It surely would lighten the tasks of feminism tremendously if we could cut to the quick of women's lives by focusing on some essential "woman- ness." However, though all women are women, no woman is only a woman. Those of us who have  ...

In “Puppies, Pigs, and People: Eating Meat and Marginal Cases,” Alastair Norcross (2004) uses a thought experiment he calls “Fred's Basement” to argue that consuming factory-farmed meat is morally equivalent to torturing and killing puppies in order to enjoy the taste of chocolate. Thus, he concludes that consuming factory-farmed meat is morally wrong. Although Norcross leaves open the possibility that consuming humanely raised meat is morally permissible, I contend that his basic argumentative approach rules it out. In this article, therefore, (...) I extend Norcross's thought experiment in hopes of convincing readers that consuming humanely raised meat is morally wrong. (shrink)

Collected and edited by Noah Levin -/- Table of Contents: -/- UNIT ONE: INTRODUCTION TO CONTEMPORARY ETHICS: TECHNOLOGY, AFFIRMATIVE ACTION, AND IMMIGRATION 1 The “Trolley Problem” and Self-Driving Cars: Your Car’s Moral Settings (Noah Levin) 2 What is Ethics and What Makes Something a Problem for Morality? (David Svolba) 3 Letter from the Birmingham City Jail (Martin Luther King, Jr) 4 A Defense of Affirmative Action (Noah Levin) 5 The Moral Issues of Immigration (B.M. Wooldridge) 6 The Ethics of our (...) Digital Selves (Noah Levin) -/- UNIT TWO: TORTURE, DEATH, AND THE “GREATER GOOD” 7 The Ethics of Torture (Martine Berenpas) 8 What Moral Obligations do we have (or not have) to Impoverished Peoples? (B.M. Wooldridge) 9 Euthanasia, or Mercy Killing (Nathan Nobis) 10 An Argument Against Capital Punishment (Noah Levin) 11 Common Arguments about Abortion (Nathan Nobis & Kristina Grob) 12 Better (Philosophical) Arguments about Abortion (Nathan Nobis & Kristina Grob) -/- UNIT THREE: PERSONS, AUTONOMY, THE ENVIRONMENT, AND RIGHTS 13 Animal Rights (Eduardo Salazar) 14 John Rawls and the “Veil of Ignorance” (Ben Davies) 15 Environmental Ethics: Climate Change (Jonathan Spelman) 16 Rape, Date Rape, and the “Affirmative Consent” Law in California (Noah Levin) 17 The Ethics of Pornography: Deliberating on a Modern Harm (Eduardo Salazar) 18 The Social Contract (Thomas Hobbes) -/- UNIT FOUR: HAPPINESS 19 Is Pleasure all that Matters? Thoughts on the “Experience Machine” (Prabhpal Singh) 20 Utilitarianism (J.S. Mill) 21 Utilitarianism: Pros and Cons (B.M. Wooldridge) 22 Existentialism, Genetic Engineering, and the Meaning of Life: The Fifths (Noah Levin) 23 The Solitude of the Self (Elizabeth Cady Stanton) 24 Game Theory, the Nash Equilibrium, and the Prisoner’s Dilemma (Douglas E. Hill) -/- UNIT FIVE: RELIGION, LAW, AND ABSOLUTE MORALITY 25 The Myth of Gyges and The Crito (Plato) 26 God, Morality, and Religion (Kristin Seemuth Whaley) 27 The Categorical Imperative (Immanuel Kant) 28 The Virtues (Aristotle) 29 Beyond Good and Evil (Friedrich Nietzsche) 30 Other Moral Theories: Subjectivism, Relativism, Emotivism, Intuitionism, etc. (Jan F. Jacko). (shrink)

The seven deadly sins have provided gossip, amusement, and the plots of morality plays for nearly fifteen hundred years. In Wicked Pleasures, well-known philosopher, business ethicist, and admitted sinner Robert C. Solomon brings together a varied group of contributors for a new look at the old catalogue of sins. Solomon introduces the sins as a group, noting their popularity and pervasiveness. From the formation of the canon by Pope Gregory the Great, the seven have survived the sermonizing of the Reformation, (...) the Inquisition, the Enlightenment, the brief French reign of supreme reason, the apotheoses of capitalism, communism, secular humanism and postmodernism, the writings of numerous rabbis and evangelical moralists, two series in the New York Times, and several bad movies. Taking their cue from this remarkable history, the contributors, including Thomas Pynchon, allowed one sin apiece, provide a non-sermonizing and relatively light-hearted romp through the domain of the deadly seven. (shrink)

