A while back, I wrote a piece called “A Critique of Peter Singer“, one of my more popular pieces on moral theory. Since I wrote that piece, I’ve spent more time reading and thinking about Singer, and I am now prepared to offer an additional critique that in some places supersedes and in other places adds to that one. Continue reading “A New Critique of Peter Singer”
Tag: Consequentialism
2 Questions about the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge
In case you’ve been living under a rock, the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge involves donating to the ALS Association and/or dumping a bucket of ice water over one’s head to raise awareness for ALS, a rare neurodegenerative disease. One can then challenge additional people to take the ice bucket challenge, raising donations and awareness for the disease:
It seems there are two kinds of people these days–people who are enthusiastically participating in the ALS ice bucket challenge and people who think it’s stupid and annoying. To answer this question, we need to ask two more.
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Why Bad Things Happen to Good People
“Why do bad things happen to good people?” This is one of those questions that is often asked but rarely comprehensively answered or seriously thought about. I’d like to take a stab at it.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson is Wrong about Philosophy
I love Neil deGrasse Tyson. It’s absolutely wonderful to have scientists as public intellectuals, making science more comprehensible to laypeople and raising its public profile. However, in a recent podcast, Tyson dismissed the intellectual value of philosophy. Given that I do quite a bit of that here, I feel a duty to stand up for myself and for those others who take an interest in political and moral philosophy. I wish to emphasize that I’m a great fan of much of Tyson’s work, and it pains me to have to write a piece like this about something he said, but it has to be done.
Continue reading “Neil DeGrasse Tyson is Wrong about Philosophy”
Fred Phelps: Is It Okay to Express Joy When Other People Die?
Fred Phelps, the leader of the infamous Westboro Baptist Church, died the other day at the age of 84. Phelps was near-universally despised. His church taught that when soldiers died in war, it was because god was angry at America for tolerating homosexuality. He believed that the best way to spread this message was to picket the funerals of dead soldiers with “God Hates Fags” signs. It’s not my purpose today to get into why this is repugnant (I assume the reader agrees with me on that), but to instead take Fred Phelps and use him as a case study to investigate the curious moral question of whether or not it’s okay to express the happiness we feel when repugnant people die.
Continue reading “Fred Phelps: Is It Okay to Express Joy When Other People Die?”
Benjamin Studebaker 
