I recently had the good fortune to attend a lecture by Professor Peter Singer in Melbourne. Peter is a world known ethicist, and probably Australia’s leading philosopher. He posed many very uncomfortable problems for his audience. His central thesis seemed to be that we have both an internal moral compass and an intellectual one. The internal one comes from our evolutionary path, (co-operation for survival, natural aversion to inbreeding etc). The intellectual moral compass however poses all of the real problems for us. Do animals have rights? If not why not? Should we use genetics to grow perfect people, or people for specialist roles? Should we repair genetic abnormalities? The line is ill defined once the questions begin. For me I think that whatever we do is natural as a species evolves, (intellectual compass), no matter how uncomfortable it may be for me personally, (moral compass). We seniors with our greater  life experience have a role to play in this public debate and your comments here would be most welcome

[In passing we have a quite good free course on ethics in the  Lyceum]