Ethics and the Hunter

Long time readers will know that I’ve been a long time advocate of objective morality, via Sam Harris’ The Moral Landscape. Those who have joined more recently may have instead noticed that I have relied on different moral frameworks when talking about morality - the appeal to a conceptual set of rules and values that…

The Progressive House

This is my second draft of this post, and that’s not how I normally operate. I normally write one draft with very few revisions (or even spell checking ― you may have noticed). Initially, I wrote a point by point rebuttal to Caroline Smith’s The House Progressives Built. But, in writing that, I noticed there…

The Inhumanity of Religious Morality

Before your religion was conceived of, before anyone believed in your God, what do you think people were doing? Do you think rape and infanticide and pillaging and murder were considered permissible and everyone brought down their full force of aggression to get their way? That every teenage compulsion immediately resulted in rape, and every…

Sam Harris and Jordan B Peterson: On truth

As part of Sam Harris’ Waking Up podcast, Harris invited someone I had not heard of ― Jordan B Peterson ― with a schedule that, I presume, included discussions of morality and religion. However, Harris and Peterson ended up having a disagreement about what it means for something to be true. Harris didn’t really offer…

What is a person?

I am a person (I promise). You are a person (I say that with confidence, as I am only addressing those that can read this). But, what exactly is a person? I’m not going to go through much ground work to establish that “living human” and “person” are non-identical terms, because I think that much…

Religion shows morality is discoverable despite God

I think there is evidence for morality being discoverable by secular methods, in religion. To make this argument, I will call on God’s justice and the fact that religions call on their followers to modulate the behaviour of the heathens. And that’s kind of it. The argument acts to do away with the common challenge…

Do I really have to answer such absurd depictions of my view? Enlightenment values help discover morality and let it flourish

In a recent conversation with oldschoolcontemporary (OSC) about objective morality, we ran into many stumbling blocks to our ability to properly communicate with each other. So far as I could tell, OSC had immovable metrics in place by which to measure objective morality that were almost necessarily religious (redemption, salvation and infallible imposable authority) which…

The Buddhist Christian, on LSD

Any moral message that can be taken from Christianity is immediately undermined by the fact Christianity holds the loophole to entire avoid moral judgement: faith. A good person receives no rewards if they are not faithful, and a bad person receives no punishment if they are faithful. I’ve argued before that this is the catastrophic…

Ethics and AI: should we be building AI?

There’s a common question I encounter when I post about ethics, particularly to promote secular ethics or challenge religious ethics: given that we can basically figure out how to operate in society, why try to create a divide between the religious and non-religious? ‘Can we all just get along.’ The sentiment isn’t always that politely…

Can abortion ever be banned, while maintaining female rights?

Madblog recently wrote a series of posts. (Recent relative to when I wrote this, anyway.) Her posts were about abortion, the two pertinent points being this: abortion is a genocide, just like the Nazi extermination of the Jews; and, in response to the indignation she subsequently received, to set the challenge for atheists (because, as…