Liberaltarians

March 4, 2011 By 1 Comment

A new blog with a promising premise: I’ve created this blog as a forum for academic philosophers who are attracted both to libertarianism and to ideals of social or distributive justice. Labels are often a greater source of confusion than insight in academic discourse, and no doubt most of the contributors to this blog will [...]

Filed Under: Politics, Politics Tagged With: , 1 Comment

Some More Thoughts On Rawls’s Maximin Principle And Fairness

October 26, 2009 By 1 Comment

A week ago, I wrote a brief primer post explaining John Rawls’s maximin principle. In that post I explained that Rawls conceives of justice as being quintessentially concerned with fairness.  In order to determine what is maximally fair politically we must imagine ourselves behind a veil of ignorance behind which we do not know what [...]

Filed Under: Ethics, Featured, Morality, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophy, Politics Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Philosophical Ethics: Rawls’s Maximin Principle

October 19, 2009 By 13 Comments

In a series of posts this semester, I am going to blog all (or almost all) the lecture topics for the two Philosophical Ethics classes I am teaching this semester. Each of these posts will primarily explicate the reading or a theme that dominated class discussion in a way that should be accessible to novices [...]

Filed Under: Applied Ethics, Civil Rights, Contemporary Ethics, Ethics, Featured, Historical Ethics, Historical Philosophy, Law, Law & Politics, Morality, News Discussion, Philosophical Ethics, Politics Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 13 Comments

Can You Have A Heart Without Having “The Heart of God”?

July 19, 2009 By Leave a Comment

In reply to my post on whether we need God to care about the poor around the world, Marianne offers this challenge: I have observed that atheists discuss and analyze poverty, but do very little about it. Most of the charities in the world are christian in foundation. You will find very few atheist charities [...]

Filed Under: Atheism, Atheistic Ethics, Christianity, Fundamentalism, Gay Rights, Political Secularism, Politics, Religion, Secularism, Torture Tagged With: , , , , , , Leave a Comment