I have been interested for some time about the effect of essentially useless moral badges. By “moral badges,” I mean moral choices that one makes as a statement of one’s values, but have very low expected utility. Whether or not… Continue Reading
Children are marginal cases. Talking about ethics in terms of autonomy, or rights — Kantian ethics — famously leaves children, especially very young children, in an odd place. I have addressed this elsewhere in a couple of specific applied issues. In this… Continue Reading
Mark Bittman has an opinion blog post deriding the ability of food corporations to direct advertising to children. (An aside: how sad is it that Bittman has moved from the Minimalist column to opinion writing? His Minimalist column was a… Continue Reading
Here’s kind of an odd, but very interesting post, arguing that Jane Austen is a better moral philosopher than a writer, and she’s not a writer with much psychological insight. I think the contrast between good philosopher/bad writer-psychologist was originally… Continue Reading
I mentioned in the comments thread on a previous post that I might want to discuss the ethics of moms over 40 having babies. I have no idea how prevalent is the view that it might be immoral. Several friends… Continue Reading
Okay, so I was all set to start my tenure here with nice aesthetics post. Then a news story came up that just happens to involve disability, ethics, and medicine. The first two are my beat, and the third is… Continue Reading