The recent history of the term 'political correctness' and its association with the contemporary left and the tedious culture wars obscures its true character and ubiquity. Political correctne...
http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2024/04/political-correctness-how-few-try-to.html
Israel is a state founded on a principle of ethnic supremacy and a practise of ethnic cleansing at exactly the point in history where these became universally condemned as morally unacceptable...
http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2024/01/israels-crimes-do-not-deserve-this-much.html
One of the peculiar side-effects of America's hegemonic dominance of global news, social media, and entertainment media is that the rest of the world is over-exposed to what Americans think of t...
http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2024/01/americans-are-not-as-poor-as-they-think.html
Human minds run on stories, in which things happen for human meaningful reasons. But the actual world is not human centred. It runs on causal processes that are largely indifferent to humans’ ...
http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2023/06/the-problem-with-stories.html
Environmentalists are always complaining that governments are obsessed with GDP and economic growth, and that this is a bad thing because economic growth is bad for the environment. They are part...
http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2023/04/governments-dont-actually-prioritise.html
It is easy to become exasperated with liberal democracy. Various factions bicker and manoeuvre against each other in an endless grubby contest for power, hypocritically appealing to a shared publ...
http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2023/02/strongmen-leaders-and-infallibility-trap.html
When people take to the street to protest this is often supposed to be a sign of democracy in action. People who believe that their concerns about the climate change, Covid lockdowns, racism ...
http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2022/12/public-protest-is-not-democratic-thing.html
According to the meta-charity GiveWell , the most effective charities can save a child’s life for between 3 and 5,000 US dollars. One way of understanding this figure is that whenever you cons...
http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2022/10/how-many-childrens-lives-is-that-worth.html
The idea that 'taxation is theft' is one of those thrilling, paradigm shifting recognitions that are continually being rediscovered and shared. It is a classic case of pseudo-intellectuality, in...
http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2022/08/on-incoherence-of-claiming-that.html
In the context of the current decolonisation movement it is rather strange that whenever bad things happen in a non-Western country they are still routinely analysed as the moral responsibili...
http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2022/07/we-should-recognise-moral-agency-of-non.html
There appears to be a moral panic going around that Putin is engineering a global famine to extort a more favourable outcome to his failed Ukraine invasion. This is a delusion with 2 pernici...
http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2022/07/if-people-starve-it-wont-be-putins-fault.html
Climate change is a huge and urgent problem. It is natural to suppose that it is therefore a terrible mistake, an unforced error that we should regret and try to prevent ever happening again. ...
http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2022/07/we-should-fix-climate-change-but-we.html
Recent developments in the US have brought renewed interest to the ethics of abortion. I will skip over most of that rather parochial and politically tribalised debate and instead consider the...
http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2022/06/abortion-bans-as-conscription.html
It is common to see claims that if only women were in charge things would be much better and nicer, for example that people would be much happier at work, inequality would fall, climate change...
http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2022/06/putting-women-in-charge-would-not-make.html
Source: UNDP One of the impressive features of humanity's response to Covid was the development of successful vaccines within only 10 months, and the production and distribution of 12 billio...
http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2022/06/no-poor-countries-shouldnt-try-to-make.html
Philosophy has traditionally been considered and considered itself a part of the humanities, with a continuity in skills and attitudes, such as an emphasis on scholarship. In many universities...
http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2022/06/philosophy-belongs-in-sciences-not.html
A standard reaction to the disastrous democratic discourse and political mismanagement of public interest issues from the economy to public health to gun control has been to demand more respec...
http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2022/05/four-reasons-not-to-trust-experts.html
According to the World Bank’s latest figures , around 700 million people live in utter destitution, on less than $1.90 per day, poorer than the average pet cat in the rich world. It is easy to...
http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2022/05/just-end-poverty-now-case-for-global.html
Capitalism has had a good Covid. While governments of every political hue seem to stumble from one crisis to the next, for profit corporations stepped up to deliver our food and consumer goods...
http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2021/09/why-capitalism-won-covid-and-government.html
Dementia is a terrible condition that afflicts up to 1 in 3 of the elderly (and some younger people too). People with dementia suffer a gradual loss of their cognitive functions, including mem...
http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2022/04/a-dead-mans-switch-method-of-insuring.html
As any map will show you, the world is divided by political borders into spaces called countries. People and things can live in, come from, or go to these places. But countries are not any ...
http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2022/03/theres-no-such-thing-as-countries.html
If Russia invades Ukraine this will be very bad for Ukraine. This has led many commentators to assume that invading Ukraine would be a great victory for Russia and a great defeat for the US an...
http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2022/02/invading-ukraine-can-only-be-bad-for.html
A large number of jobs exist not because they create economic value but because they make business sense given the institutions we have - customer expectations, bureaucratic regulations, and s...
http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2022/01/replace-waiters-with-qr-codes.html
> “The poorest he that is in England has a life to live as the > greatest he” (Thomas Rainsborough, spokesman for the Levellers at > the Putnam Debates ) What does...
http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2021/11/moral-status-should-not-depend-on.html
Suppose that we could all be good for just one day. No one would be tempted away from doing the right thing and towards their own selfish interests or illicit urges. No one would be afraid of re...
http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2021/10/if-we-could-all-be-good-for-just-one.html