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John Jay College Report on Catholic Sex Abuse
Following up their earlier study , John Jay College has produced an analysis of the sex abuse scandal in the US . I think it is mostly quite a good analysis, though there are a…
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Emotions: Appropriate or True?
One of the major debates in the philosophy of emotions is whether they ought to be treated as propositional attitudes and judgments capable of truth-tracking or simply as moods that can be appropriate or inappropriate…
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Calliagnosia
In Ted Chiang’s short story, ” Liking What You See: A Documentary ,” he offers us a typical science-fictional hypothetical, in the form of a staged debate regarding the value of seeing beauty in others.…
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Unions versus Women
Literacy is one of the major factors in female empowerment : As female education rises, fertility, population growth, and infant and child mortality fall and family health improves. Increases in girls’ secondary school enrollment are…
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Caplan’s Pacifism
Bryan Caplan echoes my own pragmatic/consequentialist arguments for pacifism : P1: The immediate costs of war are clearly awful. P2: The long-run benefits of war are highly uncertain. P3: For a war to be morally justified, its long-run…
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Arendtian Natality, Caplan’s Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, and Antinatalism
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Because of my work on Hannah Arendt, I often struggle with the apparent incongruity between her account of natality and my own tendency towards antinatalism . Natality is at the heart of Arendt’s project, a…
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Publicity Without Politics
Part 1: Forgiveness and the Problem of Irreversibility Part 2: Forgiveness as a Manifestation of Divine Charity Part 3: A Duty to Forgive? Part 4: Prejudice as the Crystallization of Judgments Part 5: Charity as a Flight from Politics Part…
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Charity as a Flight from Politics
Part 1: Forgiveness and the Problem of Irreversibility Part 2: Forgiveness as a Manifestation of Divine Charity Part 3: A Duty to Forgive? Part 4: Prejudice as the Crystallization of Judgments Part 5: Charity as a Flight from Politics Part…
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Prejudice as the Crystallization of Judgments
Part 1: Forgiveness and the Problem of Irreversibility Part 2: Forgiveness as a Manifestation of Divine Charity Part 3: A Duty to Forgive? Part 4: Prejudice as the Crystallization of Judgments Part 5: Charity as a Flight from Politics Part…
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Ideology and Self-Sealing Arguments
From Understanding Arguments by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Robert Fogelin, which I use in my critical thinking course: Ideologies and worldviews tend to be self-sealing. The Marxist ideology sometimes has this quality. If you fail to…