A Thinking Reed

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

Social and ethical issues

  • Hysterical liberal watch

    Chris Hedges has an astonishingly evidence-free article at Alternet purporting to demonstrate that “The battle against abortion is a battle to build a society where pleasure and freedom, where the capacity of the individual and especially women to make choices, and indeed even love itself[!!], are banished.” The “argument” rests almost entirely on armchair psychologizing Read more

  • The moral impotence of science

    Although it’s dressed up in the pseudo-scientific language of evolutionary psychology, this defense of free trade and outsourcing elides the same issues as most such defenses. The question of trade policy isn’t just whether our society gets richer as a whole or on average, but also what the effects on particular people are and whether Read more

  • Beyond antrhopocentrism and misanthropy

    I’ve been reading a short collection of essays by Wendell Berry called Another Turn of the Crank. I’m not ready to sign on to Berry’s agrarian vision, but I do think he makes some important observations. In an essay called “The Conservation of Nature and the Preservation of Humanity,” he points out that much of Read more

  • Bread for the world

    Interesting primer on feeding everybody, and sustainably to boot. Read more

  • Ethical seriousness without self-absorption

    Hugo has a reflective post on his journey “further up and further in” to the vegan lifestyle and contemplates the importance of gradual change. And here’s an insightful post on how the quest for moral improvement can become ironically self-absorbed. The last point is an important one, I think. In our society, obsessed as it Read more

  • PBA ban

    While I’m in sympathy with the spirit of such a law, I’m a bit skeptical of the logic. After all, the point is to ban a certain procedure, rather than to, say, ban all abortions after a particular point of development. It’s hard to see why it’s not ok to kill an unborn child by Read more

  • More from McKibbon

    A while back I blogged a couple of items on the argument Bill McKibbon makes in his new book Deep Economy for rethinking our commitment to growth uber alles. Interested readers may want to check out this article at Mother Jones where McKibbon develops his argument at greater length. In short, the argument is that Read more

  • Lutheran World Federation – following in the footsteps of the Anglican Communion?

    The Christian Century has a brief article on tensions in the Lutheran World Federation over … suprise! Homosexuality! As in the Anglican Communion, the split is largely along north/south lines. However, I think it’s unlikely that we’ll see the same level of acrimony that the Anglican Communion has experienced. Lutherans, in my admittedly limited experience, Read more

  • Respect for life as a communal value

    In yesterday’s Boston Globe, Harvard political philosopher Michael J. Sandel accused President Bush of moral inconsistency with respect to the President’s position on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research (ESCR). According to Sandel, if Bush regards the destruction of embryos as tantamount to killing a full-grown person, then he ought logically call for a Read more

  • Look for the label

    The last couple of posts got a bit bogged down in philosophical abstraction (not that there’s anything wrong with that!), so I thought I’d offer an example of what I see as a good concrete proposal for changing our treatment of animals. The “Certified Humane” label is a program of Humane Farm Animal Care, a Read more