Electric Agora (archive)

Tag: abortion

  • Epiphanies and Moral Life

    by Kevin Currie-Knight ___ Sophie Grace Chappell (Open University) talks with Kevin (East Carolina University) about her book Epiphanies: An Ethics of Experience. (Oxford: 2022) They talk about what epiphanies are, why they should count as a type of reason (often more persuasive than more formal conceptions of reason), and why philosophers should better appreciate…

  • In Defense of Linguistic Luddism

    by Moti Gorin ____ The Luddites weren’t a complacent group of workers. They worried about the loss of their jobs as a result of the introduction of new technologies, and so they went about destroying the textile machines that were rendering human laborers obsolete. The word ‘Luddite’ has since become a pejorative, applied to those…

  • Compelled Birth and the Liberal Polity

    by Daniel A. Kaufman ____ Abortion is now illegal in the State of Missouri, where I live. If my twenty-year-old daughter was to become pregnant, she would be required to carry the baby to term and give birth to it, under threat of a felony conviction. In a number of the states in which the…

  • Caring and Catering

    by Daniel A. Kaufman ___ Recently, I was involved in an exchange between several philosophers, on the subject of conversations between ethical vegans and meat eaters about the rightness or wrongness of eating meat. The following remarks by one of the participants caught my attention: “…it definitely seems gauche to defend eating meat while eating…

  • This Week’s Special: Judith Jarvis Thomson’s “A Defense of Abortion”

    By Daniel A. Kaufman http://myweb.facstaff.wwu.edu/nmarkos/Zola/Thomson.Abortion.pdf It is rare that one will find near universal agreement as to the most important paper written on a particular subject, but that is exactly what we find with Judith Jarvis Thomson’s 1971 paper, “A Defense of Abortion,” whose impact on the discussion on the morality of abortion cannot be…