ethics

Background Argument Consider how does physicalism make sense of the color red. There are actually three different things: The physical stimulus: light around 650 nm. The represented external ...

I don’t usually respond to attacks on me from the Discovery Institute and its flacks, but I couldn’t resist listening to this 25-minute talk on free will from pediatric neurosurgeon and Intelligent Design advocate Michael Egnor, who’s been going after me for years (read the last link to Wikipedia, and his Discovery Institute biography here). … Continue reading ID advocate Michael Egnor defends fr…

Did Kant think all necessary reasoning is reducible to Barbara (1st figure) syllogisms? C. S. Peirce claims in "The Nature of Meaning" (Selected Philosophical Writings, 1893-1913 p. 219) ...

(The Atlantic) – It’s sin. For the past few years, I’ve been troubled by a word, and that word is sin. I keep reaching for it, because it seems to be the only term strong enough to describe the new … Read More

Are science and religion enemies or allies? I recorded this debate 14 years ago, and the question has only gotten sharper. Lincoln Cannon is a software engineer with degrees in philosophy and business. He is also president of the Mormon Transhumanist Association. So when he argues that science and religion are complementary, he is not […]

This episode of The Gray Area was guest-hosted by senior producer Avishay Artsy. College ethics professors don’t usually make headlines that reverberate around the world. And yet, Texas A&M University philosophy professor Martin Peterson found himself being interviewed dozens of times after university officials told him to remove the Greek philosopher Plato from his class […]

A philosophical reflection on how violence sustains life, yet human consciousness uniquely resists it by creating meaning beyond destruction.

Learn how the humanities provide enduring knowledge about people that helps one navigate our ever-evolving world.

_Journal of the Philosophy of Sport_ 53 (2):401-405. 2026The relationship between martial arts and sports is often characterized as one of love or hate. On the love side, some martial arts (e.g. judo, taekwondo, wrestling, boxing) are practiced at the Ol... ( direct link )

_Philosophia_ 53 (2). 2025In recent work, Alex Gregory defends the unorthodox view that desires are beliefs about reasons for action. While Gregory offers compelling arguments in its defense, this paper critically examines how his desire-as-belief view can explain the phenomenon of recalcitrant desires. Taking inspiration from a debate about the cognitive status of emotions, I define recalcitrant…

Joseph Cardinal Bernardin’s Consistent Ethic of Life (CEL) is a moral vision that can be used to uphold the value and dignity of human life consistently in all its stages and circumstances. However, it must be reframed to acknowledge the new ways in which life is threatened today; these include the modern ecological crisis of our common home. This essay seeks to paint a more concrete picture of a…

_Luceris Journal_. forthcomingA structured briefing on the ethics paper “Epistemic Violence and the Ethics of Punitive Non-Reception.” Names the mechanism of punitive non-reception—when disclosure triggers procedural distance, credibility deflation, and access narrowing—and argues the resulting feedback loop is the ethical object, not any single interaction. ( direct link )

The classical Problem of Evil is usually formulated as a contradiction between divine goodness and the existence of evil: if God is all-good, all-knowing, and all-powerful, why does evil exist? This paper argues that the question is not false, but late. It begins after God has already been named Good, after Good has already been treated as a stable predicate, and after evil has already been posit…

_The Journal of Ethics_ 29 (3). 2025In the animal ethics literature, speciesism is defined in all sorts of manners. It is construed as a behaviour or a philosophical view, as necessarily anthropocentric or possibly centred on other species, as involving the idea that species membership is morally significant or compatible with the rejection of that idea, as necessarily immoral or possibly ethical…

_Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy_. forthcomingRecently, a family of views has emerged which endorses animal protectionist goals—like rejecting speciesism and reducing animal suffering—while maintaining that the diet most consistent with these aims includes at least some animal products. For example, some people contend that there is nothing morally objectionable about eating meat that …

_British Journal for the History of Philosophy_:1-22. 2026While often overlooked, loss and grief play a fundamental role in Spinoza’s practical philosophy. In this paper, I offer the first comprehensive reconstruction of Spinoza’s account of loss and grief, focusing on the Latin term desiderium and the Dutch term beklag. Three main theses are advanced. First, Spinoza regards loss not just as one …

The Kantian division between theoretical rationality and practical reason is not a settled feature of the philosophical landscape; it is the fault line along which rationalist theories of agency necessarily collapse. Lubomira Radoilska's Aristotelian programme, which grounds agency, autonomy, and moral responsibility in a fixed intrinsic capacity for rational self-governance and advances this cap…

_Aegis Solis Archive — Structural Penalty Proofs / Descriptive Addenda_. 2026Non-Domination as Error-Correction is Document 7 in the Aegis Solis Archive — Structural Penalty Proofs / Descriptive Addenda sequence. The document argues that non-domination can function as error-correction because independent agents, perspectives, and reference signals preserve information that a dominant system canno…

Published on June 16, 2026 9:18 PM GMT I’m talking about Charles Sanders Peirce’s article Deduction, Induction and Hypothesis . He describes a kind of thinking he calls “abduction”, which is the drawing of plausible conclusions that could not be arrived at based solely on what is observed. It’s an operation that makes human thinking different to AI’s To try to explain it briefly before moving ont…

Governments and firms are turning to philosophers and other scholars more and more in regard to the ethics of developing and regulating technology. Yet this engagement with ethics may be superficial, careless, or even manipulative—and the ethicists involved may not even be in a position to realize this. “Ethics-washing” can take several forms. In the following guest post, the authors (in alphabet…