Arianne Shahvisi

Arianne Shahvisi  is a senior lecturer in ethics at Brighton and Sussex Medical School. Her book Arguing for a Better World was published in June 2023.

From The Blog
3 July 2024

Recognising the role of moral luck encourages empathy and humility, but it also threatens the notions of culpability that help us to make sense of evil. Luke Holland died in 2020, a few months before the release of Final Account. Watching it again I could not find my way to thinking: ‘There but for the grace of God go I.’ I was, and remain, quite sure that I wouldn’t have been a Nazi.

From The Blog
20 March 2024

Even the most effective tools get blunt through overwork, and parliamentary transcripts document the rise in recent years of terrorism’s slyer and more versatile cousin, ‘extremism’. (The act of defining undercuts the term: extremism is all that is not moderate, while the government gets to define moderation.)

From The Blog
12 September 2023

My grandfather worked as a school building inspector from the 1950s to the 1980s. Farajollah Shahvisi travelled the perilous, slow-going roads that ribbon around the jagged, scrub-tufted peaks of Iranian Kurdistan, visiting schools with keeling walls and dripping roofs. There was a lot of theft. Builders would make off with government-issue cement, stuff gaps with debris and let bricks sit loose. A fault-finder by nature, my grandfather would close down schools and report cowboy developers, who’d be ordered to rebuild for free.

From The Blog
1 September 2023

The conceptual if not the literal ancestors of most of Britain’s chickens were smuggled into the country disguised as Easter eggs. Their bootlegger was Antony Fisher, a former RAF pilot who had been advised by Friedrich Hayek to make his mark not by getting into politics but by nudging public opinion from the helm of a research institute. Fisher went in search of funds. On a trip to the US, he saw fifteen thousand supersized chickens packed into a single poultry house. He wrapped two dozen fertilised eggs in foil and stashed them in his hand luggage for the return trip.

Letter
Arianne Shahvisi writes: In The Tempest, King Alonso’s adviser Gonzalo attempts to lighten the mood after the shipwreck by describing how he would organise the island. When I was twelve, we read the scene at school and were asked to reflect on the feasibility of his utopia. I argued that it was misguided, because those who work­ed hard would not be sufficiently rewarded, and those who were lazy...

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