Atheist Ethicist

We, as a society, have engineered a set of sentiments whereby somebody who is wronged may demand help, but a person who is merely harmed but...

Fox News is playing the role of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels to Trump’s Hitler. Is this your typical election hyperbole? Every el...

In our current political environment, Trump is playing the role of Hitler and Fox News the role of Joseph Goebbels. And, the election ends i...

There is no sense to the aversion to employing refugees in the host country. Such an aversion does a great deal of harm, and no actual good....

We have created a grotesquely immoral system with respect to refugees. In my previous posting , I discussed what counts as a refugee. I am...

There are folks in the world who get trapped in horrendous circumstances. A malevolent dictator seeks to have them chopped up into little pi...

Is it possible, in a democracy, for voters to cast informed votes on scientific matters when the voters do not have the scientific competenc...

This posting is less concerned with political philosophy than with epistemology - the theory of knowledge. However, it does have relevance f...

Some people fear that political liberalism - a society built on the tolerance of many different groups - is incompatible with people actuall...

Identity politics This came from a discussion elsewhere on the topic of what desirism has to say about identity politics. This is an are...

[T]he citizens of each state are entitled to the particular territory they collectively occupy, if and only if they are also politically com...

In my previous post I discussed David Miller's defense of national sovereignty, which covered the nation's rights of jurisdictional...

What may you legitimately do to other people in order to protect your culture, practices, institutions, and way of life? This question con...

We are not animals. Well, yes, of course we are animals, but we are different. We are the only animals with the capacity to judge the qual...

As I read through The Normativity of Instrumental Reason by Christine M. Korsgaard, I found many things that I wanted to comment on, so I a...

Assume that you had, as an end or goal, to learn a new language. You judge that a satisfactory way to learn a language is to enroll in an on...

A theory of desirism requires some understanding of how desires work. This is a very brief (metaphorically toned) description of an account ...

Aggression I was asked about what desirism has to say about aggression, and decided I should give a response. First, a point of clarific...