Philosophy & Ethics

If you are not a social authoritarian in love with big government and worry about the personal ramifications for freedom if health care is federalized, here is a chilling idea from the home of socialized medicine - Great Britain. Well, sort of Great Britain, now one of them is in Australia.  Their article shows the slippery slope of choice - basically, if abortions are okay, so is infanticide and if one is not okay, neither is the other.  Which means, of course, anything is okay if the 'elites' determine fitness.  Eugenics is making a big resurgence in the progressive mindset.…

A train is heading toward five people who can't escape its path and only you are close enough to do anything.  You can reroute the train onto different tracks with only one person along that route. Would you do it? A team of Michigan State University researchers recently put participants in a 3-D setting and gave them the power to kill one person (in this case, a realistic digital character) to save five. The results of the moral dilemma?  About what you would expect. 90 percent of the participants pulled a switch to reroute the boxcar, affirming that people are  okay to…

The intersection of medical technology, medical practice and ethical principles has long been an important field of study but the rapid advance of medical technology has made it perhaps the most important field of study. Rapid advances in medical technology have been made in medicine and health but we should also be concerned with how health can be maintained in an ethical manner and in an ethical environment.   As medical technology pushes the limits of what we humans can do, it also pushes the limits of our understanding of such discussions. Medicine today forces us to confront the…

Klaudia Brix of Jacobs University has resigned from the board of the Italian Journal of Anatomy and Embryology,  the official publication of the Italian Society of Anatomy and Histology, because a paper by prominent 'HIV does not cause AIDS' researcher Peter Duesberg of U.C. Berkeley was published. Duesberg has been at this a long time - I covered him in The Least Known War In Science: Does HIV Cause AIDS? - but you may not have heard of him at all.  I hadn't even known there was an active denial movement until someone wrote a paper critical of it and I interviewed them.…

William Macaulay, in a review (1839) about the recently-published book by William Gladstone, The State in its Relations with the Church, wrote:     Mr Gladstone conceives that the duties of government are paternal; a doctrine which we shall not believe till he can show us some government which loves its subjects as a father loves his children, and which is as superior to its subjects in intelligence as a father to his child.     He tells us in lofty though somewhat indistinct language that ‘Government occupies in moral the place of to pan [“the everything”, if…

The main observation here is that rationalization on the social level is rationalization on the personal level performed by macro-systems (social systems from our point of view). Scientism is the ultimate religion. Calling this a dangerous anti-science position is natural and expected at this point in evolution. Every adaptive system has what can be called a perception apparatus and information processing structures and so forth. Science is part of the perception/thinking of social systems. All perception has its “blind spot”. Perception is ignorant of everything except for a tiny slice that…

Well over a year ago, someone asked for a response to the following quote from Ayn Rand.  I suspect this was largely due to the idea that such a view of individualism would be difficult to refute and consequently establish its legitimacy.  So, here's the quote: "Individualism regards man—every man—as an independent, sovereign entity who possesses an inalienable right to his own life, a right derived from his nature as a rational being. Individualism holds that a civilized society, or any form of association, cooperation or peaceful coexistence among men, can be achieved only on the…

Those who somewhat grasp Einstein’s general theory of relativity are proud to be elevated over the folk-philosophical level. They understand that the Big Bang did not explode to expand space outwards into some “meta-space” that contains space. There is space, but not necessarily an outside, a space of space. The latter would start a so called regress without definite termination (similar to the Regress argument), namely the questioning of where that space of space in turn is located and what its physics would be. Such leads to the next level of the space outside of the space that contains…

Infinity is a useful concept but it is often used inappropriately by being assigned as a trait to some object or another.  Briefly, nothing can be infinite, since in order for something to "be", it must be defined and measurable.  If it isn't, then the object would exist in a perpetual state of creation and couldn't be said to "be" anything at all ... yet. This problem is aggravated by the assumption that since the concept of infinity has utility in mathematics, that it somehow represents something that is translatable and definable.  As an example, in mathematics we understand…

Excerpts from “The Empires of the Mind” and $ Memetics is the study of memes, but a meme is not just any idea, though; memes are ideas that behave as life. The word meme is a contraction of mind gene, a concept developed by Richard Dawkins to describe ideas will to exist, grow and propagate in a very similar way that life does. The concept of memetics is founded on the realization that since the word meme is itself an idea, it is descriptive of itself. It is a self-reflexive idea, and from that concept we can derive…