For the last year and a half, Jim Baxter and the consulting team at IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds, have been working with the Law Society of England and Wales on a project looking at the ethics of in-house law. That project has involved talking to lots of lawyers who are both passionate and insightful about the job and the ethical challenges it presents. None more so than Sharon Bridgalsingh, Director of Law and Governance at Milton Keynes City Council. Sharon was kind enough to come on the podcast and share some of her insights in this wide-ranging conversation.

The In-House Ethics Framework which IDEA produced for the Law Society is here: https://www.lawsociety.org.uk/topics/in-house/in-house-ethics-framework/.

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

Cancelling and cancel culture are terms that we hear a lot these days, and it's one of the many areas where there seems to be more heat than light. The phenomenon of cancelling has become a front in the so-called culture wars, with one side claiming it's a healthy form of protest, or simply confronting people with the consequences of their actions, while the other side sees it as persecution by an unaccountable mob. Philosophers Alfred Archer (Tilburg University) and Georgie Mills (TU Delft) have tried to disentangle some of the different actions that sometimes get called cancelling, and to help us better understand the ethics of this complex phenomenon.

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/

Words such as 'woke', 'emotional labour' and 'gaslighting' get bandied around a lot, especially in online discourse. And as they get bandied around, their meaning can change over time. Of course, changes in the meaning of words are natural, inevitable and, usually harmless. However, Robbie Morgan, back for his record-setting third appearance on Ethics Untangled, thinks we should be worried about these changes in meaning, at least sometimes. This isn't just pedantry - it's a concern about the way changes in meaning can rob us of the means to express important concepts, and also about the way these moves can serve political motivations in an illegitimate way.

Here's Robbie's paper on the topic:

Morgan, Robert (2025), "Hermeneutical Disarmament", ​The Philosophical Quarterly 75(3): 1071-1093.

Here's Robbie's website.

And here are the other sources we discuss in the episode:

• Beck, Julie (2018), “The Concept Creep of ‘Emotional Labor’”, The Atlantic.
• Bloomfield, Leonard (1983), Introduction to the Study of Language. Amsterdam/Philidelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, p.240.
• Brownmiller, Susan (1990), In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution. 1st ed. New York: Dial Press, pp.182, 280-285.
• Déjacque, Joseph, Hartman, Janine C., and Lause, Mark A. (2012), In the Sphere of Humanity: Joseph Déjacque, Slavery, and the Struggle for Freedom. Cincinnati, Ohio: University of Cincinnati Libraries.
• Fricker, Miranda (2007), Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Hamilton, Patrick (1939, Gas Light. 1st ed. London: Constable.
• Hochschild, Arlie Russell (2012), The Managed Heart. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. London: University of California Press.
• Lead Belly (2015) “Scottsboro Boys.” In Lead Belly: The Smithsonian Folkways Collection, 4:26.
• MacGuill, Dan (2021), “Did People Refer to Gaslighting During the Era of 'I Love Lucy'?”, Snopes.
• Norri, Juhani (1998), “Gender-Referential Shifts in English.” English Studies 79 (3): 270–87, p.281.
• Rothbard, Murray N. (2007), The Betrayal of the American Right. Edited by Thomas E. Woods Jr. Auburn, Alabama: Ludwig von Mises Institute, p.83.

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

Bluesky: @ethicsuntangled.bsky.social
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ideacetl
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/idea-ethics-centre/