morality
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?
Victim-Blaming After the Zombies Come
Is preserving our own beliefs better than reaching out to help others no matter what the personal cost? I contemplated this thorny issue watching “JSS,” the second episode in season six of the zombie apocalypse TV juggernaut The Walking Dead. The question centers on the actions of two good, kind men: Morgan and Aaron. In…
A Generation of Moral Dolts?
Good ol’ David Brooks, telling it like it is again in the Times, drawing from the latest work of sociologist Christian Smith about “the state of America’s youth” (in a book which Brooks incorrectly, tellingly calls Lost in Transition): It’s not so much that these young Americans are living lives of sin and debauchery, at…
The Douthat Obsession
From the KtB inbox this morning: Dear Killing the Buddha, We have noticed some suspicious internet activity on the part of subject Mary Valle. We observed that she clicked on this article over 500 times in the last 24 hours. Also, we intercepted some suspicious emails to the author of the article. Excerpts are below.…
Divinity & Disgust
The question of where morality comes from remains a bee in the bonnet of both religionists and philosophers. Or perhaps it only seems so because we’ve lately been reading a few books on the subject. What emerges from this reading is nagging feeling that talking about the origins of morality is a way of talking…
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…
Dear Doctor Ullman
An email exchange with Harlan Ullman uncovers the doubts of a defense intellectual.
