ethics
Getting to the Good Place
Can moral philosophy get Eleanor, Chidi, Jason, and Tahani to the Good Place, or do we need to talk, first, about salvation?
Reality-Based Eating
We live in an imperfect world, so why not find a way to enjoy it? In the current “Food” issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, KtB regular (and, now, father!) Scott Korb has a provocative essay, combining his experience as a recovered self-righteous vegan with the syllabus of the food-writing course he teaches. He glues these together with…
How to Instigate a God Debate
Last week I had the chance to catch what was probably the biggest God debate of the year, in this genre of blockbuster, YouTubed, college-campus bouts. The topic was “Is Good from God?”—is religion necessary for objective morality? The debaters were William Lane Craig, the evangelical philosopher, and Sam Harris, who launched the New Atheism…
A Conflict of Interest?
I’ve had a subscription to The Atlantic for about a year now and find it increasingly unreadable. They’ve entrusted advice on dealing with Iran to Jeffrey Goldberg (an attack is inevitable!) and Henry Kissinger (an arms race and “limited” wars!). To write a puff-piece on Google’s news apparatus, they dispatched James Fallows, who in the middle…
Death & Virtue: Billy & Woody
We here at KtB had an interesting weekend, quite by accident spending some time with a couple of unexpectedly complementary classics: After Virtue and Love and Death. The former, Alasdair MacIntyre’s critique of contemporary ethical theory, we had not read before and even now would have preferred to avoid. The latter, Woody Allen’s great take-off…
