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Ethics

At MercatorNet: For once, a woke “ethicist” gets shut down by people with disabilities

Message to activists for persons with disabilities: Please fight for Peter Singer’s freedom of speech to display his agenda to the world while there is still a slight chance you can legally fight it. Leave the defense of censorship to those well-heeled woke who would also deprive you of your lives. So many of them will be only too happy to oblige in both cases. Read More ›

But why need a Darwinist care about fairness in hiring?

If so many of us are talking about Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne’s moral philosophy anyway, here’s an illustration of the conundrum it creates. Jerry is concerned about unfairness in diversity hiring. Why?: Read More ›

Fancy that! An edition of Darwin’s Origin of Species with a worldview guide

What a good idea! Instead of getting shouted down by Darwinians, anxious to impose the “red in tooth and claw” on school curricula, perhaps we should long ago have adopted the practice of simply providing editions of Darwin’s works, detailing the worldview that lies behind this stuff. Accept or reject it, the worldview goes along with the package. Read More ›

Dawkins raises an issue without intending to: Can one “outgrow” God without “outgrowing” morality?

Rebecca McLaughlin: To Dawkins’s credit, he comes dangerously close to acknowledging that religious belief is correlated with better moral outcomes—though he would like to think humans are better than that (117). He finds it rather patronizing to say, “Of course you and I are too intelligent to believe in God, but we think it would be a good idea if other people did!” (122). Read More ›

John Horgan on Jeffrey Epstein and the decadence of science

Horgan: As genuine progress has stalled, hype has surged. A 2015 study of biomedical papers found that between 1974 and 2014 the frequency of terms such as “novel,” “innovative” and “unprecedented” increased 15-fold. Read More ›

If apes are people, we aren’t (but that’s the point, right?)

One factor that helps diminish awareness of the fact of human exceptionality is the promotion of “buzz” concepts around animal intelligence that are not supported by the histories of disciplines and fall apart under scrutiny. But any time one fails (apes can be taught to talk!), another rises, seamlessly, in its place (elephants can be taught to communicate via high tech!). No one ever calls any of these people to account. Read More ›

Can the history of medicine help social sciences out of their dark ages?

But maybe this historian of science’s idea can’t work. Many doctors are prepared to slay beautiful theories for the sake of the lives of their patients. Have social scientists any similar motivation? Read More ›

A serious look at whether we can be good without God

Christian Smith: One of the key problems with atheist arguments for universal benevolence, according to Smith, is the contention that we live in a "naturalistic" universe, in a realm that simply came to be, with no creator. So how can naturalistic atheist thinkers claim any rational basis for the high moral standard they're reaching for? Read More ›

Logic & First Principles, 20: What is law?

A good first step to understanding the ongoing failure of our civilisation is to contrast the common, positive law view of law summarised by Wikipedia (as a handy point of reference): Law is a system of rules that are created and enforced through social or governmental institutions to regulate behavior. It has been defined both as “the Science of Justice” and “the Art of Justice”. Law is a system that regulates and ensures that individuals or a community adhere to the will of the state. State-enforced laws can be made by a collective legislature or by a single legislator, resulting in statutes, by the executive through decrees and regulations, or established by judges through precedent, normally in common law jurisdictions Read More ›

Logic & First Principles, 19: Are we part of a Boltzmann brain grand delusion world (or the like)?

In looking at time (no. 18) we saw how a suggested form of multiverse is one in which sub-cosmi are speculated — there is no observational base, this is philosophy dressed up in a lab coat — to pop up as fluctuations, exhibiting their own “big bang” events and timelines: However, it was not as simple as that. Wikipedia, speaking against known inclinations, summarised: a Boltzmann brain is a self-aware entity that arises due to extremely rare random fluctuations out of a state of thermodynamic equilibrium [–> the predominant, statistically overwhelming group of accessible micro-states for a relevant entity in statistical thermodynamics]. For example, in a homogeneous Newtonian soup, theoretically by sheer chance all the atoms could bounce off and Read More ›