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.
Ethics and Morality
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?
Posted inEthics and Morality
Soccer unveils the white card, and I’m conflicted
Reading Time: 4 minutes I wanted to like it. I really did. But I just can’t.
Soccer’s first white card was given during a game in Portugal’s professional league this past weekend. To compliment—or, maybe, counterbalance—soccer’s punitive yellow and red cards, the white card aims to reward good behavior and “improve ethical values in sport.”
I’ve taught Ethics for 23 years, and I use sport to illustrate key concepts. And for me, the white card draws a red card.
Posted inDeep Dive
Who owns morality?
Reading Time: 4 minutes At some point during our merry journey through secularism, we all encounter some benighted religious people who incredulously ask: “If you don’t believe in a god, where does your morality come from?” Religious people believe that the source of their morality is their god and that their religious belief is the exercise of that morality. […]
Posted inThe Future
Longtermism: the good, the bad and the ridiculous
Reading Time: 6 minutes Planning for the future is wise and necessary. But some philosophers leave reason behind and stray into religious fantasy when they argue that a far-off utopian scenario supersedes any moral obligations to the present.
Posted inTechnology
Does the FTX collapse discredit effective altruism?
Reading Time: 5 minutes Sam Bankman-Fried, disgraced founder of a bankrupt crypto empire, was a big proponent of effective altruism. Does his deception reflect badly on the philosophy he claimed to believe in?