by Daniel A. Kaufman ___ A number of recent – and not so recent – essays and shorter pieces, plus several dialogues with Massimo Pigliucci and discussions on Twitter have begun to converge in my mind around several points, all of which suggest (a) a fundamentally pluralist metaphysics and (b) a central role for Wilfrid Sellars’ landmark paper “Philosophy and […]
by Daniel A. Kaufman ____ Recent exchanges with Robert Gressis and Spencer Case have led me to think a lot about obligation and objectivity. My focus thus far has been on the question of force, and my main goal has been to show that accounting for it is not made easier – or facilitated in any way, really – by […]
by Robert Gressis A couple of months ago, I had a diavlog with our host, Dan Kaufman. In that discussion, we debated what Dan has usefully called the “morality everywhere” approach; roughly, this is the idea not only that just about all of our behavior is morally evaluable, but also that it is evaluable according to very demanding moral standards. […]
by Daniel A. Kaufman ___ Last Sunday, after the most harrowing several days of our lives, I told my sixteen (nearly seventeen) year old daughter, Victoria, the following: “You can do everything right. And things can still go horribly wrong.” It is an important point and one I had been repeating again and again to myself, as I needed to […]
by Mark English ___ The metaphor of survivors competing for space on an overloaded raft or lifeboat has a long and deep history in the annals of human moral reflection. Such reflection differs from the philosopher’s more contrived and detached “trolley problems” in a number of ways, but mainly because emotional and social aspects of the moral questions involved are […]
by Daniel A. Kaufman http://www.rationalites-contemporaines.paris-sorbonne.fr/IMG/pdf/Wolf1.pdf I am currently teaching Ethics and Contemporary Issues, a course devoted to ethical theories and moral controversies that is part of the university’s General Education curriculum. The opening unit is devoted to theory, and one of the essays we take up, towards the unit’s end, is Susan Wolf’s “Moral Saints,” originally published in 1982. Up […]
by David L. Duffy Mayo’s book is a meditation on/updating of Ferdinand Brunetière’s (1894) The morality of evolutionary theory. [1][2] Like Christian de Duve’s Genetics of original sin and the future of life, Brunetière reckons Original Sin is explained by natural selection. [3] Mayo, however, prefers the Humean line on is-ought. This is an “outsider” book on ethics, in the […]
by Mikhail Valdman The Walking Wounded People’s physical wounds are sometimes visible. Their emotional wounds are hidden from view, sometimes buried so deep that not even their bearer can spot them. But imagine that it was all visible. Imagine that you had a pair of magic glasses with which you could see people’s physical and emotional wounds just as clearly […]
by Daniel A. Kaufman I want to describe a kind of moral skepticism that I believe enjoys special standing. It is skeptical, insofar as it denies that there are good reasons for believing in moral properties. It has special standing, because unlike general skepticism – by which I mean, skepticism about the external world – the doubts it describes are […]
By: Daniel Tippens A heated debate has arisen since the rise of moral psychology as a scientific discipline. Moral psychology examines, descriptively, how we come to make moral judgments and have moral intuitions (these two terms I will henceforth use interchangeably). Some thinkers argue that normative ethics — the study of what we morally ought to do — can be […]
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