The last thing I thought I'd be talking about with my language partner 语伴 was Oxford legal philosophers like H. L. A. Hart (obviously in the English language half of our time together)! Not something I would have thought a topic in Chinese studies of jurisprudence... I haven't read them since college but it might be fun to get reacquainted with the Hart-Devlin debate which, I recall very vaguely, was a major discussion about the state's right/capacity to legislate morality. My language partner is interested in bioethics, and especially in the effectively unregulated Chinese industry of genetic enhancement. He's been reading Jonathan Glover's Choosing Children: Genes, Disability and Design and is taken by the idea of "moral enhancement" of Ingmar Person and Julian Savulescu in a book called Unfit for the Future. This sort of stuff is taught at a medical school in southwestern China? The sabbatical begins!Tuesday, August 19, 2014
Moral enhancement
The last thing I thought I'd be talking about with my language partner 语伴 was Oxford legal philosophers like H. L. A. Hart (obviously in the English language half of our time together)! Not something I would have thought a topic in Chinese studies of jurisprudence... I haven't read them since college but it might be fun to get reacquainted with the Hart-Devlin debate which, I recall very vaguely, was a major discussion about the state's right/capacity to legislate morality. My language partner is interested in bioethics, and especially in the effectively unregulated Chinese industry of genetic enhancement. He's been reading Jonathan Glover's Choosing Children: Genes, Disability and Design and is taken by the idea of "moral enhancement" of Ingmar Person and Julian Savulescu in a book called Unfit for the Future. This sort of stuff is taught at a medical school in southwestern China? The sabbatical begins!