Tom Mayo and I have already posted some thoughts about organ donation in the US and elsewhere on this blog. I’ve just read two interesting recent articles about the problem with regard to kidney transplants in the US. Currently some 80,000 people are on a waiting list for kidneys, and they generally receive dialysis while […]
The Op-Ed page of the New York Times again has a challenging discussion of morality. The well-known atheist Sam Harris expresses some reservations about President Obama’s nomination of Francis Collins as Director of the National Institutes of Health. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/27/opinion/27harris.html?ref=opinion Harris recognizes Collins’ important scientific accomplishments. But he quotes some statements by Collins about religion and […]
Yesterday’s New York Times Magazine had an article by the eminent utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer with the provocative title, “Why We Must Ration Health Care”: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/magazine/19healthcare-t.html?ref=magazine It is partly a defense of the idea of a national health insurance program, but it also discusses the idea of ‘rationing’ health care. Singer is brave enough to […]
Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times columnist who writes the most about issues of global poverty and disease, has a discussion today of some of the recent work by psychologists and philosophers about empathy and its limits. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/09/opinion/09kristof.html Kristof has done his homework, and he cites some of the most important thinkers in these fields. […]
I’ve blogged a few times now about the causes of the meltdown and some of the commentators on it that I’ve found to be helpful. (As a moral philosopher interested in character I’ve tended to concentrate on writers who have looked at the imprudence and irrational optimism that affected so many people.) A recent column […]
Yesterday’s New York Times again contained an op-ed piece about moral philosophy. Nicholas Kristof wrote about Peter Singer and the movement for animal rights that he more or less launched in 1973. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/09/opinion/09kristof.html?em Once again a professor is bound to find a few errors and misconceptions in a newspaper story on his specialty. It’s not […]
I am not used to opening the morning paper and seeing an op-ed piece on general issues in moral philosophy. But today’s New York Times has such a piece by David Brooks . http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/07/opinion/07Brooks.html?_r=1 Brooks reads widely. He is aware that many philosophers these days are sympathetic to the arguments of psychologists and cognitive scientists […]
The number of executions in the US is falling, but capital punishment has not disappeared, as some had predicted. It is interesting, as a philosopher, to see what sorts of considerations have an effect in public life on the popularity of this form of punishment. A few years ago discussion focused on the possibility of […]
There has been quite a lot of discussion in the last few years generated by militant atheists like Richard Dawkins. I have not followed if closely. But, being a moral philosopher, I am certainly interested in one aspect of it: the relation of religion and morality. It is often said that morality is based on […]
One of the most insightful economists writing about the meltdown is Robert Shiller, of Yale. He is also one of the few economists who gets credit for predicting at least some of it. In a recent column in The New York Times he added some reflections about how the behavior of consumers and lenders led […]