Reading Time: 14 minutes Suffering from chronic pain, a friend’s grandmother took her own life when I was 18. I was over when my friend and her mother heard the news. I will never forget the character of her mother’s grief. She was devastated to lose her own mother, yes. But she was even more devastated that her mother felt she had to do this alone, without anyone by her side in her last moments, lest they suffer legal consequences.
Ethics and Morality
Posted inCrime and Punishment
Breaking bread: Houston tries to punish feeding the homeless—and fails
Reading Time: 5 minutes In a story that recalls the ancient custom of sacred hospitality, the city of Houston is trying to punish a charity for feeding the homeless—but they can’t find a jury willing to go along with it.
Posted inCommunity
Someone has to care
Reading Time: 4 minutes I live in Queens, in a neighborhood that’s bisected by the Grand Central Parkway. Along the side of the highway, there’s a buffer zone: a strip of land between the highway guardrails and the residential neighborhood on the other side, enclosed by chain-link fencing. In that no-man’s-land, spindly trees grow and weedy undergrowth proliferates. It’s […]
Posted inEthics and Morality
Ben Franklin’s noble lie
Reading Time: 5 minutes In his published works, Benjamin Franklin expressed the misanthropic view that most people can’t behave without religion to keep them in line. What does the evidence say about this noble lie?
Posted inMeaning & Purpose
Don’t be yourself
Reading Time: 6 minutes A growing movement of Christian evangelicals decries “expressive individualism,” or in other words, the freedom to make your own choices and decide what to do with your own life.A growing movement of Christian evangelicals decries “expressive individualism,” or in other words, the freedom to make your own choices and decide what to do with your own life.
Posted inWar and Peace
The morality of cluster bombs in the perverse logic of war
Reading Time: 4 minutes Cluster bombs are terrible weapons which endanger civilians long after hostilities have ended. But they may be the swiftest way to defeat Russia and end the Ukraine war, which will save more lives overall.
Posted inFilm/TV
‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’: How time travel creeps into Trek today
Reading Time: 11 minutes This week’s episode of Strange New Worlds takes us boldly to Canada, but I promise: just because most of the show is set in my birthplace of Toronto, we won’t go off-mission too much to reflect on how it uses the location. I will only say that if you’re buying street meat (veg or otherwise) […]
Posted inEthics and Morality
Morality is an ongoing experiment
Reading Time: 5 minutes Morality isn’t a crumbling parchment that will fall to dust if we poke at it. It’s more like scientific knowledge, which actively benefits from constant testing and refinement.
Posted inDeep Dive
How we create truth
Reading Time: 10 minutes White women have a storied history of fabricating assault at the hands of BIPOC men. On March 14, 22-year-old Eleanor Williams became part of a small subset of people to face legal consequences for false claims of abuse, which here sparked a season of hate crimes and drove three men to attempt suicide. Her elaborate […]
Posted inBooks
Rewriting Roald Dahl: Prudish censorship or the arc of progress?
Reading Time: 5 minutes Many classic books, including Roald Dahl’s, teach morals that are repugnant by today’s standards. Can we keep the good parts without dragging along the bad, or does respect for authorial integrity force us to keep them exactly as they are?