"Me! Hear! My foreign ear--the sounds of welcome near!"

Long ago, someone gave me a lifetime subscription to Typepad. I used it for a while, and then I stopped for a while, and then I started again. I like the ritual of producing a blog post every Sunday. ...

I'm listening to Ethel Cain's Willoughby Tucker, I'll Always Love You. I am thinking about Ethel Cain's interest, in much of her work, in the uses of Christianity by ordinary people who think of thems...

Basl and Coons memorably worry about inferential movements from ought to is. Such movements constitute attempts at what they call moral science. There seems to be something fishy about such inferences...

According to a view I find appealing, when somebody does something wrong, there are three particulars involved. There's the particular agent who's done the wrong thing; there's the particular action t...

In Mere Christianity, CS Lewis writes: Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion you could not have guessed...

Bret Stephens says: [T]here is a glaring dissonance to the charge that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. To wit: If the Israeli government’s intentions and actions are truly genocidal — if it is ...

Let's say an Occasionalist picture is any picture where (a) there is some agent S, and (b) there is some object O, and (c) S and O cannot directly interact (S cannot influence O, and O cannot influenc...

My opinion is that we should be faithful vegans: We should consistently and constantly follow veganism's rules. On an alternative view, we should be economic half-vegans. An economic half-vegan is som...

My Dad was pretty choosy when it came to ideas. If you wanted to persuade him of anything that he didn't already believe, you'd usually have your work cut out for you. But when he did find an idea he....

Kevin Vallier says that the American right is now a "strange blend" of three things: (1) Techno-optimism, exemplified by Peter Thiel, the billionaire investor and Trumpist, who thinks that "the forces...

Sarah McBride advocates a politics of grace. In a recent conversation with Ezra Klein, she defines grace like this: I think grace in politics means, one, creating room for disagreement: assuming good ...

I think the general type of view that Errol Lord presents in this paper is somewhat widely held, and Lord develops a sophisticated version of the view. For these reasons, the paper is valuable. But I ...

Conversation is like dancing. Some conversations are like square dances, some conversations are like mosh pits, and so on. If someone who's used to having mosh-pit conversations is paired up with some...

Inward light is what I take to be the central idea of Quakerism. In its main forms, it has the following four features: It's in you: To find inward light, you're supposed to look inside yourself. This...

Tim Kenyon and Jennifer Saul have observed that Trump often "appear[s] uninterested even in constructing plausible falsehoods." They say he is a "bald-faced bullshitter." A bald-faced bullshitter is o...

Some people say that there is no such thing as desert. They say that bad people do not deserve to suffer, and that good people do not deserve to be rewarded. One way to reach such a view is via...

There are many different views about what the basic stuff of material reality is. Some have said, for instance, that everything either is an atom or is made out of atoms; others have said that, in add...

A few days ago, a somewhat prominent philosopher created a hullabaloo on Facebook by suggesting that hiring people "on the basis of" race or gender is unjustifiable, and is illegal, yet is commonplace...

Recently, for a little while, many philosophers were toying with stoicism. Happily, the stoicism trend seems to be dying out. Here's The worst form of stoicism: The world around you is completely outs...

We should not just be in the neighborhood of vegan. For example, we should not be vegetarian. We should not be flexitarian. We should not be reducetarian. We should be vegan, specifically, rather than...

Consider: The Darwall-Dancy definition of moral reasons: A reason to φ is a moral reason to φ =def it is the sort of reason that can, in the right circumstances, give rise to a moral obligation to φ. ...

I saw Mickey 17 in the theater the other day, and it made me worry about whether I might be wrong in my belief that we have relationships (relationships of the folk sort) with ourselves. I won't bothe...

I'm a fan of the view that All moral obligations are directed: If S1 has a moral obligation to φ, then there is some individual, S2, to whom this obligation to φ is owed. The view runs into problems w...

To illustrate the distinction between relationship tokens and relationship types, consider: Huck's friendship with Jim is a different thing than Bert's friendship with Ernie. These two things are dist...

I don't see why the following very simple idea isn't good. The People's Bribe (1) Key decision-makers (KDMs) in the federal government are guaranteed a large income for life. (2) Apart from whatever t...

A standard (I think) story: Before the chemical composition of water was known, people didn't know, and couldn't know, that water=H2O. But they still had the (or a) concept of water. It's just that th...

It is widely and, I think, correctly thought that if The desire-satisfaction account of well-being: For any individual S, S's well-being consists in S's desires being satisfied, such that S is made be...

Compare and contrast: Curtis Yarvin and Elizabeth Anderson. Yarvin's signature idea is that the United States should not be a democracy and should instead be a dictatorship. He thinks the country shou...

Here is the idea of naturalness that I like the most: A fact F is natural if and only if either (i) F is brutely natural or (ii) F explains (= substantively contributes to the best explanation of) at ...

In America, (a) there are 10 billion livestock animals and about 330 million humans, which is to say that (b) almost all Americans who are alive at this moment (>97% of the population) will soon be br...

I've never been particularly thoughtful or knowledgeable about what's called "alienation" in Marxian circles but I've been teaching Philosophy of Work this term and in the course of that I've been rea...

You can correctly say of an undocumented person that she is not a legal citizen, i.e., isn't considered a citizen by the US government, doesn't have a US passport, isn't allowed to vote, can't run for...

Consider: The forever view: Each moment of your life is, was, and always will be happening locally, at its particular time and place. This view has long been a comfort to me. It strikes me as a somewh...

Certain weird statements recently made by Donald Trump have created renewed interest in the scenario where America metastasizes: Each of the world's countries become states of the USA, one by one, unt...

I'm a fan of the idea that we have moral obligations to ourselves, for two main reasons: Feelings of guilt: I feel guilty when I let myself down, and I feel guilty when I let others down. The feelings...

According to a view I'm attracted to, we should think there are precisely two realms of reality: the natural world and morality. We can learn about the truths of the natural world with scientific meth...

In Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy Pilgrim is informed by the Tralfamadorians that their flying-saucer crews had identified no fewer than seven sexes on Earth, each essential to reproduction. ... Billy cou...

There are muckety-mucks, and then there are regular people. Muckety-mucks are the ones with a lot of influence, visibility, perceived authority, etc. Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare CEO who was r...

We do not treat all speech equally. We have classes of privileged speakers who enjoy special tolerances, protections, and advantages. That's as it should be. It's good that journalists and only journa...

Activists point at cases. Four illustrations: (1) Black Lives Matter activists talk about Trayvon Martin, George Floyd, and a number of other Black people who have been killed in recent years. (2) MAG...

Over time, metaethicists have shifted from Definition 1: Moral realism is the view that moral facts are mind-independent to Definition 2: Moral realism is the view that moral facts are stance-independ...

All traditional religions should be abandoned, but if we are going to participate in any traditional religions at all, it seems to me that Quakerism is a pretty good choice for a typical American pers...

I doubt that the movement known variously as wokeism / identity politics / political correctness deserves much of the blame for Trump's victory. But in any case here are some of my current opinions ab...