Judge This: No Gay Kissing On Modern Family?

I am a bit late on this story but wanted to offer a contrary viewpoint to the dominant one of the outraged blogosphere. Though I have never seen the show, I was interested in the controversy over the show Modern Family which apparently features a gay couple among its lead characters.  The controversy centers not [...]

Rightful Pride: Identification With One’s Own Admirable Powers And Effects

Pride is essentially the personal identification with something admirable.  When I am rightly proud of my traits, I rightly take the traits themselves each to be admirable in one way or another and rightly take myself to be admirable insofar as they are part of me and expressions of me.  When I am rightly proud [...]

Some Suspicions About The Superiority Of Liberal Moral Values

Earlier today, I drew attention to Greta Christina’s article formulating some ideas she picked up from Rebecca Newberger Goldstein.  If you have already read either or both of those posts, you can just skip the next two paragraphs meant to catch up new readers. The Goldstein/Greta Christina argument built off of Jonathan Haidt’s theory of [...]

Are Liberal Values Objectively Better Than Conservative Ones?

In recent years, Jonathan Haidt has been influentially arguing that there are five essential modules in the mind from which human moral concerns originate.  He has made this claim in several places, most prominently among philosophers in his contribution to Moral Psychology, Volume 2: The Cognitive Science of Morality: Intuition and Diversity (from Walter Sinnott-Armstrong’s groundbreaking [...]

David Chalmers On “The Singularity”

What happens when machines get smarter than humans?  Presumably, they will build machines smarter than themselves which will build machines smarter than themselves and onward towards infinity. Philosophy Bites interviews David Chalmers, a leading philosopher of mind, about the concept and its possible realization. Thanks to 3QuarksDaily for the heads up. Your Thoughts?

“Skipping Sunday School”: A Documentary On Parenting Without Religion And Growing Up Godless

(via Atheist Nexus) Learn more about the topic and the film here. Your Thoughts?

Moral Actions, Moral Sentiments, Moral Motives, and Moral Justifications: More On The Nun Excommunicated For Approving A Life-Saving Abortion

In reply to my post on the story of Sister Margaret McBride whom the Catholic Church “automatically excommunicated” for helping to give the go-ahead to an abortion claimed necessary for saving the life of an 11 week pregnant mother, I have already received two interesting replies.  The first challenged the medical argument for the necessity of [...]

Christian Anti-Kissing Propaganda

(via) I find this really creepy, perverse, and emotionally poisonous, having at one point in my life been indoctrinated into such unhealthy and irrational, extremist ways of thinking.  As hilariously corny as the ham handed filmmaking is and as laughably naive as the film’s apparent morally hysterical fear of sex is, the consequences of such [...]

What Does Google Search Tell Us About Moral Philosophy/Moral Psychology?

Slate ran a contest called Google Suggest where they asked readers to type in a bit of text into Google’s search engine and see what suggestions the search box gave.  Since the suggestions Google offers reflect popular searches from a timeframe specified only as “recent”, the suggested ways to finish sentences that start with the [...]

A Challenge To Christians To Unqualifiedly Condemn Genocide

Christians who defend the Old Testament genocides are guilty of either relativistic authoritarianism (anything can be okay as long as God wills it and His will has simply changed from the Old Testament days to the New Testament one) or, possibly worse, theoretical agreement with all the normal justifications of genocide as long as God [...]

A Brief Overview Of My Dissertation

Nietzsche’s writings on morality are famously provocative and controversial.  His criticisms of morality in both theory and practice are so extensive and rhetorically scathing that many philosophers assume that he can offer little or nothing constructive to moral philosophy.  Additionally, his glorification of the will to power sounds prima facie like a celebration of excessively [...]

Loving Wives And Loving Countries

On Bloggingheads, philosophers Simon Keller and Niko Kolodny dissect love.  If you don’t have the hour to watch the whole thing or if you are only interested in one of the subtopics they discuss, below is the set of topics.  The time listed next to each topic indicates how long that portion of video runs. [...]

Philosophical Ethics: Can We Uphold Both A Moral Law And A Principle That We Should Break It?

