The Moral Maze: AWay of Exploring Christian Ethics

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He was born in India, brought up in Manchester and now lives in London. He studied neurobiology (at the University of Sussex) and history and philosophy of science (at Imperial College, London). Michael attended a grammar school, Harrow County, and went to Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he gained a first class degree in History.

BBC Sounds - Moral Maze - Available Episodes

Michael Buerk chairs a special Moral Maze debate recorded at 'HowTheLightGetsIn' festival of philosophy and music. Originally produced at the BBC North West's New Broadcasting House on Oxford Road in Manchester, the programme production base is Salford Quays. The programme is broadcast live from BBC Broadcasting House in London. Some believe the pursuit of growth attaches too little value to wellbeing, that it neglects what should be the real priority, people’s contentment and happiness. Government policies lead us, they claim, to work harder and for longer than we want to. They suggest it creates a culture that values our economic activity, earning money and spending it, over other important roles such as caring for children and elderly relatives, maintaining our community, or charitable work. Some ecological economists believe that endless growth is unachievable without climate breakdown, that it simply can’t be sustained without irreversible damage to the planet. Should we trust children and teenagers to make good judgments about the future? Or, if active citizenship is the preserve of adulthood, what is an adult?The language of freedom permeates our political debate. In the US, it may be a decisive battleground in the 2024 presidential election. The problem is that people mean very different things by it. Is it freedom from government regulation or freedom to have an abortion? Freedom of speech or freedom from discrimination? Freedom to own a gun or freedom for communities to ban them?

BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Human Maturity

He is the author of two books " Paddling to Jerusalem", which won the Madoc prize for travel journalism, and Voodoo Histories - a modern history of conspiracy theories - published in early May 2009. Michael Buerk Matthew Taylor became Chief Executive of the RSA in November 2006. Prior to this appointment, he was Chief Adviser on Political Strategy to the Prime Minister. Styled a conservative by her opponents, she prefers to think of herself as defending authentic liberal values against the attempt to destroy western culture from within. Michael Portillo The war of the robots has begun. Microsoft’s ‘ChatGPT’ and its rival, Google’s ‘Bard’ allow you to have a conversation with a computer, much as you would with another person. But it’s not just talk. As well as writing essays, presentations, legal documents and sermons, artificial intelligence can also produce art. We’ve accepted that machines can beat us at chess, but might they soon also beat us at poetry, painting and music? Could they make Shakespeare look second rate? Or will art without human input always be worthless?Computers are becoming more powerful. Much more powerful. Last week, Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel Corporation died. A computer industry billionaire, he came up with ‘Moore’s Law’ which observed that the power of computers doubles every couple of years. Today a microchip can contain 50 billion transistors, each narrower than a strand of human DNA. The first programme on Monday 20 August 1990, was forty minutes long from 11 am, and followed by Poetry Please. It was made by the Factual Unit of Religious Programmes (later called Factual Programmes Religion) at BBC North in Manchester. It was hoped that the programme format would involve the panellists' views being revised during the course of a programme, but this rarely happened.

BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, 08/11/2023

A distinction is often made between positive and negative freedom. Negative freedom is the absence of constraints (‘freedom from’) – while positive freedom is the possibility of acting in such a way as to take control of one’s life (‘freedom to’). Libertarians often see individual freedom - the private enjoyment of one’s life and goods, free from interference – as the most fundamental value that any society should pursue and protect. This view is challenged by those who believe wealth, health and educational inequalities inevitably mean some people are more free than others, and seek instead to promote the collective freedom of society as a whole. In early 1994, a television version was considered, which eventually took off on Saturday 10 September 1994,on BBC2 as a trial series of six 45-minute-long programmes broadcast around midnight, perhaps influenced by Channel 4's successful late-night discussion programme After Dark. The pilot had audiences of around 1.3 million. It was last broadcast on 15 October 1994, at 11 pm. Michael was re-elected to Parliament in a by-election in Kensington and Chelsea in November 1999 and was Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer February 2000 - September 2001. Following the Conservatives' election defeat in 2001, Michael unsuccessfully contested the leadership of the party. In 2005 Michael left the House of Commons. Is it morally acceptable to go on strike, disrupting the lives and livelihoods of millions of people who are uninvolved in a dispute? This week’s rail strike is expected to be the biggest in 30 years with only a fraction of services running and widespread disruption. But whatever the arguments behind the dispute, what’s the moral case for a strike?

Claire previously worked as a mental health social worker and as a lecturer in English literature. Giles Fraser Nicola Sturgeon has argued for a wider debate on teenagers' rights, as she defended plans to allow 16-year-olds to change their legal gender in Scotland. Each society settles on its own thresholds to determine when a person is old enough to make informed decisions about matters including voting, having sex or drinking alcohol. This is a collective agreement about the legal point at which human beings reach maturity. But what is human maturity in moral terms? This program is without a shadow of a doubt, a necessary listen for anyone that would like to participate in the debate of current affairs and, for the ones that are brave enough to be challenged on their own views and beliefs.