Is Religious Circumcision of Male Infants Morally Defensible?

July 27, 2012 By 102 Comments

Last month a court in Cologne, Germany ruled against allowing the circumcision of children too young to give consent. CBS News summarized the facts: a German court ruled that circumcision infringes on a child’s right to be protected from bodily harm. The regional court in Cologne said that circumcision went against the “fundamental right of [...]

Filed Under: Andrew Sullivan, Applied Ethics, Autonomy, Bio-Medical Ethics, Civil Rights, Contemporary Ethics, Ethics, Law, Law, Law & Politics, Morality, News, News Discussion, Politics, Religion, Religious Rights, Secularism, Separation of Church and State, World Affairs 102 Comments

Justice, Order, and Chaos: The Dialectical Tensions In Batman Begins and The Dark Knight

July 20, 2012 By 29 Comments

In this post I am going to explore the moral themes from the first two films of the Dark Knight trilogy. This post gives away nothing about The Dark Knight Rises but assumes knowledge of Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. In a subsequent post I will explore how The Dark Knight Rises picks up, advances, augments, and culminates these folllowing themes from the first two films of the Dark Knight trilogy.

Filed Under: Arts, Comic Books, Ethics, Film, Morality, Nietzsche Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 29 Comments

How Ethics Is More Like Physics Than Faith

July 2, 2012 By 48 Comments

People who use the free speech that they take for granted in free societies to disparage moral philosophy as useless, superfluous, and incapable of progress since it does not function like a natural science are as naive and guilty of practical contradiction as people who use the internet to talk about how science can not attain any genuine truths because it cannot square its own metaphysical foundations or tell us about the meaning of life.

Filed Under: Applied Ethics, Authority, Contemporary Ethics, Epistemic Justification, Epistemology, Ethics, Ethics, Historical Ethics, Moral Psychology, Morality, My Theory of Morality's Rational Foundations and Nature, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophy Tagged With: , 48 Comments

In Which I Answer Leah Libresco's Moral Philosophy Concerns So You Don't Become A Catholic Too

June 28, 2012 By 121 Comments

Leah Libresco was an irreligious person with little interest in religious issues until as a Yale undergraduate she began dating a Catholic, reading Catholic theology and apologetics, and going to church with him. She wrote a blog about her process of weighing Catholicism against atheism. Recently, she converted to Catholicism. I have previously analyzed some of [...]

Filed Under: Atheism, Atheism, Atheistic Ethics, Christianity, Contemporary Ethics, Duty, Ethics, Ethics, Morality, My Theory of Morality's Rational Foundations and Nature, New Atheism, New Atheism, Philosophical Ethics, Religion, Roman Catholic Church, Teleology, Virtues Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 121 Comments

After I Deconverted: I Was A Radical Skeptic, Irrationalist, And Nihilist—But Felt Liberated

June 26, 2012 By 13 Comments

In a series of posts, I have been describing my former Christian life and beliefs, the stage by stage process of my deconversion from Christianity, and the ways that my predominantly Christian friends and family and I each took my deconversion. I am not done with all those stories yet, but because of other posts [...]

Filed Under: Epistemology, Ethics, Nietzsche, Personal, Philosophy Tagged With: , , , , , , 13 Comments

How Foolish Atheists Convinced The Atheist Blogger Leah Libresco That Catholic Philosophy Was Rationally Superior To Atheism

June 25, 2012 By 192 Comments

On Friday I am finally going to put up an extensive post dissecting the philosophical arguments that atheist blogger Leah Libresco has either made or referred to in defending and explaining her decision to convert to Catholicism. But first this post will make some more important preliminary points about the inadequacy of the reasons for [...]

Filed Under: Arguments Against The Existence of God, Arguments for the Existence of God, Atheism, Christianity, Ethics, Metaphysics, Metaphysics, Morality, My Theory of Morality's Rational Foundations and Nature, New Atheism, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophy Of Religion, Religion, Roman Catholic Church Tagged With: , , , , 192 Comments

Is Anything Intrinsically Good or Bad? An Interview with James Gray

June 14, 2012 By 2 Comments

James Gray blogs at Ethical Realism. He is passionate about advancing philosophy education and exploring moral realism both in ways accessible to beginners and engaging for advanced philosophy students. The interview below was done as part of a blogathon to support the Secular Student Alliance. Please donate to this worthy organization! And see more links [...]

Filed Under: Contemporary Ethics, Contemporary Ethics, Epistemic Justification, Epistemic Justification, Ethics, Metaethics, Moral Psychology, Moral Psychology, Morality, Morality, My Theory of Morality's Rational Foundations and Nature, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophy, Teleology, Teleology, Virtues, Virtues 2 Comments

My Metaethical Views Are Challenged, A Debate With "Ivan"

June 14, 2012 By 22 Comments

This is the first interview of my blogathon for the Secular Student Alliance and the third post overall in the blogathon. Please donate to support secular college and high school students around the country organize, learn, and develop as a community together by donating to this important cause. See links to the many diverse conversations [...]

Filed Under: Metaethics, My Theory of Morality's Rational Foundations and Nature Tagged With: , , , 22 Comments

Gender Pay Gap Among Elite Doctors

June 14, 2012 By 2 Comments

Just another piece of data to support the notion that implicitly sex discrimination is to blame for disparities between men and women in Western society: The researchers surveyed 800 physicians who had received a highly competitive early career research grant from the National Institutes of Health in 2000-2003. By focusing on these grants, the researchers [...]

Filed Under: Feminism, Feminism, Women's Rights, Women's Rights, Women's Rights, Women's Rights, Women's Issues 2 Comments

Is It Ever Good To Be Annoying?

June 1, 2012 By 9 Comments

I have received several very good comments on my recent meditations on how to be powerful, fearsome, empowering, and loved. I plan to address several of them in distinct posts. I figured I would start with one that can be given a relatively brief reply. For background, in my previous post I reiterated my general [...]

Filed Under: Ethics 9 Comments