According to David Brooks, All Morality is Local
I normally try to stay away from taking pot shots at David Brooks columns, but today’s raises a question that informs a lot of my political critique and which I reflect on a lot personally....
Tagged: ethics
A Terrible Starting Point
From today’s Boston Herald (via memeorandum): The Tsarnaev family, including the suspected terrorists and their parents, benefited from more than $100,000 in taxpayer-funded assistance — a bonanza ranging from cash and food stamps to Section...
A Tough Call for Dragon*Con
~by M.A. Over the last week, I’ve had to ponder a very difficult question. A few years ago, I started to attend a rather remarkable yearly event called Dragon*Con. It’s a wonderful event held...
Does Opposition to Abortion Demand Certainty That the Fetus Is a Person?
I agree with Ned Resnikoff that the issue of abortion hinges on the question of personhood, but I am not sure the question of personhood as related to nascent human life has to be...
Blinded Trials Bait: An Ethics Quandary
Updated Below I had an exchange at a large retailer this weekend that made me question some of the struts in my own ethical framework. Intellectually, I’m having a hard time piecing together whether...
The Meaning of Human Sexuality: A Philosophical Query
I don’t suppose I’ll be courting much controversy by saying that human sexuality has historical meaning. The sexual revolution would have made no sense had sex meant nothing to anyone. It was a reaction...
This Week’s Political McNuggets: In which we find God in schools, Romney in NAACP-Land, and ethics pretty much nowhere
A few things I wanted to touch on today, but none of them really merit their own post: ________________ Louisiana, Florida to Allow God to Have a Peek at Public Schools: Conservative legislators in...
Basketball Bet: Bad Bankruptcy Barrister
Randy Harris won our NCAA pool this year and has selected me to write an article in response to this hypothetical, which I present here with minor editorial changes from what Randy sent me:...
Marginal cases and virtue
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...
Jane Austen, philosophical psychologist
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...
Will blog for food
Jonathan Strong has an interesting piece on the sometimes-fuzzy line between blogging and paid political advocacy. I think there’s quite a difference between getting paid by an ideological organization to blog (this is hardly...
Anonymity
Speaking as someone who doesn’t blog under his full name to avoid professional and personal complications, I think James Joyner has the best take on l’affaire publius (background here). And speaking of Internet anonymity,...
