ethics

On October 8 th, 2019, Jameela Jamil, one of the lead actresses on the surprising hit TV-show The Good Place was embroiled in a Twitter scandal. Liberal TV personality Ellen DeGeneres, who had…

For the third time in this young century, Reinhold Niebuhr is getting another splash of attention. It happened last in 2008, when presidential candidate Barack Obama said that Niebuhr had deeply…

A new Star Wars film premieres this week, accompanied by the kind of social ferment usually reserved for presidential elections—or in the case of this year, papal visits. Beyond George Lucas’ classic…

In the wake of tragedy, considering both the human and the moral costs of the ultimate sports pilgrimage.

The slogan “Don’t be evil” prompts questions Google’s chairman seems ill-equipped to answer.

Though Craig is correct that his argument is “simple,” he is wrong to believe that simplicity makes it good. Indeed, the suggestion that terms and concepts are immune to redefinition is simply… false. It demands an unflattering comparison to Rick Santorum, who once stumped around the nation declaring that a “ napkin is a napkin.”

Last week, in the wake of Russian-led investigation, it was reported that when Tamerlan Tsarnaev was in Russia he was, in fact, more eager to wage war than the Islamist contacts he had traveled to find. Accounts reveal that he arrived in Russia with “an avid interest in waging jihad.”

Peter Singer: if your religious beliefs don’t permit it, don’t do it.

When it comes to the consumption of meat, our human hands have long been dirty. This isn’t a discouragement to stop striving for the good. But a moral proposal that promises to wash our filthy fingers spotlessly clean—in seconds flat—is suspect. Because they will still be dirty. The pressing moral question, of meat, becomes: given that human hands are obviously soiled, what can be done with these polluted tools?

We humans are, today, animals like any other. We always have been. Our culture, however, appears designed to culminate in a magnificently human apex. This has long been a problem when it comes to legal rights. I know I don’t have to explain that the fight for animal rights has fanned the flame of much heated political controversy. And I won’t take an ethical position on that now. Because I’m pointing to something else that, I think, is increasingly under fire: the powerful, dreamlike, quasi-trance state driven by that powerful myth of being human.