I found this interview with Martin Luther King, Jr. very helpful in critically exploring his pacifism or commitment to non-violence. There are two distinctions King makes which I found particularly illuminating and thought-provoking. The first is between non-violence and organized… Read more ›
Kant Immanuel Kant, in his Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), offered the most influential and interesting theory of delightful terror or the sublime. He discusses two forms of the sublime in sections 25-28 of his book, namely, the mathematical and… Read more ›
Kant According to Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), the moral evaluation of our actions has nothing to do with our feelings, inclinations, and selfish preferences. It also has nothing to do with the actual consequences of our acts. Rather, it is a… Read more ›
J.S. Mill (1806-1873) John Stuart Mill, in his classic book On Liberty (1859), offers one of the most enduring principles in political philosophy. This principle has come to be known as the harm principle and it is a widely embraced principle in… Read more ›
When it comes to sexual morality many hold the liberal view that consent between adults is everything. Once we have consenting adults then sexual activity is moral. Violations of consent are immoral. This short and entertaining video presents a helpful… Read more ›
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) argued that the phenomenal world we experience – the world of space and time with unified objects that are causally related – is the outcome of our minds giving form to sense data. Or, to use his… Read more ›
In the last few years the police have been under scrutiny like never before and many criminal justice reforms are currently underway. One of the many areas of such reform is ethical reform. Over the past year I served as… Read more ›
Plato (detail from Raphael’s The School of Athens) When we engage in the philosophical activity of ethics we ask questions like: what are right and wrong actions? What does it mean for something to be good or bad? What is… Read more ›
I recently had a conversation with someone who maintained power and freedom are incompatible. He was thinking of power in the negative sense in which it is unfortunately all too often experienced, that is, as illegitimate, manipulative, immoral, and so… Read more ›
Rights, to quote the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “are entitlements (not) to perform certain actions, or (not) to be in certain states; or entitlements that others (not) perform certain actions or (not) be in certain states.” Some rights are civil… Read more ›
Fighting the Gravity of Vice: An Essay on Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth Dwight Goodyear Introduction (Spoiler Alert) The cult classic The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) is one of my favorite films. It was directed… Read more ›
Martha Nussbaum, in her book Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton, 2011), observes that “The humanities and the arts are being cut away, in both primary/secondary and college/university education, in virtually every nation of the world. Seen… Read more ›
William James in 1908 Introduction The title of this post contains a conjunction of two words—progress and tragedy—that don’t usually sit well together. After all, tragedy, whether in art or life, often spells doom for progress. The situation is a bit more… Read more ›
The German-American philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906-1975; see here for an overview of her work) offered two groundbreaking and closely connected theories of evil, the banality of evil and radical evil, that help us rethink many common conceptions of not only evil but… Read more ›
The German-American philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906-1975; see here for an overview of her work) offered two groundbreaking and closely connected theories of evil, the banality of evil in her Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963)… Read more ›