A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

Ethics

  • Digital simplicity

    It’s not news that a lot of us have a complicated relationship with technology. Many of us feel like we spend more time on our phones–particularly social media–than we think, in our more reflective moments, is probably good for us. Phone addiction is now discussed as a serious issue, and the ubiquity of mobile phones Read more

  • Odds and ends for a Friday

    I realize I’m exactly the type of person you’d expect to like a Sufjan Stevens album, but nonetheless–the new album is really good! Evangelical Christian groups are working on a statement of theological concern regarding factory farming. I’m no longer a vegetarian (and feel vaguely guilty about it), but I’m all for any efforts to Read more

  • Liberal Christians aren’t caving in to “society”

    This article makes two assumptions, neither of which really stands up to scrutiny. The first is that Christians have held the same views on marriage, sex, and gender for the last 2,000 years. But I think you’d have a hard time making the case that marriage and gender have been understood the same way during Read more

  • “Theistic ethics” or Christian ethics?

    I said in my previous post that some Christians might be worried by the fact that Ward’s Morality, Autonomy, and God doesn’t appeal to the Bible or specifically Christian revelation. Shouldn’t Christian ethics be informed by convictions specific to Christianity? In his book Behaving in Public, Christian ethicist Nigel Biggar takes a position that is Read more

  • (How) does morality need God?

    “Does ethics need God?” is an old question, and the answers we get are often simplistic. On the one hand, Christians (and other religious believers) sometimes identify ethics with “God’s will” conceived as a sheer command, and they imply (or sometimes outright assert) that only believers in God can be moral. On the other hand, Read more

  • Utilitarianism as “moral Esperanto”?

    The Atlantic‘s Robert Wright has a thought-provoking review of Joshua Greene’s Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them. Greene used scans of people’s brains to examine their responses to the famous (famous by the standards of professional philosophy, anyway) “trolley problem” thought-experiment. In the thought-experiment, people are asked whether they would Read more

  • Liberals aren’t sexual relativists

    In an article that otherwise makes some good points about conservatives’ “populist” defense of junk food, Rod Dreher just can’t resist taking a swipe at a time-honored liberal strawman: For conservatives, it may be revealing to compare the defensiveness with which many of us discuss what we do in the dining room to the defensiveness Read more

  • Do the evolution

    As everyone not living under a rock now knows, in an interview with ABC yesterday, President Obama–who recently had said that his views were “evolving”–announced that he now supports the right of same-sex couples to get married. Some liberal critics complained that Obama’s announcement does nothing to change the status quo, with marriage still being Read more

  • Does vegetarianism kill more animals than meat-eating?

    Contrary to what you may have heard, I don’t intend this to be an all-vegetarianism, all-the-time blog, but this objection came up in comments to the previous post, and it seemed like it was worth addressing separately. The objection here is that a vegetarian diet also results in animal deaths, since animals such as voles, Read more

  • Redefining moral rules?

    Gene Callahan had a post recently on this Salon article by Irin Carmon. In the article, Carmon writes: The Rush Limbaughs of the world don’t get to define the boundaries of appropriate sexual or moral behavior. But something is happening: Women are defining those boundaries for themselves, with many men alongside them, and they’re being Read more