In a series of posts this semester, I am going to blog all (or almost all) the lecture topics for the two Philosophical Ethics classes I am teaching this semester. Each of these posts will primarily explicate the reading or a theme that dominated class discussion in a way that should be accessible to novices [...]

Extrinsic Motivation A Poor Substitute For Intrinsic Motivation

I’ve always had a personal and philosophical aversion to motivation that is rooted in extrinsic rewards.  I balk pretty heavily at the idea that moral actions can be motivated by the hope for rewards or the fear of punishment.  I am Kantian to the extent that I am firmly convinced that however right one’s action [...]

‘Nuff Said Award Winner: An Andrew Sullivan Reader On A Darwinist Response To Evil

Just great stuff (from a very long e-mail you should read in full): You want a secular account of evil?  Here it is.  Evil does exist, like most other phenomena granted a label by human culture.  It is what we’ve semantically converged on:  a universally-understood though fuzzily-bounded descriptor of that which goes against our current [...]

Philosophical Ethics: Hobbes On The Source Of Authority

In a series of posts this semester, I am blogging all (or almost all) the lecture topics for the two Philosophical Ethics classes I am teaching this semester. Each of these posts primarily explicates the reading or a theme that dominated class discussion in a way that should be accessible to novices (such as my [...]

Philosophical Ethics: Does Calling Someone Evil Explain Anything About Them?

In a series of posts this semester, I am going to blog all (or almost all) the lecture topics for the two Philosophical Ethics classes I am teaching this semester. Each of these posts will primarily explicate the reading or a theme that dominated class discussion in a way that should be accessible to novices [...]

The Predictive Power Of Game Theory

In this clip from The Daily Show, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita discusses predicting world affairs using models based on game theory to an extraordinarily high degree of accuracy (twice that of the CIA by their own estimation). It’s really exciting stuff. His book is called on The Predictioneer’s Game: Using the Logic of Brazen Self-Interest [...]

Camels With Hammers Philosophy

After this introductory paragraph, every sentence in this post will summarize and link a different post expressing my views, primarily on topics related to atheism, philosophy, and ethics—which are the primary preoccupations of this blog. I am organizing all of these links into this one summary statement of “Camels With Hammers’ Philosophy.”  This post will [...]

The Integral Role Of Emotions In Good Decision Making

Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio on the indispensable connection between emotions and value assessment and how these are necessary for decision making. The full video is here. Your Thoughts?

Philosophical Ethics: Bruce Russell On Theories About What Makes An Action Rational Or Not

In a series of posts this semester, I am going to blog all (or almost all) the lecture topics for the two Philosophical Ethics classes I am teaching this semester. Each of these posts will primarily explicate the reading or a theme that dominated class discussion in a way that should be accessible to novices [...]

On Failing To Grasp How Competition Can Be Cooperative And How Cooperation Can Be Counter-Productive

Robin Hanson responds to work such as Frans de Waal’s which emphasizes the invaluable role that empathy and cooperation played in natural selection of humans by stressing that as good as cooperation might be, we are prone to making serious errors about what genuinely helpful cooperation entails in specific instances: The unstated moral behind most [...]

Philosophical Ethics: A.J. Ayer And The Emotivism Of A Positivist

In a series of posts this semester, I am going to blog all (or almost all) the lecture topics for the two Philosophical Ethics classes I am teaching this semester.  Each of these posts will primarily explicate the reading or a theme that dominated class discussion in a way that should be accessible to novices [...]

Philosophical Ethics: From G.E. Moore’s Non-Naturalism To C.L. Stevenson’s Emotivism

In a series of posts this semester, I am going to blog all (or almost all) the lecture topics for the two Philosophical Ethics classes I am teaching this semester.  Each of these posts will primarily explicate the reading or a theme that dominated class discussion in a way that should be accessible to novices [...]

Philosophical Ethics: On G.E. Moore’s Notion Of Good As An Indefinable Non-Natural Property

In a series of posts this semester, I am going to blog all (or almost all) the lecture topics for the two Philosophical Ethics classes I am teaching this semester.  Each of these posts will primarily explicate the reading or a theme that dominated class discussion in a way that should be accessible to novices [...]