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 [...]
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 [...]
So if you haven’t been tuned in to the biotechnology buzz in the last few years, you might not know that scientists think they may be able to grow meat without growing animals in the near future. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has even offered a reward for it. And it looks win-win, [...]
I thought: something uncontroversial for my first post back in a while. With GOP Chairman Michael Steele’s “outrageous” remark that abortion might be a woman’s individual choice and Palin’s gladness during the campaign that her daughter had made a decision to keep her new baby, I’ve begun to wonder how many pro-life politicians really understand [...]
The real tragedy of this election is that far too many Americans believe that the other side is not just wrong about the issues, but fundamentally deceived by one of the candidates. This may be the most prominent symptom of an unhealthy democracy. For a long time now, I’ve taken idea of villains who fought [...]
Many people studying ethics for the first time are scared off by the first formulation of Kant’s categorical imperative: Act only on that maxim (principle) which you can at the same time will to be a universal law. You’re constrained to acting on principles that can be willed to be universal laws. But the easiest [...]
[This post is a continuation of Kantopias, Part 1] So before we look at the details of these Kantopias, there is one last thing that Kant could have said in the third formulation of the Categorical Imperative, and didn’t. He could have argued that we should “act in accordance with universal laws for a merely [...]
It’s been a while since we’ve had a proper Kant post on the blog here, so let’s get to it. One of the least understood parts of Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals is the third formulation of the Categorical Imperative, usually known as the “Kingdom of Ends” formulation. This isn’t helped by the [...]
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