New Zealand's Antarctic research began during the 1957/1958 International Geophysical Year. This analysis explains how and why it has evolved. There have been two phases: 1957 until 1991, when the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research and the universities were the key research organisations, and after 1991, when the publicly funded research sector became more diverse. International collaborations have been important throughout. Funding decision processes have progressed from a bottom-up curiosity-driven approach to a more complex system of regular contests. Since 1991, the focus has been on coherent strategies and the outcomes sought. Funding criteria are well-defined and contests are widely accepted as fair and transparent. Reviews and evaluations have been positive. Collaborative organisational interactions dominated decision-making during the early period. Bureaucratic politics is most evident in post-1991 organisational changes. The quality of the research strategies has improved in terms of defining outcomes sought and appropriate measures of progress towards them. However, New Zealand's Antarctic research funding is currently dispersed. It needs better coordination. Collaborative research should be emphasised in areas where New Zealand has established a strong reputation taking account of both national and global priorities if New Zealand's international research standing is to be maintained and enhanced.

This article surveys the debate over the social discount rate. The focus is on the economics rather than the philosophy literature, but the survey emphasizes foundations in ethical theory rather than highly technical details. I begin by locating the standard approach to discounting within the overall landscape of ethical theory. The article then covers the Ramsey equation and its relationship to observed interest rates, arguments for and against a positive rate of pure time preference, the consumption elasticity of utility, and the effect of various sorts of uncertainty on the discount rate. Climate change is discussed as an application.

James Oliver Robertson intended no sacrilege when he called the Declaration of Independence a sacred text, an essential component of what has become American “holy writ.” It is now venerated as a founding document of the national civil religion. The Declaration, Robertson emphasized, reflects an expectation that the new United States would become the nation among all nations. As celebrated now, independence then provided the political means to achieve a social end, that social end being a better life for Americans, their new nation acting as an exemplar for the larger world. Or, as Stephen E. Lucas put it, the Declaration of Independence went through an “apotheosis,” through which, over the years, Americans have come to “see its original purpose in universal terms almost wholly divorced from the events of 1776.”

In a recent Utilitas article, Neil Feit argues that every person occupies a well-being level of zero at all times and possible worlds at which she fails to exist. Views like his face the ‘problem of the subject’: how can someone have a well-being level in a scenario where she lacks intrinsic properties? Feit argues that this problem can be solved by noting, among other things, that a proposition about a person can be true at a possible world in which neither she nor the proposition exists. In this response, we argue that Feit has not solved the problem of the subject, and also raise various related problems for his approach.

This article continues and expands differences I have with Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu concerning issues of moral bioenhancement and free will. They have criticized my conception of voluntary moral bioenhancement, claiming that it ignores the extent to which freedom is a matter of degree. Here, I argue that freedom as a political concept (or as one that is analogous to a political concept) is indeed scalar in nature, but that freedom of the will is to be understood as a threshold concept and therefore not as subject to degree. Consequently, I contend, by asserting that freedom is a matter of degree, that Persson and Savulescu have not undermined my arguments favoring voluntary moral enhancement. In addition, I add three further arguments against compulsory moral bioenhancement.

This article explores some implications of the concept of transformative change for the debate about human enhancement. A transformative change is understood to be one that significantly alters the value an individual places on his or her experiences or achievements. The clearest examples of transformative change come from science fiction, but the concept can be illuminatingly applied to the enhancement debate. We argue that it helps to expose a threat from too much enhancement to many of the things that make human lives valuable. Among the things threated by enhancement are our relationships with other human beings. The potential to lose these relationships provides a compelling reason for almost all humans to reject too much enhancement.

It has been argued that moral bioenhancement is desirable even if it would make it impossible for us to do what is morally required. Others find this apparent loss of freedom deplorable. However, it is difficult to see how a world in which there is no moral evil can plausibly be regarded as worse than a world in which people are not only free to do evil, but also where they actually do it, which would commit us to the seemingly paradoxical view that, under certain circumstances, the bad can be better than the good. Notwithstanding, this view is defended here.