Rethinking the 'Just War,' Part 1. The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless. Can war be justified? Is there such a thing as morally proper conduct in war? With Veterans’ Day upon us and, with the Obama administration preparing to face another four years of geopolitical choices in unstable regions, The Stone is featuring recent work by Jeff McMahan, a philosopher and professor at Rutgers University, on “just war theory” — a set of ethical principles pertaining to violent conflict, whose origins can be traced back to Augustine, that still influence the politics and morality of war today.
The work will be published in two parts on consecutive days — the first dealing with the background and history of the traditional just war theory, and second consisting of the author’s critique of that theory. — The Editors There is very little in the realm of morality that nearly everyone agrees on. The Evolution of the Theory Leif Parsons The Theory’s Importance. Six Famous Thought Experiments, Animated in 60 Seconds Each.
By Maria Popova From the fine folks at the Open University comes 60-Second Adventures in Thought, a fascinating and delightfully animated series exploring six famous thought experiments. The Paradox of the Tortoise and Achilles comes from Ancient Greece and explores motion as an illusion: The Grandfather Paradox grapples with time travel: Chinese Room comes from the work of John Searle, originally published in 1980, and deals with artificial intelligence: Hilbert’s paradox of the Grand Hotel, proposed by German mathematician David Hilbert, tackles the gargantuan issue of infinity: The Twin Paradox, first explained by Paul Langevin in 1911, examines special relativity: Schrödinger’s Cat, devised by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935, is a quantum mechanics mind-bender: For more such fascination and cognitive calisthenics, you won’t go wrong with Peg Tittle’s What If….Collected Thought Experiments in Philosophy . via Open Culture.
Karsten R. Stueber, Imagination, Empathy, and Moral Deliberation: The Case of Imaginative Resistence. A New Birth of Reason - Susan Jacoby. Cover Story - Winter 2013 Print Robert Ingersoll, the Great Agnostic, inspired late-19th-century Americans to uphold the founders’ belief in separation of church and state Robert Ingersoll (Library of Congress/Brady-Handy Photograph Collection) By Susan Jacoby December 7, 2012 Why do some public figures who were famous in their own time become part of a nation’s historical memory, while others fade away or are confined to what is called “niche fame” on the Internet? Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899), known in the last quarter of the 19th century as the Great Agnostic, once possessed real fame as one of the two most important champions of reason and secular government in American history—the other being Thomas Paine.
Traveling across the continent when most Americans did not, he spread his message not only to urban audiences but also to those who had ridden miles on horseback to hear him speak in towns set down on the prairies of the Midwest and the rangelands of the Southwest. Sam Harris Part 1, Speech, October 29, 2012 - Bon Mot Book Club. Could you pass a US citizenship test? - Who signs bills?
Metaphysics. Episode 03 - Justice with Michael Sandel. Walter Sinnot-Armstrong on Morality without God (Philosophy Bites Podcast) Platform. Adopted in Convention, May 2012, Las Vegas, NV Download as a PDF As adopted in Convention, May 2012, Las Vegas, Nevada As Libertarians, we seek a world of liberty; a world in which all individuals are sovereign over their own lives and no one is forced to sacrifice his or her values for the benefit of others. We believe that respect for individual rights is the essential precondition for a free and prosperous world, that force and fraud must be banished from human relationships, and that only through freedom can peace and prosperity be realized. Consequently, we defend each person's right to engage in any activity that is peaceful and honest, and welcome the diversity that freedom brings.
In the following pages we have set forth our basic principles and enumerated various policy stands derived from those principles. These specific policies are not our goal, however. We, the members of the Libertarian Party, challenge the cult of the omnipotent state and defend the rights of the individual. Libertarianism. First published Thu Sep 5, 2002; substantive revision Tue Jul 20, 2010 Libertarianism, in the strict sense, is the moral view that agents initially fully own themselves and have certain moral powers to acquire property rights in external things.
In a looser sense, libertarianism is any view that approximates the strict view. This entry will focus on libertarianism in the strict sense. For excellent discussion of the liberty tradition more generally (including classical liberalism), see Gaus and Mack (2004) and Barnett (2004). Libertarianism is sometimes identified with the principle that each agent has a right to maximum equal empirical negative liberty, where empirical negative liberty is the absence of forcible interference from other agents when one attempts to do things.
(See, for example, Narveson 1988, 2000, Steiner 1994, and Narveson and Sterba 2010.) Libertarianism can be understood as a basic moral principle or as a derivative one. 1. 2. Let us now consider left-libertarianism. Barry Schwartz: Using our practical wisdom. Www.wesleyan.edu/masters/courses/Spring_2013/syllabi_spring_2013/syb_arts633.pdf.
Ethical Issues.