Philosophy & Ethics

Is there such a thing as moral expertise? Good question, right? I’ve been thinking more about it for a few weeks now as a result of an interesting talk by Gopal Sreenivasan (Duke University) entitled “Moral expertise and the proto-authority of affect,” which he gave at CUNY’s Graduate Center. The New York Times certainly seems to think that one can be a moral expert, hence its ongoing “Ask the Ethicist” column. It is currently run by Chuck Klosterman, a journalist, author, and essayist — not a moral philosopher. Interestingly, when he took over the job recently, Klosterman told New York…

The imminent death of a family member is riddled with emotions for family family members. The reasons are obvious.  But it's not just them.  A paper based on the reflections of third-year Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine students sheds light on the struggle physicians in training often face when trying to control their own emotions while not becoming desensitized to the needs of the dying patient and his or her family. This could mean trouble in a future where human lives quite clearly have a cost. In the past, it was easy to demonize hospitals and insurance…

People who identify with the various versions of the skeptic / atheist / rationalist / freethinking movement(s) hold up the Enlightenment, the famous “Age of Reason,” to be the pinnacle of human civilization, as well as a model for future progress. Richard Dawkins famously said that he considers himself a son of the Enlightenment, and my favorite philosopher of all time, David Hume (Aristotle and Bertrand Russell complete my personal pantheon) was a prominent exponent of the Scottish Enlightenment — not to mention the source of the famous Sagan dictum, “Extraordinary claims require…

As I’ve mentioned on other occasions, my most recent effort in philosophy of science actually concerns what my collaborator Maarten Boudry and I call the philosophy of pseudoscience. During a recent discussion we had with some of the contributors to our book at the recent congress of the European Philosophy of Science Association, Maarten came up with the idea of the pseudoscience black hole. Let me explain. The idea is that it is relatively easy to find historical (and even recent) examples of notions or fields that began within the scope of acceptable scientific practice, but then moved (…

“Should I kill myself? May the artificial intelligence (AI), which humankind will depend on, ponder such questions, decide rationally, and drag us with it in a mercy killing?” This question taken seriously and answered scientifically is not going to go down well in Christian America, however, one publisher was daring enough. The annual DEATH AND ANTI-DEATH anthology’s VOLUME 11 has just been published. Distributed By Ingram (and on Amazon), the annual Death And Anti-Death Series has always discussed controversies related to death, life extension, and anti-death. A variety of differing points…

After a series of media stories about the Liverpool Care Pathway being systematic malnutrition, dehydration and premature death in patients across a wide age-range, it was subjected to review by a panel which delivered their findings on 15 July 2013 saying that the Liverpool Care Pathway needed to abandon its name, as well as the use of the word "pathway", and that the the Liverpool Care Pathway should be replaced within 12 months by an "end of life care plan".  Claud Regnard, FRCP, a palliative care consultant writing in Age and Ageing, calls the demise of the Liverpool Care Pathway…

I’m getting a little tired of writing about the relationship between science and philosophy when it comes to ethics, as I’ve made my views abundantly clear on this blog and elsewhere. Nonetheless, more than one of my readers has exhorted me to take on Richard Carrier’s arguments to the effect that science can answer moral questions, as these arguments are allegedly much better than those advanced by more prominent skeptics, such as Sam Harris and Michael Shermer. I took a look in particular at a recent post by Carrier where he summarizes his views after my debate with Shermer and the…

A recent talk by Adam Elga (Princeton University) at CUNY’s Graduate Center made me think a bit about what the author calls “suspiciously formed desires.” For instance, suppose you suddenly find your old circle of friends stale and uninteresting, and begin to gravitate toward new people. But then you realize to your horror that the change in your social preferences just happened to coincide with the time you started taking anti-depressants (there are documented cases of this sort of effect on various aspects of one’s emotional life, see Chapter 11 of Answers for Aristotle). Or, to use…

When the Supreme Court was debating the legal foundation of the Affordable Care Act in the United States, Justice Antonin Scalia challenged the Obama administration claim that the controversial individual mandate provision was Constitutionally legitimate, even under the broad 'Commerce' clause. "Could you define the market -- everybody has to buy food sooner or later, so you define the market as food, therefore, everybody is in the market; therefore, you can make people buy broccoli," Scalia said.  And that was always the worry; if taxpayers pay for your health care, can they tell you…

Yes, yes, we’ve covered this territory before. But you might have heard that Sam Harris has reopened the discussion by challenging his critics, luring them out of their hiding places with the offer of cold hard cash. You see, even though Sam has received plenty of devastating criticism in print and other venues for the thesis he presents in The Moral Landscape (roughly: there is no distinction between facts and values, hence science is the way to answer moral questions), he is — not surprisingly — unconvinced. Hence the somewhat gimmicky challenge. We’ll see how that ones goes, I already…