Philosophy & Ethics

An expert witness is a person authorized by a judge to share professional opinions in a court of law about subjects in which the expert was found to be sufficiently knowledgeable and competent.   During criminal or civil litigation, the permission granted to expert witnesses to give their opinions about topics of interest (DNA, fingerprints, accounting, ballistics, engineering, toxicology, and so forth) gives them considerable power and influence in the courtroom as compared to other kinds of witnesses. Expert witnesses serve as consultants - so to speak - to the courts.  In this…

U.S. Right To Know is a small marketing group devoted primarily to endorsing the organic food process and undermining conventional agriculture. Nearly 100 percent of their funding comes from organic food companies, and they seem to believe that for organic food to be cost-effective, regular farming has to become more expensive. (1) Like Sourcewatch, Mother Jones and a few others, they are what the science community calls Deniers For Hire, the junkyard dogs of politically partisan anti-science groups. They hate farmers, and they hate affordable energy, but they hate scientists…

Often, we do not understand because we do not see the issue from the other side. For example, the person who believes in some sort of determinism, the "determinist", wonders why those others, people such as those who believe in ‘free will’, the “free-willers”, make a big deal out of that determinism may be used as an excuse. He exclaims: “Look, determinism does not imply that people stop feeling guilty about their misdeeds and start acting irresponsible. People are just as well determined to believe in ‘free will’.” A determinist naturally looks at what the assumed determinism implies, and in…

Today’s affirmative action professoriate like to talk as though they own the moral high ground because they are not white men. It’s a big act. Even before the affirmative action professoriate came into being, the academic study of ethics and morality was suspect. To this day, when any scholar of ethics publishes a study exploring why people cheat, they tend to do the same things. Keep in mind, that for professors today in this climate of politically correct hysteria, ethics is a hot topic, and it is a fave topic when it comes to teaching undergrads. They love to begin discussing morals and…

Though the Affordable Health Care was passed and signed without really knowing what it was, a few things were certain; you could keep your doctor, it would be cheaper due to competition for new customers, and socio-economic disparities would be eliminated. None of those have turned out to be true. While there are fewer uninsured Americans, that is due to penalties and forcing the companies of parents to pay for adult children until they are 26. Insurance companies are abandoning the programs because they are still losing billions; they are forced to pick an insurance cost while not…

Last week, a small group of people held a protest outside Channel Nine in Sydney. They were objecting to the network’s treatment of Adam Whittington, the Australian man whose company “recovered” Sally Faulkner’s children on the streets of Beirut. It’s clear there is a high level of concern within the community. Some concerns relate to Nine’s treatment of Whittington and his colleagues, who remain imprisoned in Lebanon. Others include Nine’s apparent involvement in arrangements for what might constitute the criminal act of child abduction, the payment of A$115,000 by Nine to Whittington’s…

Long Title: "Galactic Random-Genocide from Quantum-Relativistic Plenitude Principled Multiversial Many-Minds Ethics under the Doctrine of Diversity or Donald Trump" Alternative Title: The 1 CC = 50 FF or FFF Theorem or One Concealed Carry saves Fifty Feely Faggots in a parallel universe under Donaldo Trumpovich.   1) If “free will” is illusion, all we ever do is finding ourselves with our pasts. There is then no “real ethics,” because we cannot do anything about it whatsoever.   2) Therefore, in order to be meaningful as well as moral, ethics must(!) hope that “free will” is…

The technological capacity for generating virtual worlds from home computers will soon be widely available to the general public, as special head-mounted displays are brought to market that create the illusion of being immersed in virtual three-dimensional worlds. The fact that Virtual Reality (VR) can create these strong illusions is a main reason why VR brings new risks - recent studies have shown that immersion in VR can cause behavioral changes that last after subjects leave the virtual environment. And because VR can also create a situation in which the user's bodily appearance and…

Organic Consumers Association, which funds Denier For Hire cabals like the anti-science group U.S. Right To Know, has baffled the science community once again by just making stuff up. When groups made claims that a larvicide named pyriproxyfen was part of a Monsanto conspiracy to promote Zika to give Monsanto a problem to solve(1), they were dismissed by even Washington Post reporters, so OCA has simply swapped out a new name and is trying again.(2) This time they chose atrazine, a pesticide made by the chemical company Syngenta that is commonly used on corn fields and golf courses. They have…

Is a scientist someone who does science? It depends on who you ask, according to a presentation at the AAAS meeting in Washington, D.C.  A century ago, an occupation based on intelligence was regarded as a blue-collar endeavor. Sherlock Holmes was better than the police because he was an amateur detective, self-educated in science. Today, a large number of scientists, and certainly much of the public, thinks you are only a scientist if you are government funded. What do scientists think? They separate real scientists from others using their own metrics, and they often involve self-…