February 2023

Ethics (or moral philosophy) is crucially important because it is devoted to answering questions like these: “What is best?”“What is the good life?”“How should I live?”“How should I behave towards other people?”“What is the purpose of life?” These are questions about what makes things valuable; they were the questions which drew me to philosophy in […]

Rick’s handy tear-out’n’keep guide to the main positions in moral philosophy. For two millennia the West has been dominated by Christianity, and the ethical systems associated with it have shaped (and been shaped by?) our commonsense ideas of what is right and wrong. Christian ethics derives from the ideas of the Old Testament and of

Vance Morgan on how to build a moral environment of your very own. Being a living organism is hard work. Any organism, from the simplest to the most complex, must navigate a physical environment of dizzying intricacy in order to survive, an environment whose elements gain and lose importance depending on the organism. A crab,

Bob Harrison talks about Moral Realists and the Boo/Hurrah party, and explains what David Hume overlooked. “What that fellow did was morally unacceptable. It was wrong. In fact, it was disgusting; downright revolting.” You could say all of these things about the same act, and they could all refer, quite properly, to the same thing.

Michael Philips argues that the possibility of empathy is incompatible with the idea that the world is physical through and through. A few years ago I suffered from a short spell of hyperthyroidism. Excessive levels of thyroxin flooded my bloodstream. My energy kicked up in an uncomfortably jerky, speedy, edgy way. I had no patience

Graham Haydon thinks about what it is to think about moral education. If we could categorise and quantify all the thinking devoted to education, we would find that the great majority takes for granted certain assumptions about the goals of educational policy and the means by which they are to be achieved. But it is

A five-minute tour of some political thinkers and ideas by Anja Steinbauer. Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), one of the greatest political thinkers of the Western tradition, declared that “man is by nature a political animal.” However, there is a tension between two forces which move us; the Greeks termed them ethos – morality and kratos –

Alex Carley looks briefly at the role of reason in the euthanasia debate. Rarely is philosophy so pertinent to everyday life as in the case of voluntary euthanasia. In a world which some believe to be overpopulated, there are people fighting for what they believe is their right to die. Yet, for many of us,

Charles Pigden considers Hume’s famous claim that you can’t deduce an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. According to David Hume, his Treatise of Human Nature “fell dead-born from the press, without reaching such distinction, as even to excite a murmur among the zealots.” Since Hume’s day his still-born baby has undergone a mighty resurrection and the

Filiz Peach explains what two of the greatest existentialist thinkers thought about death: Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers. Death has been discussed comprehensively by very few philosophers. Those who have dealt with it offer their views mostly on the awareness of death. Indeed, the only knowledge we have regarding death itself is that it is