On May 25, 2020, George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, died after Derek Chauvin, a white police officer, knelt on his neck for nine minutes and twenty nine seconds while he was lying face down handcuffed on the street. His death, and many other… Read more ›
Fake news can be defined as “a form of news consisting of deliberate disinformation or hoaxes spread via traditional news media (print and broadcast) or online social media” (Wikipedia). Many people are understandably expressing their concern, even panic, over not knowing how to… Read more ›
I take the concept of evil very seriously and have written many posts on it over the years. But some think we should abandon the concept of evil altogether. In this post I want to briefly take a look at… Read more ›
In January of 1972 BBC Two broadcasted a four episode television series called Ways of Seeing written and presented by John Berger (1926-2017). The series was subsequently adapted into the book Ways of Seeing which was published in 1973. Both… Read more ›
Classic utilitarianism, whose classic proponents were Jeremy Bentham (1789), John Stuart Mill (1861), and Henry Sidgwick (1907), is a moral theory which doesn’t consider motives and acts as having any intrinsic moral value. Rather, motives and acts can only be… Read more ›
It is easy to lose our sense of wonder for things around us. Of course, we may wonder when confronted with things out of the ordinary. But shouldn’t it be more common to wonder about, well, everything? Perhaps not. After… Read more ›
Edgar Allan Poe, 1809-1849 It is March 21, 2020 and the coronavirus is a pandemic threatening everyone on Earth. In my relative isolation of social distancing, I have had more time to read and I was drawn to a tale… Read more ›
I was recently asked to give a talk on what makes relationships beneficial. Since Valentine’s Day was approaching, I decided to offer a set of insights based on three philosophical theories of love which I cover in my philosophy of love… Read more ›
In the previous two posts (go here) I considered various formulations of the privation theory of evil and considered various objections to it. Now let’s consider some reasons to embrace the theory. (1) The privation theory can offer a comprehensive… Read more ›
In part one of this three part series I gave a brief overview of some influential formulations of the privation theory of evil before suggesting that we accept Peter King’s concise and convincing one in Evil: A History (Oxford, 2019):… Read more ›
Introduction In the previous post I presented some contemporary scientific views on evil and argued both for their importance and their limitations. We saw that such views can be construed as natural evil insofar as they see evil as a… Read more ›
Evil, after many years of neglect in ethics, has returned as a topic of interest since at least 9/11. One of the things that characterizes this return is the use of science. Traditionally, evil has been understood as a phenomenon… Read more ›
Our experiences of beauty and duty appear to be very different. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), in his book Critique of Judgment, argued that judgments of the beautiful must be “disinterested.” This means that we make these judgments (1) without concern for the truth; (2) without… Read more ›
Determinism is the view that, given the laws of nature, all events are the necessary effects of previous events. When applying this to systems, one can say that a system is deterministic if there is only one way the system… Read more ›
The American philosopher John Dewey (1859-1952) was often accused of being too optimistic about the potentials of science and democracy. Some claimed he lacked a tragic sense of life which is necessary to truly understand the world in which we… Read more ›