If you’ve ever been the victim of violence or another kind of interpersonal abuse, you know how awful it can be. If you’ve been victimized more than once, that awfulness can feel exponentially greater. It can be easy to blame yourself for the abuse, especially when it’s happened to you…
Jesse Prinz’s “Moral Mary” is a thought experiment where he asks us to imagine a person who has had no inherent moral inclinations, but knows everything that there is to know about normative theories of ethics.
The point is to make the argument that emotions are inescapably tied to morality…
The doctrine of “eternal recurrence” is Nietzsche’s idea that history repeats itself in the same series of patterns, forever. If the doctrine is true, then you and I will repeat the lives we are living now an infinite number of times, and we have done this already.
Friedrich Nietzsche isn’t much of an ethical theorist, but he offers a great critique of morality. He is insistent that there are no normative moral facts, or totally universalizable moral theories. …
Does more advanced technology lead to greater freedom? Michel Foucault characterizes the modern world as a decidedly less free place than in previous eras.
As evidence for his claim, he points to the rise of disciplinary technologies (collectively called “biopower”) which are designed to encourage subservience and conformity in the…
In his Ethics, Baruch Spinoza explains that we are inextricably tied to our emotions. He teaches that we must learn to accommodate our bondage to our emotions in service of the good. We can overcome the emotions which assail us from the outside with the power of the emotions that…
In his essay, “Therapy Not Punishment,” Karl Menninger makes a case for a therapy-based model of justice. …
In An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, Jeremy Bentham outlines his utilitarian system of ethics. He argues that a punishment should fit the crime and that punishment is, “in itself,” evil.
I agree that punishments should fit crimes, but I don’t think that punishment itself is inherently…
The Equal Pay Act of 1963 mandated that men and women be paid equally for equal work. Nearly sixty years later, women still earn about 80% of what men do for the same kind of work. They make even less if they are Black, Indigenous, Asian, or Latinx.
There are…
Mandatory arrest laws ostensibly exist to protect victims of violence. They are designed to send the message that domestic violence is intolerable and will result in immediate consequences. While mandatory arrest laws seem to have been born of good intentions, in practice, they often have negative results. …
