A Thinking Reed

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

Philosophy

  • Huxley, the perennial philosophy, and the scandal of particularity

    Aldous Huxley is best remembered for his chilling depiction of a totalitarian state in Brave New World. I’ve long thought that Huxley’s vision was in many ways more accurate than Orwell’s, at least as far as the West is concerned. We seem more likely to fall for a spiritually dead consumerist dystopia than a boot-on-the-neck Read more

  • Mill, liberal perfectionism, and religion

    As a tangential follow-up to this post, the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a petty exhaustive discussion of J.S. Mill’s moral and political philosophy here. Specifically, here’s a discussion of the relationship between Mill’s utilitarianism and his liberalism; here’s a comparison between Mill’s liberalism and other variants, such as Rawls’s. The emphasis here on Read more

  • Carter on Singer

    Joe Carter is, I think, too hard on Peter Singer in this post. Singer is wrong about a lot of stuff–his views on disability and on bioethics in particular. But as much as anyone he deserves credit for bringing the abuses of animals in factory farms to public attention, not to mention his work on Read more

  • Mill, animals, and liberalism

    Gaius asks whether a liberal who traces her intellectual lineage to J.S. Mill–i.e. who sees the purpose of politics as permitting the widest possible scope for human liberty consistent with the liberty of others–can consistently be in favor of laws for preventing cruelty to animals or protecting the environment: how [did] liberals, historically, either politically Read more

  • Beyond Prejudice 4

    In the previous posts we saw Pluhar make a two-step argument for moral rights. First, she argued that any agent, reflecting on the nature of her own agency, must advocate for herself basic rights to freedom and well-being, simply because she is a purposive agent. Second, Pluhar contends that the principles of consistency and universalizability Read more

  • Beyond Prejudice 3

    If, following Pluhar, we agree that any reflective agent has reason to affirm that she has basic rights to freedom and well-being, why should that agent extend those rights to others? In other words, must the reflective agent also be a moral agent? To start, let’s review why Pluhar (following Gerwith) thinks that any reflective Read more

  • Beyond Prejudice 2

    I want to zero in on what I think would be the most controversial steps in Evelyn Pluhar’s argument for rights (both for human and nonhuman animals). In this post I’ll focus on the first: the move from an agent affirming her own goals and desires to affirming a right to freedom and well-being necessary Read more

  • Beyond Prejudice 1

    I recently finished Beyond Prejudice, a book on “the moral significance of human and nonhuman animals,” by philosopher Evelyn Pluhar. Pluhar is part of a second generation of animal rights/liberation theorists who build on the pioneering work of thinkers like Peter Singer and Tom Regan. Pluhar’s main contention is that attempts to rebut the assertion Read more

  • The new new new fusionism?

    I remember those days of–what?–three years ago when the “new fusionism” was supposed to be an alliance of pro-lifers and foreign policy hawks. And then there was “liberaltarianism.” Now it’s an alliance between “neo-Benedictines” and “libertarians.” The idea is that folks who want to live in Alasdair MacIntyre-style local communities heavy on religious identity and Read more

  • John Stuart Mill – right about everything

    Mill believed in complete equality between the sexes, not just women’s colleges and, someday, female suffrage but absolute parity; he believed in equal process for all, the end of slavery, votes for the working classes, and the right to birth control (he was arrested at seventeen for helping poor people obtain contraception), and in the Read more