Torture Isn’t Complicated
Jon Stewart, the comedic political commentator and host of The Daily Show, has an unfortunate habit of thinking he’s being hospitable to a legitimate opposing viewpoint when really he’s just inclining an ear to...
Tagged: Ethics
In Practice, Objective Morality Needs No Ultimate Source
In the short video below, Boston College philosophy professor Peter Kreeft goes looking for the ultimate source of morality, doesn’t find it in evolution, reason, conscience, human nature, or utilitarianism, but calls off the...
Social Safety-Nets and the Right to Vote: A Thought Experiment
Would you support amending the Constitution to provide a federal safety net in food, housing, education, and medical care, with the following limitation: anyone who accepts that support would not be entitled to vote...
What’s Your Ethic of Voting?
A single vote may rarely make a difference for good or ill, but cumulatively votes obviously have practical consequence, and so I think we can reasonably speak of an ethics of voting that applies...
Wednesday Philosophical Query: Cannibalism Edition
The cannibal almost always plays the role of radical other in popular imagination: he or she is a super-creepy sociopath, a monster such as a witch or a wendigo, or a savage not fit...
The Terror of Drones
Conor Friedersdorf summarizes a recent report on the consequences of U.S. drone strikes in the tribal areas of Pakistan. While one occasionally hears about nameless dead innocents, the full terror caused by these drones...
Reinventing Ethics?
Howard Gardner has it that traditional morality, which he defines as the “goods” and “bads” outlined in the Ten Commandments or the Golden Rule, provide little if any guidance in contemporary situations. We all...
Wednesday Philosophical Query #6
From Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity: It must not be forgotten that there is a concrete bond between freedom and existence; to will man free is to will there to be being,...
The Unwittingly Conditionally Pro-Life
Critics of the pro-life position will at times point to the seeming inconsistency of pro-lifers who support laws to prohibit abortion while opposing policies that would help create conditions beneficial to mothers and their...
Religious Faith, Universal Healthcare, and the Inevitability of Moral Dilemmas
The other day, Sarah Posner and Mollie Ziegler Hemingway discussed religious faith and the Republican National Convention on Bloggingheads. Most interesting to me in the exchange was Mollie’s arguing that Catholics opposed to the HHS...
