Mask-Less Shopping Is Like Drunk Driving

In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, many states in the U.S. issued stayat-home orders that prohibited people from leaving their homes except to access essential services. Upon reopening, a number of those states passed mask mandates requiring people to wear face coverings while in public, but as I write this, in October of 2020, there remain a substantial number of states that have not outlawed what I’ll call ‘maskless shopping’. This is a mistake. After describing the standard, public health argument for outlawing mask-less shopping and explaining why it fails, I give a better argument for outlawing mask-less shopping that depends on the claim that mask-less shopping is analogous to drunk driving. It follows that every state should outlaw it

Against Eating Humanely-Raised Meat: Revisiting Fred’s Basement

In “Puppies, Pigs, and People: Eating Meat and Marginal Cases,” Alastair Norcross uses a thought experiment he calls “Fred’s Basement” to argue that consuming factory-farmed meat is morally equivalent to torturing and killing puppies to enjoy the taste of chocolate. Thus, he concludes that consuming factory-farmed meat is morally wrong. Although Norcross leaves open the possibility that consuming humanely-raised meat is permissible, I contend that his basic argumentative approach rules it out. In this paper, then, I extend Norcross’ thought experiment in hopes of convincing readers that consuming humanely-raised meat is morally wrong

A Virtue Theoretic Solution to the Problem of Moral Luck

At the beginning of his famous paper “Moral Luck,” Thomas Nagel notes that it is intuitively plausible that people cannot be morally assessed for what is beyond their control. He then argues that most, if not all, of what people do is beyond their control. Thus, Nagel concludes that individuals must deny that people cannot be morally assessed for what is beyond their control, alter the way they think about morality, or abandon the belief that moral assessment is possible. I contend that one’s best option is to alter the way one thinks about morality and therefore draw from the work of Michael J. Zimmerman to construct and defend a counterfactual theory of moral assessment which looks not only at the kind of person one is and the kinds of actions one performs but also at the kind of person one would be and the kinds of actions one would perform in certain counterfactual circumstances. In closing, I explain why one who accepts my counterfactual theory of moral assessment has reason to prefer virtue ethical theories of morality to their consequentialist and deontological counterparts

Introduction to Ethics: An Open Educational Resource, collected and edited by Noah Levin

Collected and edited by Noah Levin Table of Contents: UNIT ONE: INTRODUCTION TO CONTEMPORARY ETHICS: TECHNOLOGY, AFFIRMATIVE ACTION, AND IMMIGRATION 1 The “Trolley Problem” and Self-Driving Cars: Your Car’s Moral Settings (Noah Levin) 2 What is Ethics and What Makes Something a Problem for Morality? (David Svolba) 3 Letter from the Birmingham City Jail (Martin Luther King, Jr) 4 A Defense of Affirmative Action (Noah Levin) 5 The Moral Issues of Immigration (B.M. Wooldridge) 6 The Ethics of our Digital Selves (Noah Levin) UNIT TWO: TORTURE, DEATH, AND THE “GREATER GOOD” 7 The Ethics of Torture (Martine Berenpas) 8 What Moral Obligations do we have (or not have) to Impoverished Peoples? (B.M. Wooldridge) 9 Euthanasia, or Mercy Killing (Nathan Nobis) 10 An Argument Against Capital Punishment (Noah Levin) 11 Common Arguments about Abortion (Nathan Nobis & Kristina Grob) 12 Better (Philosophical) Arguments about Abortion (Nathan Nobis & Kristina Grob) UNIT THREE: PERSONS, AUTONOMY, THE ENVIRONMENT, AND RIGHTS 13 Animal Rights (Eduardo Salazar) 14 John Rawls and the “Veil of Ignorance” (Ben Davies) 15 Environmental Ethics: Climate Change (Jonathan Spelman) 16 Rape, Date Rape, and the “Affirmative Consent” Law in California (Noah Levin) 17 The Ethics of Pornography: Deliberating on a Modern Harm (Eduardo Salazar) 18 The Social Contract (Thomas Hobbes) UNIT FOUR: HAPPINESS 19 Is Pleasure all that Matters? Thoughts on the “Experience Machine” (Prabhpal Singh) 20 Utilitarianism (J.S. Mill) 21 Utilitarianism: Pros and Cons (B.M. Wooldridge) 22 Existentialism, Genetic Engineering, and the Meaning of Life: The Fifths (Noah Levin) 23 The Solitude of the Self (Elizabeth Cady Stanton) 24 Game Theory, the Nash Equilibrium, and the Prisoner’s Dilemma (Douglas E. Hill) UNIT FIVE: RELIGION, LAW, AND ABSOLUTE MORALITY 25 The Myth of Gyges and The Crito (Plato) 26 God, Morality, and Religion (Kristin Seemuth Whaley) 27 The Categorical Imperative (Immanuel Kant) 28 The Virtues (Aristotle) 29 Beyond Good and Evil (Friedrich Nietzsche) 30 Other Moral Theories: Subjectivism, Relativism, Emotivism, Intuitionism, etc. (Jan F. Jacko

Working out Douglas’ aphorism: discarded objects, categorisation practices, and moral inquiries

This article aims to reconsider Mary Douglas’ well-known aphorism – that, ‘where there is dirt there is system’ – through the work of street cleaning in and the handling of detritus in the Upper Town district of Gibraltar. In ‘working out’ the aphorism, we adopt an ethnomethodological approach and focus upon the description of situated categorisation practices in the treatment of waste and dirt. The article is thus concerned with the methods in and through which objects are handled in the everyday work of street cleaning. We describe these practices across three sections concerned with: the seeing of waste as a situated accomplishment; the practical distinction between objects to be removed and those to be left in situ; and the seeing of categories through discarded objects. In this way, rather than explaining the practices of street cleaners via recourse to a notion of ‘system’, we recover the ways in which objects come to be treated, in a situated sense, as a potential ‘inference-rich’ resource for moral reasoning relating to residual categories and predicates of people and places. Keywords: public space, street cleaning, urban maintenance, ethnomethodology, categorisation practices, ethnograph

Is It Wrong to Eat Meat?

Dr. Jonathan Spelman discusses the ethics of eating meat. You may not know this, but you think it\u27s wrong to eat meat. In his talk, he explains why you think that and what you should do about it