In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, many states in the United States issued stay-at-home orders that prohibited people from leaving their homes except to access essential services. Upon reopening, a number of those states passed mask mandates requiring people to wear face coverings while in public, but as I write this, in October of 2020, there remain a substantial number of states that have not outlawed what I'll call ‘mask-less shopping’. This is a mistake. After describing the standard, public health (...) argument for outlawing mask-less shopping and explaining why it fails, I give a better argument for outlawing mask-less shopping that depends on the claim that mask-less shopping is analogous to drunk driving. It follows that every state should outlaw it. (shrink)

This note argues for an intertextual connection between the Epitaph for Bion lines 93-7 and Pindar fragment 198a and then interprets this programmatic allusion.

A lively investigation of the intimate connections we maintain with the things we toss away It's hard to think of trash as anything but a growing menace. Our communities face crises over what to do with the mountains of rubbish we produce, the enormous amount of biological waste generated by humans and animals, and the truckloads of electronic equipment judged to be obsolete. All this effluvia poses widespread problems for human health, the well-being of the planet, and the quality of (...) our lives.But though our notorious habits of disposal have put us well on the way to making the earth inhospitable to life, our relation to rejectamenta includes much more than shedding and tossing. In Trash Talks, philosopher Elizabeth V. Spelman explores the extent to which we rely on trash and waste to make sense of our lives. Examples are rich: We use people's rubbish to gain information about them. We trumpet wastefulness as a means of signaling social status. We take the occupation of handling trash and garbage as revelatory of possible moral or spiritual shortcomings. We are intrigued by or in distress over the idea that evolution is a prodigiously wasteful process and that it is to the dustbin that each of us, and our species, shall ultimately repair. In the heaps of our trash, some see consequences of dissatisfaction, while others find confirmation of a flourishing consumer economy. While we may want to shove debris and detritus out of sight, many of our most impassioned projects involve keeping these objects resolutely in mind. Trash talks, and there is much of which it speaks. (shrink)

Apollo travels from Pytho to Olympus, and the other gods greet his arrival (186–93):ἔνθεν δὲ πρὸϲ Ὄλυμπον ἀπὸ χθονὸϲ ὥϲ τε νόημαεἶϲι Διὸϲ πρὸϲ δῶμα θεῶν μεθ’ ὁμήγυριν ἄλλων⋅αὐτίκα δ’ ἀθανάτοιϲι μέλει κίθαριϲ καὶ ἀοιδή.Μοῦϲαι μέν θ’ ἅμα πᾶϲαι ἀμειβόμεναι ὀπὶ καλῇὑμνεῦϲίν ῥα θεῶν δῶρ’ ἄμβροτα ἠδ’ ἀνθρώπωντλημοϲύναϲ, ὅϲ’ ἔχοντεϲ ὑπ’ ἀθανάτοιϲι θεοῖϲιζώουϲ’ ἀφραδέεϲ καὶ ἀμήχανοι, οὐδὲ δύνανταιεὑρέμεναι θανάτοιό τ’ ἄκοϲ καὶ γήραοϲ ἄλκαρ.From there he goes quick as a thought from the earth to Olympus, to the house of Zeus, (...) in order to join the gathering of the other gods. Immediately the immortals concern themselves with lyre music and song. All the Muses together, responding with their beautiful voice, hymn the divine gifts of the gods and the endurance of men, all that they have from the immortal gods and yet live ignorant and helpless, unable to find a remedy for death and a defence against old age. (shrink)

In 2006, Michael Zimmerman published an underappreciated paper on the nature of moral obligation in which he argued that our moral obligations depend, not on the facts or our beliefs, but on the evidence available to us. Two years later, he published a lengthy book in which he argued more thoroughly for the same conclusion. In this book, Zimmerman returns to the central question of those works to respond to objections that have been brought against the views he presented therein. (...) This new book is the most thorough defense of what has come to be known as the Prospective View of moral obligation and as such is a must-read for those working in normative ethics narrowly construed. (shrink)