David Chart's Blog

Category: Ethics

  • The Freedom to Publish and Safe Spaces

    A month or so ago, I wrote an article saying that I disagreed with OneBookShelf’s decision to start refusing to sell “offensive content”. In the discussion of that on my Facebook page, a number of people expressed incredulity at the idea that anyone might have a right to be sold. That comment thread was not…

  • Troubles for Tolerance

    A little while ago I wrote a post about problems for the idea that it would be good if everyone were equal. That is an easy target for me, because I don’t think that it would be good if everyone were equal, in part because of those problems. Today, then, I want to look at…

  • The Analects

    I finally got around to reading the Analects of Confucius, in Arthur Waley’s translation. The introduction claims that this is actually a good, fairly literal, translation, which would make it different from his translation of, say, the Tale of Genji, which gets called a paraphrase. I imagine that’s an exaggeration born of scholarly outrage, but…

  • Foundations of Ethics

    There’s an interesting article in this week’s Nature (well, strictly last week’s now, but still the most recent one I have here), on research into the neural basis of disgust, and its links to ethical judgements. (Nature 447 (2007), 768-771) It would seem that, when people judge things to be ethically disgusting, they are using…

  • Problems for Egalitarianism

    Today, I read an article in an ethics journal (called Ethics, simply enough) that defended egalitarianism. This is the view that it is, in general, a good thing to make a society more equal. It’s quite a popular view; it gets defended a lot. I, however, find it very unpleasant; its defenses almost always feel…