phlogma

Bedau argues that opposition to the death penalty cannot be utterly unconditional.1 He asks us to imagine a world where the execution of a murderer would miraculously bring back to life the innocent victim. Could we still oppose the penalty on principle?
I don’t know, could we? I find it somehow easier to imagine a world […]

If you are going to have capital punishment, this is how the logic of retributivism requires it should be done.

Capital punishment and barbarization

Was Otto Weininger a misogynist? Or are we missing something?

I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith. [Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Kemp Smith trans., p. 29.]
Similarly Weininger created the logical space for a feminine morality—in fact, an entire feminine experience of life or moral phenomenology—in delineating what precisely was male and what was not. This […]

How men commonly come by their principles. This, however strange it may seem, is that which every day’s experience confirms; and will not, perhaps, appear so wonderful, if we consider the ways and steps by which it is brought about; and how really it may come to pass, that doctrines that have been derived from […]

Principles of actions indeed there are lodged in men’s appetites; but these are so far from being innate moral principles, that if they were left to their full swing they would carry men to the overturning of all morality. [Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book I, Chapter II, “No Innate Principles,” par. 13.]
Unlike in […]

From Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1777 edition), pp. 80-6.
From this circumstance alone, that a controversy has been long kept on foot, and remains still undecided, we may presume, that there is some ambiguity in the expression, and that the disputants affix different ideas to the terms employed in the controversy. For as the […]

From Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1777 edition), p. 62.
Complex ideas may, perhaps, be well known by definition, which is nothing but an enumeration of those parts or simple ideas, that compose them. But when we have pushed up definitions to the most simple ideas, and find still some ambiguity and obscurity; what resource […]

To live a comfortable, even luxurious life it is not necessary to kill anyone; but it is necessary to allow some to die whom we might have saved…
[Peter Singer, Practical Ethics]
If only morality’s demands could be so modest. Rather, to live at all … and then moreover in the realization of a biological imperative to […]