

21/08/2017 Hello again. Contents Tips and jokes; diary entry; pieces reprinted from last week; preparation for next week in the form of Singer on euthanasia.  Just a reminder that the first essay is due on the 24 th . Feel free to send or give me drafts to comment on. This week’s tip has been distilled from the ramblings of some ancient idiotic hermit I encountered in a cave in the hills above Lanblethicwmciddian: Live life to the full and do not watch television. Keep your teeth clean, dipping them in the pure waters of a mountain stream, then arrange them neatly on a cave ledge next to your wig. When chasing sheep, always – at that point I had to stop him, dreading what he might say next, and just to make sure that he wouldn’t inflict his geriatric puerilities on other innocent ramblers I rolled him into a ball – he was surprisingly supple – and sent him on his way down the steep mountain slope, bouncing from rock to rock, until he disappeared over the edge of a clif...

Marriage and being faithful My aim in this paper is to promote the liberalisation of personal relationships, this to be achieved partly by analysing the discourse by which men and women rationalise their relations with one another. The place to start, ideally, would be with facts and figures about people’s attitudes to the more problematic aspects of marriage, and in particular to questions of freedom and faithfulness. Not having access to the results of surveys about applied marital values, I shall simply assume that spouses are expected to have sex only with each other, as also to exclude other people in many other ways. Although the emphasis is always on sexual restriction, it seems to me that emotional involvement with others is also placed under curfew. Thus, it often happens that heterosexual couples will police each other’s personal relations with members of the opposite sex, even when they are not regarded as potential sexual rivals, or will try to curtail each other’s acces...