Despite being looked down upon for it by more sophisticated philosophers, I see a lot of value in the utilitarian idea that the right course of action can often be discerned by considering what will produce the greatest good and the least harm among the most people. It’s not a philosophy that answers all ethical […]
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The popular aphorism ‘charity begins at home’ brings both sets of beliefs to the fore in a lucid way. Taken together, these beliefs work to diminish empathy on the part of the population by stressing the existence of deep and non-contingent differences between wealthy citizens and those living in other parts of the world. They […]
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This Canadian news article about political opposition to carbon taxes does a good job of summarizing the barriers to stronger greenhouse gas mitigation policy that people like Doug McAdam and Stephen Gardiner have articulated: “Certainly there are abundant grounds to doubt the political wisdom of the Liberal plan. A tax, or anything that resembles it, […]
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In an ideal world, politicians would rely on high quality sources of information to determine what they should consider to be true factually about the world. They could then apply their political philosophies and ideologies to the question of what public policy ought to exist. It’s not only conservatives who invert or pervert this process, […]
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There’s some hope perhaps that experiences like extreme weather events and wildfires will boost the salience of climate change in the population and shift atittudes toward more robust controls on carbon emissions. Anecdotally: In North Carolina, hurricanes did what scientists could not: Convince Republicans that climate change is real
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There’s another dire warning from the IPCC: Final call to save the world from ‘climate catastrophe’ There seems little reason to hope that people will react differently to this one than to the 1990, 1996, 2001, 2007, and 2014 reports. Our collective future is a massive ethical blindspot. People who wouldn’t think about missing a […]
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I have seen it argued in several places that among heterosexuals romance is a more egalitarian game for women than for men, with most women being able to find a partner, get married, and have children if they prioritize those things, while the least attractive men struggle to find anyone at all who wants them […]
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Another case of conspiratorial thinking, selfish politicians, and conflict threatening to make a deadly serious threat into a dire global emergency: Pockets of “reluctance, refusal and resistance” to accept Ebola vaccination were generating many of the new cases, Salama said. “We also see a very concerning trend. That resistance, driven by quite natural fear of […]
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The researchers and trauma experts Bessel A. van der Kolk and Alexander C. McFarlane write, “Reason and objectivity are not the primary determinants of society’s reactions to traumatized people. Rather … society’s reactions seem to be primarily conservative impulses in the service of maintaining the beliefs that the world is fundamentally just, that people can […]
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The irrational urgency of desperately awaiting a package delivery which you have no immediate need for, but which an online tracking system informs you could arrive at any time.
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