New Years Eve 2014 (and the metaphysics and metaphilosophy of the “now”)

With the beginning of a new calendar year often comes the inescapable feeling of the inevitability of passing time, though, perhaps not as arduously so as on one’s birthday. But is this feeling the result of an illusion? Is time “real” in the most profoundly metaphysical sense of the word? Even if there is such […]

The Call of Duties (Thoughts on W.D. Ross’s The Right and the Good) pt I

  For a person who professes to be a proponent of ethical pluralism (which posits the CALL OF prima facie DUTIES), I am surely among the few who have not read W.D. Ross’s The Right and the Good from cover to cover (I have read excepts in anthologies, and secondary sources, of course). I was […]

American Hustle (and hedonism, lying, and the American Dream)

I recently saw “American Hustle”, a Hollywood picture about FBI agents staging sting operations to convict politicians of corruption charges, aided by a con-artist making good on a plea-bargain, played masterfully by Christian Bale. I became convinced Bale was a fantastic actor by his stellar performance in “The Fighter”, wherein he plays the wry and […]

Prostitution (and Kantianism)

Today the Washington Post featured an editorial on the recent finding that prostitution laws are unconstitutional in Canada; the author notes the real opportunity for sex workers and advocates of sex workers to be included in deliberations in redrafting existing laws. My concern is not with the legal parameters of prostitution, but with the morality […]

Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme (and mortality)

Last night I watched my favorite rock outfit, Queens of the Stone Age, perform a mesmerizing two hour show in a small and intimate thousand person occupancy theater in Richmond, Virginia. For those who haven’t heard QOTSA, their sound is of a unique sort; imagine the soundtrack to a silky, sexy debonair vampire king who […]

Breaking Bad’s Walter White (and Amoralism, Internalism, Humeanism, and Moral Motivation)

There are many qualities to love about “Breaking Bad”, but I think the feature that so deeply engrosses audiences is the moral terrain that Walter White walks, and the cool and collected manner he amorally navigates it. I will argue that Walter White is an amoralist, and then posit that White’s amoral existence undermines the […]

Moral Naturalism and Non-Naturalism (and moral disagreement)

Note: I was working on an addition to my “About” page wherein I attempted to briefly state my meta-ethical views when I noticed that I had gotten carried away and written far more than was appropriate for the page. Thus I have decided to share it as a post.  Among metaethical options, I think that […]

Batman (and Kierkegaard on the suspension of ethics)

I am unashamedly a big fan of Batman; I grew up watching the PG-rated cartoons and reading innocent adaptations of the mythology (some more innocent than others — I definitely read “A Death in the Family” a little too young”), and in high school read the more mature trade paperbacks and graphic novels, an interest […]

The NSA Tracking Cellphone Locations (and the Doctrine of Double Effect)

Old disclosures from Snowden have resulted in the new revelations that the NSA is using cellular phone data to map and track the movements of millions of persons with the intention of tracking non-American terrorists, but with the incidental effect of tracking non-terrorists. The Washington Post writes, “The NSA does not target Americans’ location data […]

End Value (and intrinsic and extrinsic value)

It is a commonplace of philosophy that the different sorts of value that we ascribe to goods and states of affairs are of two kinds, end value and instrumental value. It has been the prevailing consensus that intrinsic and extrinsic value are interchangeable with these respective terms, or that intrinsic value supervenes on end value, […]