A Thinking Reed

  • Vegetarianism without foundations

    Freddie at the group blog the League of Ordinary Gentleman probes the philosophical underpinnings of vegetarians/vegans and contends that they are insufficiently developed. I think he’s wrong in suggesting that vegetarians haven’t devled deeply into these issues: there’s quite a vast philosophical literature on the subject that has sprung up in the last 30 years,…

  • Smith: animal rights=idolatry

    Wesley Smith is shocked and appalled (surprise!) by Humane Society president Wayne Pacelle’s recent column on Michael Vick’s efforts to rehabilitate himself. First, Pacelle: In a civil society, there must be accountability for grievous actions. But there also must be an embrace of people who are willing and ready to change – even in tough…

  • Freedom’s just another word

    In a Reason symposium on libertarianism and culture, Kerry Howley argues that libertarians should be concerned not just with minimizing government coercion, but with critiquing cultural barriers to human freedom. For instance, she points out that a woman trapped in a repressively patriarchal culture, or one that merely reinforces “traditional” gender roles, is hardly capable…

  • The agri-empire strikes back

    California beef producer Harris Ranch Beef Co. put the screws to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo when they found out Michael Pollan was scheduled to speak there, with the company chairman essentially threatening to withhold financial support in a letter to the university’s president. The result? Instead of a speech by Pollan, the university put…

  • A very kinky book

    The new book Superfreakonomics (sequel to the much-ballyhooed Freakonomics) hasn’t even been published yet, and it’s already receiving massive smack-downs for its highly misleading chapter on global warming. See Joseph Romm (here, here, and here) and Paul Krugman.

  • Pardon our dust

    Experimenting with a more minimalist look around here. I found a very minimalist WP theme I liked, but for some reason it didn’t allow block-quotes, which would make many of my posts downright confusing. This one-column theme is a compromise. Any thoughts? UPDATE: Decided to go back to the old tried-and-true format.

  • Friday Metal: Converge, “No Heroes”

    An acquired taste, to be sure:

  • “A severely conservative moral stance”

    James Rachels on vegetarianism: Vegetarianism is often regarded as an eccentric moral view, and it is assumed that a vegetarian must subscribe to principles at odds with common sense. But if this reasoning is sound, the opposite is true: the rule against causing unnecessary pain is the least eccentric of all moral principles, and that…

  • The cosmic prodigal son

    I’ve been reading a book called Created from Animals: the Moral Implications of Darwinism by the late philosopher James Rachels. The thesis is that Darwinism does have far-reaching implications for morality, even if not the ones commonly thought. This is in contrast to those, like Stephen Jay Gould, who tried to erect an insuperable wall…

  • Yes, Virginia, the pope believes in global warming

    Apparently some right-wing Catholics have interpreted the fact that the words “global warming” or “climate change” do not appear in Benedict XVI’s recent encyclical to mean that the pope is a global warming skeptic of some sort. Neil Ormerod, a Catholic theologian in Australia, attempts to set the record straight.