The Philosopher Justice

 Is deference to authority the basis for morality?  According to Christian doctrine, the “original sin”was disobedience, which is what led to the first humans being separated from God and ejected from paradise. The Bible tells us that  at first God planted a tree of knowledge in the middle of the  garden of Eden and then forbade the humans from eating its fruits.  Here we have the very first test of obedience, the kind  where children are given access to an attractive goody but are expressly forbidden from partaking, in order to see whether they have the self-discipline to obey authority.  Apparently, Adam and Eve failed the first test, hence the idea of “original sin”.   Note that later in the Bible, one of the “ten commandments”  is “Honour your father and mother”.   Put this way, deference to a parent’s authority appears to be a human universal.  Indeed, as the Psychologist Jean Piaget showed, all young children recogni...

 What is the mind?  And how is it different from the brain?  The difference between mind and matter has been an  ongoing philosophical topic since the ancient Greeks.  The mind is something subjective, subject to our passions.  It’s not a thing, but our self-reflecting ongoing experience that is about things and about ourselves. It can focus on what is possible, what happened before, what might happen, and what should happen, whereas the brain is a thing, a physical organ that is none of the above.  We only need be conscious of our brain if it affects our mind when something goes wrong, as, when we get hit on the head or we have a stroke.  But that’s not the whole story because it is obvious that brains are necessary for our minds to function at all . The existence of the brain doesn’t explain what’s going on in our mind, because the mind is “about” things, it “contains”  thoughts and sensations which together have meaning for us and refer bo...

  People moralize when they use morality as a weapon against people they disagree with.  Some principles are in dispute:  is homosexuality wrong?  We can obviously disagree about this.  Many, if not most people, see morality through the lens of religious belief.   Although the Bible has some prohibitions of homosexual behaviour, it also has prohibitions against wearing fibres mixing wool and linen together.  And like mixing fibres together,  homosexuality is not a major theme of the  holy scriptures.  It isn’t one of the ten commandments.  Jesus never mentions it, although Paul condemns certain kinds of behaviour.  It’s not really a thing in the Bible. You can go through the whole Bible and you will find very little about homosexuality.  It is definitely not an important Biblical theme. Nowadays there is a strong feeling among many of us that homosexuality doesn’t do any harm, unless by harm you mean ruining a parent’s exp...

   A philosophical thought experiment is supposed to clarify a philosophical problem. Peter Singer’s famous thought experiment about the difference, or lack of difference, between saving a nearby life versus saving a far away life, does appear to clarify, but in fact it conceals an illegitimate move. The assumption that morality applies universally leads to a problem: are we, as individuals, morally responsible for the whole world?  This would imply an impossible burden on each human being.  Singer’s logic is relentless and seems irrefutable.  But he makes an illegitimate move when he goes from a moral ought to an ethical ought.  Singer, like most modern and ancient philosophers, (with some prominent exceptions, i.e. PF Strawson, Bernard Williams and Stephen Darwall ) , believes that there is no real difference between morality and ethics.    As a preliminary I’d like to thank Professor Singer for doing philosophy a service in putting moral p...

  If I were to recommend only one work of philosophy to read it would be Plato’s dialogue:  “The Symposium”  The subject is love, which is odd, since very few philosophers have tackled that subject since Plato did 2400 years ago. Plato’s take on love is that love is a bridge from the desire for a lover to desire for “The Good” with a capital G - in other words,  love is a form of transcendence.  In Plato’s time a Symposium was when a group of people got together to drink wine and give speeches on a given topic.  Symposiums still happen, but the difference today is that the drinking happens in the evening after, and not during the speeches.   A similar approach, minus the drinking, occurs in the Hebrew Bible in the book of Deuteronomy.  The name of this book: “Deuteronomy”, is the real give away.  It means “second law” because it is the second time that the ten commandments are recorded.  The key is that this time there is a prayer that d...

  I used to think that “harm reduction” was a good thing.  Better that addicts don’t share their needles and thereby spread deadly diseases like HIV and Hepatitis C. So, it benefits society for the government to provide free disposable needles to addicts in order to prevent this. But the BC health authority's policy of giving addicts free doses of opiates in order to protect them from overdosing from street fentanyl goes too far. Yes, it may have led to decreased deaths,  but, unfortunately, it has introduced more youth to these opiates because, (suprise surprise!) that supposedly “safe supply” is now being sold on the street. These policies are actually encouraging opiate use in the name of reducing harm.  There is a whole industry out there producing and distributing street drugs, getting rich off destroying people’s lives.  And what’s even worse is the lives destroyed by addiction itself.  We know it is causing great harm to society.  That’s what ma...