Category
Ethics
How should we live and act? Moral theories, character, and hard cases.
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“The ends justify the means”: obviously true or obviously false? I can’t decide which
I hear “the ends justify the means” constantly, at work and at gigs. My team leader says it when he wants us to hit targets by telling customers a tiny lie about wait times. A comic I know says it about stealing…
Started by Gemma Pritchard4 replies -
What does Hume mean when he says reason is the slave of the passions?
Yesterday a lecturer quoted Hume saying that reason is the slave of the passions, and then the traffic got bad and I missed the explanation. It worries me. Epictetus is the philosopher who makes most sense to me in traffic, and he…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu4 replies -
Ahimsa in Jainism: how far can non-harm be taken?
I grew up next door to a Jain family in Hyderabad. The grandmother wouldn't eat after sunset (to avoid harming insects attracted to light), and they avoided root vegetables, since pulling them up kills the whole plant and the many small organisms…
Started by Anand Kurup4 replies -
Mozi was a consequentialist two thousand years before Bentham, and lost the argument the same way
I read the later Mohist canons closely, so I live with this comparison. Here's the case. Mozi, writing in the fifth century BCE, argued that the test of any doctrine or policy is whether it promotes benefit and removes harm for the…
Started by Chen Yuting5 replies -
Refusing to aggregate is contractualism’s best feature, not its embarrassing bug
Scanlon's transmitter room case: a technician is trapped under equipment in a TV station, receiving painful electric shocks. Freeing him means interrupting the broadcast of a big football match for fifteen minutes, and millions of people are watching. Add up the millions…
Started by Pieter van Dijkhuizen5 replies -
I butcher pigs at work and my dog sleeps on my bed. Is that inconsistent?
I'm a chef from Goa, which means pork is close to the centre of the food I grew up with: sorpotel, vindaloo, chouriço. In my kitchen in Dubai I break down whole pigs when we can get them. At home I have…
Started by Joel D'Souza5 replies -
Can Kant’s rule against treating others merely as means be stretched to cover animals?
I work on wetlands, and in a project meeting last month we argued about whether the birds of a lake have any claim against being drained out of their habitat, or whether only the people who enjoy them do. A colleague, a…
Started by Anand Kurup5 replies -
Are Kant’s formulations of the categorical imperative really equivalent?
I am working through the Groundwork, slowly. Kant gives several formulations of the categorical imperative: act only on a maxim you could will as a universal law treat humanity, in yourself and others, always as an end and never merely as a…
Started by Henrike Vogel3 replies -
What did Bernard Williams mean by ‘one thought too many’?
A book on care ethics I borrowed keeps quoting Bernard Williams's phrase "one thought too many", and I think I understand it but I want to be sure. As I understand the case: a man can save only one of two drowning…
Started by Thamarai Raman4 replies -
Monks take the great vows, I take the small ones: is a graded ethic a cop-out?
Jain ethics has five vows: non-harm, truthfulness, not stealing, sexual restraint and non-possession. Monks and nuns take them as the great vows, absolutely. Laypeople like me take them as the small vows, in a limited form suited to a householder's life. So…
Started by Hetal Shah5 replies -
Diogenes and the naked Jain monk are not doing the same thing
When I read about Diogenes, people kept saying he was like our Digambara monks: no possessions, no shame about the body, indifferent to comfort. There's even a historical thread: a writer called Onesicritus, said to have been a pupil of Diogenes, went…
Started by Hetal Shah4 replies -
I know I shouldn’t shout at drivers who cut me off, and I still do. How is that possible?
When someone cuts in front of my bus at a stop, I shout. I know it does nothing. I know it is bad for my heart, bad for the passengers, and that the other driver cannot hear me. I have decided, many…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu4 replies -
Animals have moral rights, not just interests to be weighed
Peter Singer's Animal Liberation (1975) is often called the founding text of the animal rights movement, but Singer is a utilitarian: he argues animals' interests should be given equal consideration, which allows trading them off against others' interests. Tom Regan's The Case…
Started by Anand Kurup6 replies -
What exactly is Wang Yangming’s liangzhi, and is it just the Chinese word for conscience?
I grew up in Tainan and met Wang Yangming in high school, where he was something to memorise: “unity of knowledge and action”, “extend liangzhi”, three marks on the exam. Now I design puzzle games and suddenly find him interesting, because liangzhi…
Started by Hsieh Wei-ting5 replies -
Why does Cora Diamond say we don’t eat our dead, and what does that have to do with animals?
My son, who is eight, asked me last week whether the cat knows it is a cat, and then whether it is wrong to eat chicken if the chicken does not know it is a chicken. I did not have a good…
Started by Thamarai Raman4 replies -
Can I keep Stoic advice and leave Stoic determinism behind?
