Philosophy Now Forum

Environmental Externalities: If any individual has consideration for his children and future generations then he is not an outright individualist believing in personal autonomy and nothing more. Future generations effectively signifies all future humanity and the world, and that is all but altruism....

Should Climate Activists Break the Law: There is a dimension of duty and responsibility that links Altruism and Tyranny – or mere Authoritarianism – and which is largely absent for anarchistic society or Autonomy. The plain answer is that ‘anarchists’ will indeed break the law with some impunity. Ho...

Racism; This another term that arouses irrational passion. With our present reductionist ethic, it is yet another value that is defined according to the prejudices that prevail. As with all matters of morality the first thing to be clear is what form of society we are judging it within. What is broa...

Modern and Social Engineering A BBC documentary on LGB teaching at schools raised several questions. Quite apart from what is ‘right or wrong’. Firstly the terms old and modern are not ethical values, and can justify nothing ethically. To be modern and more effective for a morally ‘good’ purpose is ...

Public Benefit, Social Benefit, Government Benefit: There are a vast number of naive or tendentious people in the world, asking for absolute or ‘right’ answers to moral conundrums, while yet we live in a world that is and will be far from perfect. An imperfect world has the greatest quantity of conu...

Freedom – Pragmatism – Reductionism Reductionists tend to take particular values that they happen to like and extol them in isolation or with respect to particular things or objects that are favoured. As Social values freedom and pragmatism stand in conjunction with other values. It is the ethical p...

Empower – Empowering: A term which is very popular today and would appear to be a positive emphasis on freedom. People are given the power to do things. As such it is the opposite of slavery or being forbidden anything. It is therefore subject to the same comments as is freedom. It is other values t...

Democracy: Until recently democracy in this country has been on the basis of representative government and not delegates, and not opinion polls. This has at least placed legislation in the hands of people who are probably concerned with social stability and play of opinion in parliament. There is no...

Catch 22: Politics in Action: On the assumption that politicians accepted a fundamental three way split in social-ethics, as against a break down in society and conflict, or chaos. It is unlikely that they would employ names for their parties and philosophies quite the same as I have used. They need...

What are ethical values? On no basis is it a species of animal out there that can be examined and described. Therefore it is not a human being that can be dissected as a material body. It would be a mistake to simply take our own existing prejudices and build on them. The starting point is the whole...

It is evident enough that moral rules need to be made applicable to classes of subjects. Men, women, children, antelopes and zebras – or broadly nature other than humanity. But the core values, such as equality, freedom, diversity, are all universals. However they have their antonyms or opposites as...

Chicken and Egg Ethics Which came first? Society or ethical values. Man or ethical values. The answer is neither. Society does not have ethical values. Values are what describes a particular society. Society must therefore be determined by end values that encompass values holistically. It is absurd ...

Globalised Ethics We still largely treat Ethics as if the values apply to individuals and personal relationships. It served well enough when we all lived locally, and the market place was a place in town. Today we have technology thrusting globalisation onto us, and blaming us for its outcome. Ethic...

Animal Rights To answer this question directly is absurd, to do so merely invites personal whimsy. The question as to whether the animal kingdom has rights, is perfectly easy to answer, although the specific nature of each right is a matter for debate. ‘God’ naturally accords rights and duties that ...

Reith Lecture 3 June 2019 The speaker at last hit the buffers of ethical-political practicality. It is not presently possible to treat the whole world as a unity while it is in social chaos. Until tyrannies are overthrown, and democracy is not libertine but altruistic, human rights cannot be made un...