Realism is Needed for Moral Intuitions
Iain McGilchrist in The Matter With Things refers to a study where subjects were asked to evaluate two scenarios. One described a woman giving a friend a…
Determinism and the Good Life Are Incompatible
This article is a continuation of an interaction with a blogger calling himself Robot Philosopher. RP is a polemicist and likes to pepper his arguments with snide…
Is Evolutionary Psychology Immoral?
“In 1800, half of all those born died as children; two centuries later, almost none did. More and more people who would not have survived in the…
Nihilism, Ethics, and the Trolley Car Dilemma
The Trolley Problem is a potentially morally corrupting piece of pro-murder propaganda with nihilistic tendencies. It imagines a scenario where a runaway trolley can be diverted by…
The Pathbreaking Philosophical Women: A Review of Benjamin Limpscomb’s “The Women are Up to Something”
Benjamin Limpscomb. The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. …
Taleb and Business Ethics
Many of this semester’s readings will be taken from Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. He first rose to fame with his 2007 book Black Swan, the title…
Are We All Selfish?
Many students imagine that every human being and every action is selfish. Immanuel Kant was rightly suspicious of the tendency to defer everything to the “dear self,”…
Aristotle and Ethics
Ethics and Metaphysics Aristotle’s conception of ethics is consistent with Plato, his teacher’s notion that moral virtue is essential to human happiness and offers some useful and…
Fashion and Vanity: Max Scheler and Craft Fashion
Max Scheler is, without question, one of the most significant philosophers of the twentieth century. With Husserl and Heidegger, he is a founding father of phenomenology, the…
Fashion: Rhetoric of Death?
The anarchist, Proudhon, argues that Rome fell because she was incapable of changing her “objects of public veneration.” Rome’s gods, he says, were blood and luxury. The…
Superhero Ethics
Superhero Ethics. Travis Smith. Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Press, 2018. No doubt as soon as there were two superheroes, people asked the question “who would win in…