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 …
Anja Steinbauer says Don’t Trust the Ethicists (too much). Ethical issues are a messy business. Trying to get a firm grip on them is like holding a handful of sand and see it trickle through your fingers. Many philosophers love ethics. Equipped with their professional buckets and spades – virtues, maxims, systems and values – …
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. …
Paul Gregory on How to End Packages and Bundling. A major practical problem with democracy is how opinion can be organised and measured so that something resembling a general will, or a majority, or a consensus, can be identified. How can one possibly establish all the relevant opinions and values people hold? How can we …
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 …
Ramsey McNabb on knowing how other people feel. Tragically, Hector’s father is involved in a car accident and dies. Hector is devastated. An acquaintance, Anita, tells him that she knows just how he feels. Angered at her presumption, he responds, “No, you don’t know how I feel!” After all, how could she know how he …
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 …
Carolyn Suchy-Dicey considers the dilemma of teaching moral autonomy. Last night while working for a wedding, a girl I will call Sarah seemed her normal, bubbly self. She was given a simple task, one we do for every event, but had some difficulties performing it properly. Her response was to yell, blame, shove, and walk …