Category Archives: ethics

Lying and Plagiarism: When Is It OK to Lie?

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 [...]

Young Philosophers - Joshua Thurow

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?” [...]

Central APA

I’m off to Chicago today for the Central APA. Assuming I have access to the internet, I’ll post about some of the philosophy going on there.
I’m commenting on a paper by Matthew Pianalto called “Moral Realism and Ways of Life.” He discusses an issue that Walter Sinnott-Armstrong raises for moral realism that’s fun to think [...]

Experiments Involving Perception and Intuition

About a month ago, I posted about an article that presents some interesting experiments involving perception. You don’t have to click that link…here’s the relevant bit.
It turns out that there are many cases in which what people expect to see tricks them into thinking they saw it. For example, they had people watch someone throw [...]

Philosophy, Philosophy, Philosophy

In the last few hours, I’ve stumbled on quite a few cool bits of philosophy…
1. Mike Almeida has a pretty interesting post on Multiverse responses to a variety of versions of the Problem of Evil here.
2. Carrie Jenkins just suggested that we might be able to handle Kripkenstein Undetermination Worries in a (roughly) analogous way [...]

The Puzzle of Inadvisable Parenthood

Ralph Wedgewood over at PEA Soup presents an interesting puzzle that David Velleman recently discussed at a conference.
Here is the puzzle…
Suppose that Karen, a 14-year old girl, decides to conceive a child. Having a child at such a young age will make life very hard for Karen, and for her child as well: in general, [...]