November 18, 2008 – 11:33 pm
I’m working on a revise and resubmit, and there’s an interesting issue that I’m going to have to deal with. So let me begin with a question. Is it possible to forgive someone for an action, but fail to believe that the action was wrong?
I’m inclined to say yes. Here’s three potential motivations.
Moral Skepticism
Suppose someone [...]
October 27, 2008 – 10:58 am
Here’s a good discussion about how eVoting should be done.
Of particular interest, is the case made for using an open source software for the electronic voting machines.
With closed-source, proprietary software a company has the perfect cover to pull some cloak-and-dagger stuff (e.g., insert a backdoor program that allows for the creator to manually change results, [...]
October 21, 2008 – 11:18 pm
I had three hits today on my website from somebody googling “What Plargiarism is OK?” - Here is your answer…none.
October 12, 2008 – 7:35 pm
I’ve ranted a lot about how awesome I think Ubuntu (a super user friendly Linux alternative to Mac and Windows).
One of the benefits that I like to emphasize when I try to persuade someone that they should consider Linux has to do with social justice. There is good reason to believe that Linux (and supporting [...]
October 2, 2008 – 12:29 pm
“Moral Perception” has just been accepted for publication in the European Journal of Philosophy. As Clayton once so eloquently put it - Huzzah!
I have to make some stylistic changes. When I do that I’ll post a draft of the paper. For now, I’ll give you a draft of the new version of the abstract.
Moral Perception [...]
September 5, 2008 – 2:38 pm
Nick Treanor was here last week for our Young Philosophers Lecture Series. I’ll be posting those talks over at Young Philosophers sometime within the next week.
In his introductory level talk, he presented a view about emotions, according to which emotions could be rational or irrational. That talk was the inspiration for this argument.
Warm-Up
Treanor’s talk led [...]
I don’t do much with business ethics, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that there is something wrong with Colgate.
I snapped these two pictures at the grocery store over a month ago because I thought it was kind of funny. Compare them.
Single Purchase
Value Pack Purchase
Did you figure it out? [...]
A senior DHS official is seriously interested in EMD Bracelets for all airline passengers. The basic idea is to replace boarding passes with bracelets that would connect passengers with their luggage, serve as passenger identification, enable tracking throughout the airport…oh and they have the abililty to taser you if you get out of line. That’s [...]
Lying is prima facie morally wrong. But most people are willing to acknowledge that it is sometimes OK to lie.
Cognitive Daily has an interesting post concerning a study designed to assess when teenagers think it’s OK to lie. You might be amazed at what teenagers regard as permissible defeating circumstances. Here is the link to [...]
Joshua Thurow is here for our second set of lectures in the Young Philosophers Lecture Series. He gave a great talk yesterday developing and defending BonJour’s Generality Argument for the conclusion that we have some a priori knowledge.
Today he is giving an introductory level talk titled “Is Morality Real, or Do We Make it Up?” [...]