In light of Dr. Jack Kevorkian’s passing away earlier this month, dozens of pundits and bloggers have weighed in on the right to die and euthanasia. Ross Douthat argues that a right to die would mean that physician-assisted suicide can’t reasonably be limited to only the infirmed or the terminally ill. It must apply as [...]
Archive for the ‘Philosophy’ Category
Kevorkian’s Legacy And The Right To Die
Posted in Philosophy on June 21, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Is God Necessary For Morality?
Posted in Philosophy of Religion on May 18, 2011 | 11 Comments »
That was the topic of a debate between philosophers William Lane Craig and Shelly Kagan (via Andrew Moon). It’s an important question that goes to the heart of both religion and morality. But, as R. Aharon Lichtenstein remarked in a related context, “this particular query is a studded minefield, every key term an ill-defined booby [...]
Humanity as God’s Fictional Characters
Posted in Philosophy of Religion on March 14, 2011 | 1 Comment »
Last year, I wrote about the tension between divine providence and natural causation. How can we reconcile the idea that God exercises providence over our day-to-day lives with the idea that events in the world seem to be caused by other prior events? I suggested that God acts in the world from an entirely different [...]
Exercise and Ethics
Posted in Philosophy on February 23, 2011 | 1 Comment »
A New York Times article about the passing of fitness guru Jack LaLanne discusses and not-so-subtly dismisses “the modern fitness ethos” for which LaLanne’s gym and television show helped lay the groundwork. After briefly noting how he released “[a]n army of spandex missionaries”, author Frank Bruni gets to “the most interesting (some might say insidious) [...]
Our Collective Values, Some of Which Are Religious
Posted in Political Philosophy, Religion on December 20, 2010 | 6 Comments »
Last week, I discussed Ronald Dworkin’s reframing of the debate regarding the appropriate role of religion in public life. Dworkin argues that advocates on the Right and Left have fundamentally different notions of the relationship between church and state, which accounts for the shrillness of the public debate on the issue. The Right believes that [...]
A Religious Nation That Tolerates Nonbelief Or A Secular Nation that Tolerates Religion?
Posted in Political Philosophy, Religion on December 12, 2010 | 3 Comments »
In Is Democracy Possible Here?, Ronald Dworkin laments the lack of productive argument in today’s political discourse. By “argument”, he means “the old-fashioned sense in which people who share some common ground in very basic political principles debate about which concrete policies better reflect these shared principles.” Nevertheless, Dworkin suggests that by reframing our ideological [...]
Morality Disguised as Science
Posted in Philosophy of Religion on October 3, 2010 | 1 Comment »
Noted Atheist Sam Harris has a new book, The End of Faith. The New York Times review describes it as a “blistering take-no-prisoners attack on the irrationality of religions.” According to the review, the book “aims to meet head-on a claim he has often encountered when speaking out against religion: that the scientific worldview he [...]
Faith in the Shadow of Death
Posted in Philosophy of Religion, Religion on August 17, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Christopher Hitchens movingly describes his fight against metastatic esophageal cancer in his recent Vanity Fair column and in interviews with Anderson Cooper (transcript) and The Atlantic. Anderson Cooper subtly asks Hitchens, a renowned atheist, whether he may have moments of doubt as he contemplates death. Hitchens’s response: “If that comes, it will be when I’m [...]
Barr On Moral Relativism
Posted in Philosophy on July 12, 2010 | 1 Comment »
I recently came across this 2007 article by Stephen Barr on moral relativism. Barr is a scientist with a philosopher’s gift for picking out the nuances in complex arguments. He nicely illustrates how modern relativism emerged from positivism and its influence on public morality and politics. Similarly to what Alasdair Macintyre famously argued in After [...]
Dawkins’s Volition Delusion
Posted in Philosophy on July 8, 2010 | 14 Comments »
Tim Kowal posts a transcript of an exchange about determinism and free-will between a questioner and noted atheist Richard Dawkins. The questioner pointed out that Dawkins’s stated positions commit him to physical determinism and asked how the scientist reconciled it with free will. Dawkins’s response, while refreshingly honest, undermines one of the major themes in [...]
