Tag: Peter Singer
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The Uses of Philosophy
By Daniel A. Kaufman ___ [1] We need to distinguish between philosophy and what people have called philosophy. Physics is not philosophy and neither is biology, yet once, they — and the rest of the natural sciences — went under the name “natural philosophy.” [2] I would identify philosophy with a set of tools and techniques,…
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A Foolish Impartiality is the Hobgoblin of Morality
by Daniel A. Kaufman ____ Philosophy professors like to think that ours is a clarifying business, so some may be surprised to discover that we can be confused about things that most ordinary people are not. One of these things is partiality and impartiality and how they affect ethical questions. Certainly, the average person thinks…
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three lectures on ethics and animals
by Daniel A. Kaufman ____ Three lectures from my Ethics and Contemporary Issues course on the subject of animals and ethics. I cover material from Peter Singer, Cora Diamond, and Bernard Williams. First Lecture: Peter Singer on Our Ethical Obligations to Animals https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYe6z7EUXaQ&list=PLYpFt8HxKBGvo2CSBGfHUx2_sm6zcZMvg&index=8&ab_channel=AravisTarkheena Peter Singer, a contemporary philosopher at Princeton University, is most famous for…
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Why I’m Sitting in this Chair
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…
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Course Notes – W.D. Ross, The Right and the Good, Ch. 2.
by Daniel A. Kaufman http://spot.colorado.edu/~heathwoo/readings/ross.pdf School is back in session, so it’s time, once again, for Course Notes. This semester I am teaching two sections of Ethics and Contemporary Issues, a course that is part of the General Education curriculum, and Aesthetics, an upper-division offering that runs every Fall. I have made a significant change…
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Morality Everywhere?
by Daniel A. Kaufman Lately, I’ve been having a certain kind of argument, over and over again. I feel compelled to defend something that I really like – and which I would have thought it quite normal to like – against rather emphatic moral criticisms from various quarters. Eating food, for instance (well, food that…