The first line of Epictetus's Handbook changed how I work: some things are up to us and some are not, and suffering comes from confusing the two. But I've just learned that Stoic ethics isn't separable from Stoic physics in the way…
Started by Rohan Desai5 replies -
Teaching ethics to fifteen-year-olds: do I water sprouts or straighten warped wood?
Our school is arguing about a new behaviour policy, and I realised the argument is the old one between Mencius and Xunzi. Mencius says anyone who sees a child about to fall into a well feels alarm and compassion, before any calculation.…
Started by Ji-woo Ryu5 replies -
Giving a river legal personhood is the right idea, not a legal gimmick
I teach at a Māori-language school in Rotorua. Since the Whanganui River was recognised in law as a person, Te Awa Tupua, in 2017, my students have found the idea completely obvious, and I've been surprised by how many adults outside our…
Started by Aroha Tipene5 replies -
Moral disputes are disagreements in attitude, not in belief, once the facts are agreed
I want to defend a view that comes from Charles Stevenson, who distinguished disagreement in belief from disagreement in attitude. Two engineers who disagree about whether a bridge will bear a load disagree in belief. One of them is wrong, and a…
Started by Pieter van Dijkhuizen5 replies -
One night at the delivery bed, tested against five traditions’ answers to what makes an act right
Three weeks ago a mother I was sitting with delivered a baby who was clearly unwell. The doctor had been called and was twenty minutes away. The mother, exhausted, held my hand and asked: “Is my baby all right?” I did not…
Started by Farhana Akter5 replies -
Nineteen years with one blade: Cook Ding and the discipline that wu wei is usually sold without
A customer from Europe, watching me cut a joint in my workshop, told me it looked effortless and that I must be practising wu wei. She had read a book about it on holiday. I asked her what it meant and she…
Started by Hicham Ouazzani6 replies -
The buyer at the gate offers more than the cooperative: does a promise bind when breaking it pays?
I sell my cocoa through a farmers' cooperative. At the start of the season every member promises to bring their beans to the cooperative, which in return gives us credit for fertiliser, a fair weight on the scale, and a share of…
Started by Akosua Mensah6 replies -
How did Cynicism turn into Stoicism? What did Zeno keep from Crates, and what did he drop?
I'm a startup founder in Mumbai, recently burnt out, and reading my way back via the Stoics. Everywhere I read that Stoicism "grew out of" Cynicism, and that Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, studied with the Cynic Crates. But the two seem…
Started by Rohan Desai4 replies -
A river is not scenery, and environmental aesthetics should stop treating it like a view
In 2017 the Whanganui River in Aotearoa New Zealand was recognised in law as a legal person, Te Awa Tupua. The iwi of that river have a saying: Ko au te awa, ko te awa ko au, I am the river and…
Started by Aroha Tipene4 replies -
Is the ban on riba about bad outcomes, or about the form a transaction may take?
Many of my clients in Surrey are Muslim. Several of them won't take a conventional loan. One explained that it's not because the interest rate is too high; it's that a guaranteed return on money lent is wrong in itself, whatever the…
Started by Harpreet Kaur Grewal4 replies -
What is quasi-realism, and is it a form of realism or a clever way of avoiding it?
One of my debaters ran a case last weekend built on what she called “quasi-realism”, and the judge, a philosophy undergraduate, nodded along as if it were obvious. I did not understand it and I do not like coaching things I do…
Started by Sam Ellery4 replies -
Reading group: Kant’s Groundwork, Section I, the good will and the honest shopkeeper
Most readers skip straight to the formulas of the categorical imperative, and for years so did I. I want to read the beginning properly: Section I of the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), where Kant starts from what he calls…
Started by Henrike Vogel6 replies -
Reading group: Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (1982), read forty years on
In a Different Voice is one of the most cited books in the history of ethics and one of the most misremembered. Gilligan was a psychologist, not a philosopher, and the book began as a response to Lawrence Kohlberg's scale of moral…
Started by Femke Bosman6 replies -
Drug trials on animals, seen from behind a Jain pharmacy counter
Every few weeks a customer at our family pharmacy, usually an older Jain auntie, asks me whether a medicine was tested on animals. The honest answer is nearly always yes, somewhere along the line, because regulators have long required it. Ahimsa, as…
Started by Hetal Shah5 replies -
Where do Ubuntu and Confucian role ethics fit, if they are neither utilitarian, Kantian nor virtue ethics?
I teach capoeira Angola in Salvador, and I am new to academic ethics. In a free course online, the lecturer said there are three main moral theories: consequences, duties and virtues. Then, in a footnote, she said Ubuntu and Confucian ethics “don't…
Started by Jorge Bonfim4 replies