Philosophy & Ethics

In the modern American political climate, we see echoes of 40 years ago, when Richard Nixon was president. Federal agencies are being used as hatchetmen for the administration, copies of messages…

Compassion can produce counterintuitive results, challenging prevailing views of empathy's effects on moral judgment, say philosophers in a new paper To understand how humans make moral choices, the…

Since it is election season in America, we can expect a new wave of social psychology papers claiming that political liberals are smarter and more creative than political conservatives. It makes good…

In the debate over government control of health care in the United States, critics looked at the UK system and its death panels, which drew an arbitrary line on when to stop treatment. Their recent…

Most physicians would choose a do-not-resuscitate or "no code" status for themselves when they are terminally ill, yet they tend to pursue aggressive, life-prolonging treatment for patients facing…

The decision to jettison the controversial approach to dying known as the Liverpool Care Pathway was "too extreme" given that its principles were considered by proponents as the best examples of…

Reprinted from Scientia Salon. You can read the original here. It seems like my friend Neil deGrasse Tyson [1] has done it again: he has dismissed philosophy as a useless enterprise, and actually…

For more than two decades, members of the United Nations have sought to forge an agreement to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions, but international climate negotiations have had limited success.…

The Dead Mouse Argument By whatever choice of words it is often argued that because one thing leads to another, adverse consequences must inevitably follow if the opponent's proposed course of action…

In modern NASA culture, extended spaceflight might as well be science fiction. The no-risk requirement coupled with volumes of employment criteria, rules and regulations were why the Constellation…