On the Ethics of Teasing and Mocking People, in Groups, in Friendships, and...
One of the difficulties in working out the civility pledge I co-wrote and signed earlier this year was addressing the use of humor and mockery in disagreements. So let me offer a bunch of points of...
View ArticleOh You Can Get Good People To Do Bad Things Without Religion Alright…
Sometimes atheists become enamored with some pretty psychologically shallow memes. In this post, I fisk one.
View Article4 Kinds of Irony and Nietzsche. An Excerpt From My Dissertation
A peek inside my dissertation! I love this stuff about irony that I worked out in this section. Irony is such a generally ill-explicated subject. I wanted to blog about it today but decided I had...
View ArticleShades of Cruelty
How BDSM is like sour candies, cannibalism is like white chocolate, and violence is like cinnamon.
View ArticleForward Thinking: Round up of Responses About the Ethics of Cruelty
For this round of the ”Forward Thinking” values development project Libby Anne and I are running, I asked bloggers to contemplate the ethics of cruelty. I pointed out a number of roles cruelty plays in...
View ArticleIntent Is Not Magic, But It Still Matters
Sometimes we hurt others without intending to do so. Often in these cases, we typically feel it a matter of paramount importance to clarify our intentions and demonstrate that they were not malicious,...
View ArticleMy Appearance on the Atheist Experience Defending Objective Morality
Click the headline of the post for a guide to finding my articles on morality that most apply to your challenges and interests!
View ArticleForward Thinking: The Ethics of Challenging Each Other’s Identities
In this post I explore some of the ways that our beliefs, values, commitments, behaviors, etc. constitute ourselves and how our commitments to various ideas, institutions and practices, etc. also...
View ArticleIn Defense of Taking Offense
As predominantly pro-social animals, humans are quite often conflict averse. And innumerable forms of social pressure, all the way from authoritarian patriarchy to liberal multiculturalism, encourage...
View ArticleDoes Sexism Trump Even The Profit Motive?
Why I don't buy the argument that the reason they don't make enough video games or films centered around strong female characters because such simply wouldn't sell.
View ArticleTalking About Gay Marriage and Prostitution on The Ashley F. Miller Show
Ashely F. Miller of the blog Ashley F. Miller hosted her inaugural episode of The Ashley F. Miller Show and Mavaddat Javid and I were her guests. First we speculated about the prospects for this week’s...
View ArticleRebecca Goldstein: The Mattering Map: Religion, Humanism, and Moral Progress
From many sources I have heard that philosopher Rebecca Goldstein’s lecture on the “will to matter”, below, was the highlight: Your Thoughts?
View ArticleVulnerability, Victim Blaming, and The Just World Fallacy
Trigger Warning: What follows are speculations about the implicit philosophies and psychologies underpinning victim blaming. Years ago I read an article by a rape survivor who talked about how after...
View ArticleFrom Normal to Normative, Human Minds’ Conformist Conservative Prejudice
In this post I use a social psychology finding as a key for speculating about the causes of a lot of frustratingly poor ethical reasoning.
View ArticleYou Don’t Kill Hateful Words’ Powers By Ignoring Them
The problems discussed in the middle section of this post’s essay are epitomized in various ways by this video: The Stoics, with some wisdom that is in need of some qualification, advise us to always...
View ArticlePhilosophical Advice For Dealing With A Bad Mother With Medical Needs
Hi Dan! I have a question for you! What do you think one’s moral obligations are to an ailing parent who parented very poorly? I had what seems to me to have been a very rough childhood. My parents...
View ArticleThe JT and Bria Conflict and Why I Usually Don’t Blog About Interpersonal...
The best moral judgment is not absolutist. It does not blindly apply simplistic, overly broad rules in every circumstance regardless of the consequences. When necessary, the best moral judgment in fact...
View ArticleWhen All That Abstinence Fetishism Goes Too Far…
Did you hear about this young evangelical couple in Topeka?? Jon and Darla Crocker, who dutifully abstained from sex during their 14-month courtship, have remained abstinent after marriage and plan to...
View ArticleKinds of Pleasures
Thomas Hurka is one of my favorite moral philosophers. His essay on Nietzsche found in the compilation Nietzsche and Morality is meaty and challenging both as a stark reading of Nietzsche and as a...
View Article“You Can’t Stop Teenagers From Having Sex”
Don't say "You can't stop teenagers from having sex". It's not true. You can stop some of them. (I held out! And I know plenty of others who did too.) You just can't stop enough of them with...
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