Ethics and Morality
‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’: How time travel creeps into Trek today
Reading Time: 11 minutes This week’s episode of Strange New Worlds takes us boldly to Canada, but I promise: just because most of the show is set in my birthplace of Toronto, we won’t go off-mission too much to reflect on how it uses the location. I will only say that if you’re buying street meat (v
What might 100,000 more years of evolution do for the future of morality?
Reading Time: 2 minutes It was a bawdy planet for hundreds of millions of years; the whole of it reeked of sex without a whiff of morals in the air. Then, rather late in the day, a mere several thousand years ago, humans began offering moral codes recommending ‘licit’ sexual expression. But humans f
‘Memento Mori’: To live with the prospect of death (Strange New Worlds)
Reading Time: 9 minutes Like any self-respecting Trekkie, I learned the basics of gunpower from Star Trek: The Original Series. One of TOS‘s most memorable scenes comes from “Arena” (Season 1, Episode 18), when Captain Kirk, trapped on a planet with minimal resources, has to use his wits to survive
An ethical maze: Designing babies for a greater good?
Reading Time: 16 minutes “At ten months old, we were told he would need a heart transplant. There was no cure for his condition, so we would have to go to Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital at some point. If they had a bed. And a heart. And agreed to the procedure.” Great Ormond Street, the fam