Ethics
Fumbles
I got behind a bit on this #BloggingEveryDayFebruary project, so I’m playing catch up right now. If I’m being completely honest, I knew this would happen at some point during the month. Blogging every day is hard. It doesn’t take a lot of time to write a post each day, but it takes a lot…
Read MoreAdulting
As a general rule, I’m not a fan of the contemporary obsession with gerunding (#seewhatIdidthere), i.e., turning words that were perfectly fine being nouns, perfectly fine accepting the assistance of helping verbs to make sense of some phenomenon, into stand-alone verbs themselves. My allergy to this practice is, for the most part, a consequence of countless, maddening…
Read MoreAnonymity
What difference does a signature make? I’ll assume that the phenomenon of trolling is one familiar to most of us on the interwebs, a phenomenon that is, in turns, infuriating, exasperating, unpleasant, and often genuinely hostile and threatening. There’s much to abhor about trolls– their pettiness and vitriol, their disregard for basic conversational decorum, their…
Read MoreTorture
Several years ago, a friend and colleague of mine invited me to come speak to his class about torture. The class was a writing seminar organized around the theme of “citizenship” and my colleague was feeling (understandably) frustrated because, in his words, he “just didn’t feel like [he] had the tools or the knowledge to…
Read MoreTemptation
Today is Ash Wednesday, which marks the first day of Lent on the Western Christian calendar. Many observant Christians fast or practice some other manner of self-denial for the duration of the Lenten season, commemorating Jesus’ forty days in the desert where (as recounted in the canonical Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke) he was…
Read MoreHandy Guide to Tone-Policing
I won’t even bother with summarizing or linking to the most recent debacle in the Philosophy blogosphere. Instead, I’ll just note that, commensurate with the rest of the nation, the discipline of Philosophy has a real problem determining between when one ought and ought not “tone-police.” I’ve said my peace (here) before about tone-policing and/or…
Read MoreMerit
The first text I assign in my social and political philosophy course is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges entitled “The Lottery in Babylon.” In it, Borges’ narrator tells the story of his former home, Babylon, where (over the course of many years) a lottery evolves from being a voluntary game of chance into a mandatory…
Read MoreMortality
I am fairly certain that I watched a man die in the street in Memphis last Saturday night. [TW: disturbing content follows] I say that I’m “fairly certain” because, the truth is, I still do not know for sure. In the past several days, I’ve recounted the events of that night to a few friends,…
Read MoreRisk
In the January edition of the New Yorker, there was a story (“The Hit List”) about the so-called “Islamist war” on secular bloggers in Bagladesh. It begins with the murder of blogger Avijit Roy: atheist, rationalist and advocate of scientific understanding. (Roy: “The vaccine against religion is to build up a scientific approach.”) It is a…
Read MoreRecent Posts
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