Can you judge a moral theory by the people who try to live by it? I’m not sure just off-hand if anyone has written about this (Parfit comes close at one point), but it occurred to me that one way people argue for their favorite moral theory is to argue that a competing moral theory [...]
…I haven’t gone away again. Just moved last week, all-day meetings this whole week, and no internet at my new place yet. It’s like the perfect non-blogging storm.
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Posted 11 August 2010
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In the previous post here I complained that I didn’t want to refer to ethical theories and theories of the good life using the blanket term “ethics”. One way to resist this is to insist that any worthwhile ethical theory should show how the good life and fulfilling our duties will or tend to converge. [...]
Since vanishing from my blog last year, I’ve been thinking a lot of very general thoughts about what the differences are between theories of obligation or duty, like Kant’s ethical thought, and theories of the “good life”, like Aristotle’s ethical thought. In particular, I’ve been sort of annoyed at how the word “ethics” seems to [...]
Cross-posted over at In Socrates’ Wake: I just came across this website (via Everyday Philosophy at the Purple Bike Café) that is gradually releasing videos from what appears to be a comprehensive introductory ethics course by Michael Sandel at Harvard. I’ve read Sandel, but I had no idea he was such a gifted lecturer. The [...]
Over at A Ku Indeed, Chris wrote a post about David Frum’s piece on the need to put some distance between Glenn Beck and the GOP. While Frum’s piece is helpful, it’s hard not to see conservatives-in-exile as lying in the bed made by years of disparaging government. But that’s not the point of this [...]
When President Obama took office in January, many Americans (including, of course, myself) breathed a sigh of relief. One of the big thoughts behind this sigh was that we had someone in charge of the executive branch who understood that government could be part of the solution to some of our domestic problems, particularly the [...]
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via The New Republic This piece by Sam Schulman at the Weekly Standard appears to be the newest case against gay marriage that doesn’t have anything to do with either Biblical or secular accusations about the immorality of homosexuality. It’s a variation on the “damaging the institution of marriage” argument in which—get this—homosexual marriage is [...]
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Posted 26 May 2009
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Twittering
